Tunisia 03: Food

We quickly found that there is a wide range of Tunisian food, as one might expect. Most tourist restaurants offered bland, overcooked interpretations of Western "hotel food" or, more frequently, mounds of flavourless couscous with bits of mutton bones. This stand-by plagued us from one end of the country to the other as the backbone of the cheap-as-dirt tourist service. But by asking and following the locals one could find new, unexpected dishes that were well-made and delicious.
One that we found on the first day in Tunis quickly became a favourite: ojja with merguez (above, beside good old fried chicken and chips). The ojja is tomato sauce with egg either on top or cooked in, and it is best when served with merguez, which are fragrant sausage-shaped meatballs. Fantastic and cheap, and could be found reliably across the country, unless we were in a tourist hotel, where they would never serve anything so flavourful...

We love restaurants where we can look through the pots on the stove and discuss their contents with the chef, and Mahdaoui was a perfect example, not too far into the Tunis souk and very busy. Above is a large pan of omelet-like tajine and behind it a very savoury fish stew, which was a bit too fishy for us.
And then there was the large pot of sheep heads, halved and stewing in a turmeric-yellow sauce. The chefs enjoyed tempting us with it, knowing we weren't quite ready for it. But during our meal we realized that our squeamishness had put us in the "vast minority" of the customers. We were the only ones in the place without half a sheep's face on our plate, and those who did have one were clearly enjoying themselves, with jaws being torn away and chewed on with great enthusiasm. We came back to Mahdaoui a few days later and I was determined not to miss out on this local specialty.
Eating a sheep's head, or half of one, is an experience of textures more than flavours. The flavour was "tasty Mediterranean mutton stew", but the textures were extraordinary to me. This is the list of things you get to eat (that I could find) on a sheep's head, and their associated textures:

1. Tongue: dense, firm
2. Jaw muscle: tender, fibrous like a chicken thigh
3. Eyeball: soft, gelatinous (mind the lens inside, like a soft fingernail)
4. Brains: very soft, somewhat like marshmallow
5. Teeth: you don't eat them, but they clack against yours when you are going for the tongue
6. Other fleshy protuberances: varied, with surprising bits of cartilage

I don't know that I'd be in a rush to order it again, but it was well worth it, and not only for the story.

Dessert was found deeper in the souk, with a very friendly pastry chef deep-frying date-stuffed cookie-things and coating them in honey and sesame seeds. Fantastic.

Tunisia 02: The Souk

Tea outside a hammam (the stripes tell you it's a bath house).

The metal-working district of the souk. The din of hammering is overwhelming and there are huge amounts of chemicals being spilled around without a thought to environmental or personal health.

Each street has only one "charbon" dealer and it was always a robed and bearded devout. He sits peacefully, waiting until one of the endlessly-toiling metal-workers comes to pay for another bag of charcoal. The transaction is a display of power, with the worker having to offer compliments and platitudes and the charcoal merchant eventually, reluctantly, rising to fetch a pre-weighed sack from his stores and toss it onto the street. The "customer" picks it up and, with repeated thanks and little bows, backs away to return to his forge. In the photo Keith is trying to understand the roots of the monopoly. Turns out it's just as it looks.

Views of the souk, away from the tourist shops.

In the hat-making district we are shown how the classic fez starts off as a white knit touque, familiar to any Canadian. It is shrunk and made stiff by brushing and ironing, kept to a certain size by a terra-cotta form. When properly shaped, it will be ironed and dyed either black ("Libyan style" with a little knob in the center of the crown) or Tunisian red ("the colour of our independence").

Tunisia 01

A friend we met in Tunisia recently wrote asking why there were no photos on this blog of our time spent there. It is an excellent question, and one that can be expanded to ask "why no photos of Firenze? Or of Tuscany? Or Sardegna? Napoli? Sicily? Well, the easy answer would be something like "we didn't take any" or "we hate those places", but of course both of those are demonstrably, egregiously, parsimoniously false. In fact, it is because we loved all those places so much that we ended up with over 10,000 photos from our trip and our intentions to blog them just kind of collapsed under their weight in kilobytes.

"But," you cleverly point out in rebuttal, "get off yer ass you lazy monkeys." Well said, although we find your use of the colloquial "yer" repellent and citrus-scented.

To meet the semi-fictional demand, we will now start posting photos and stories from our time in Tunisia and other neglected locations even though the order in which they appear may be both illogical and incorrect, temporally speaking. Here is the down payment on that usurious promise.

The Grand Mosque, Tunis. The mix of architecture throughout the Mediterranean region is one of its delights.

Entrance to the Grand Mosque, Tunis.

Shoe shiner outside Tunis train station. You might think that those exotic colours would be for women's shoes, but that is not necessarily the case in Tunisia. The fine, strong feet of both sexes were shod in leather shoes of all fey shades. On a related topic, in every restaurant we entered, even those described in the guides as having "masculine atmosphere", the only kind of wine we saw being consumed was rosé. Just saying.

An entrance to the Tunis souk. One of many. More photos from within the souk in the next posts.