Petit Dej à Casa
Photo: Inès Oulevay, with permission for the CLC. All images are the author’s own.
Casablanca is wet. It is a soggy city that needs a car and a pair of sunglasses that you can lift from sanded eyes and toss into your greasy, salted hair when the disobedient lights come on later in the day. If you want to be chewed up and spread out like honey on a folded crepe then head first to the toothsome, muggy merveille that is my grandmother’s city.
I wake up so slowly, embarrassingly so. Sets of cousins and aunts and uncles emerge long before I am able to peel myself from a hard mattress. I share a room with my little brother, now fourteen years old, and we awake in our yellow twin beds. He leaves for the terrace early, putting his dusty feet up onto the white banquette, staining it with yellowish dust for me to punch and pat off. I do not make it to the terrace before I stumble into the kitchen looking for something unsustaining and surely delicious.
Back in our London home it is standard to pick perhaps one or two treats to taste from the cupboards and fridge. But here in Casa, it is typical to saunter one’s way out of the apartment and into the Maarif to find le mec des fraises and freely scour glass cabinets of floury foods in hot streets.
Dusty-eyed and wet-haired, I pull on warm denim and one of the many soft jumpers that my grandmother dumps into my arms upon arrival. We traipse down seven floors, the elevator is usually out of service, and slam open a couple heavy doors to hit the cracking, mosaiced pavements. Head on a swivel, I read my heart and stomach, usually wanting beghrir and msemmen or salty klii with eggs. Spending a few dirhams in the morning is our duty as transplant Moroccans, emptying our pockets of coins and filling them with sappy, bright mint for steaming delicate glasses of atay.
Laying the table is both an art and something so commonplace it should be considered a bland ritual. My grandmother lays out a plastic tablecloth and an intricate, light and white one over it. Sometimes, there is something vaguely English and flowery about that cloth that carries a funny sense of anachronism in our apartment in Casablanca’s Quartier Gauthier. The apartment my mother felt all her teenage years in. Gauze curtains and wide open windows that leave so much room for the loud sounds of one of my home cities. My brother and I have one leg up, one leg on one another’s chairs in buttoned-up pyjamas.
Reaching over the table there are dates and bottles of tea, juice and syrups. It’s easy to roll up a holey beghrir and play it, entertaining a little cousin with the lacey and light composition of the crepe-like thing. This is a table we trotted round with open hearts and wobbly feet. It’s hard not to feel nostalgic, but we were totally eating mushed up tagine around the table at some point, flipping over the top side of arm chairs with bowls of sugared strawberries waiting for us. Dutiful as ever!
Ah, a hot pan of klhii is chewy and salty, a way to accompany a bitty but oh-so-sweet jus d’orange and an atay. I open a gorgeous tiny tagine up into my smiling, cheeky face. Steam and salt with a couple of eggs, some still feathery at times. Double beverages are not uncommon, in fact, they are probably as mandatory as lip-smacking and sighs of appreciation. My Swiss-French paternal side brings creaminess and Nutella to the table. He leans into tartines and less-sugary teas and fancily frothes his milk.
A fifteen minute walk takes you to Amoud, a busy patisserie place which my grandmother drives to in a whizzy car, but us young ‘uns march over to on foot arriving in the brunch-period for a corne de gazelle or a plain old croissant. It’s that “in-between” that I live and love in, a total half-way between the Mediterranean and the cold above it. The great gap and the gorgeous link between folded, buttered pastries and somewhat heavier, scented delicacies.
Peeling into the kitchen in the morning, cold tiles against the cotton knees of pyjama-wearing now-adults, I hear the terrace’s buzz and the quiet radio from below and beside the apartment. Thin walls and waving laundry give way to the bright, dusty sky of Casablanca. There is no shock when I hear the call to prayer, it is just a reminder to slurp up some good pruney jams and thick, thick honeys so that I might remember my country on my way back home, in the plane, back to cold, bland bread and butter.
