March 27, 2010
For India: a Dinner in Morocco
My friends Rick and Teel recently told me another amazing tale of a memorable meal, in the mode of an earlier one I have written about here. This one involves a meal at the home of Jacqueline Rosenblum, who taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat in the early ’60s. Rick was there as a Fulbright Lecturer in 1963-64, teaching American literature, and his wife, Teel, was teaching English. Their friend, Jacqueline was (is…?) a remarkable polyglot; she was teaching Latin, but was also fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, and other languages. I’m not quite sure of the details, but apparently control of the university was soon to change hands (in 1965), and with the change would come the exclusion of all Jewish faculty. Jacqueline arranged a dinner party and invited a number of faculty members to her small house, where she served a meal she prepared herself: a leafy salad, flat bread, couscous, a large platter of lamb’s eyes, and a bowl of snails, stacked in a spiral cone. As Rick and Teel sat in the murmur of a dozen different languages at the table, they looked at each other with trepidation. A woman sitting next to Rick asked him, in French, if he would be able to eat what had been set before them. Rick, whose French was not terribly strong at the time, answered with “Je sui pouissant.” He meant to indicate something along the lines of “I can take it,” but had apparently told the woman he was “potent.” Instantly the woman’s husband, seated across from them at the table, was up and rushing around to get at Rick, saying in Danish “Did you hear what that man said to my wife?” Fortunately Jacqueline swept in, making good use of her many languages to explain to all what he had meant to say.
What a microcosm of cultures and conflicts that dinner was! I asked Rick and Teel if they ate any of the lamb’s eyes. They said they liked the snails but passed on the eyes.
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thank you, Daryl.
I love Rick and Teel for a million reasons. What y’all need to understand is that stories like this come up every time we speak to them. We’ll be sitting around and one of us will say something about having to transfer planes and one of them will say, “Oh, that reminds me of the time we had to leap from a PT boat to a scaling net aside a cargo ship in rough seas when the kids were little.”
They should charge.
Intrigued by the proposition of cooking eyes, with or without the associated animal, sent me in search of recipes. I found one for “Lamb” eyes…described as “broiled bacon-wrapped prunes sprinkled with cayenne”.
I’m certain this was not what Rick and Teel were referring to, however.
Yep, Danny–we’re talking a bowl of big ol’ eyeballs.
Gaaah.
Great story, Daryl.
Cary Ellis
[...] friends R & T never run short of stories, and I have posted a few here about unusual meals. Here’s another [...]