IS IT SOUP YET?

I’m becoming a bit of a foodie, a weird food enthusiast. I seek the indigenous, the local and quotidian. Regular meal times often disappear and snack time is whenever I find something interesting to eat. I tucked into kolduni in Belarus, had raw scallops and ceviche in Mexico, and ate chicken’s feet at a dim sum brunch. I sipped Vana Tallinn in Estonia, Unicum in Budapest and absinthe in Prague. In Morocco, even after getting rather sick on something I ate on the Djemaa el-Fna in Marrakesh a week earlier (snail soup, I think), I was back at it when we reached Fez.

On the train from Casablanca, Lynda Graham (Gîte Vert le Mont, Sutton), a true travel-guide hunter, had identified some interesting quarry. So the next morning we entered souk Féz el-Bali in search of panachi and bisara. Near the entrance to Kairaonine mosque we found and shared a panachi, a drink made of milk, almond milk, pulverized fruit and raisins. It was tasty, with a yogurty tang. The nuanced pleasures of bisara we found a bit more elusive.

Bisara is a thick pea soup served with a generous sloosh of dark green olive oil on top. Finally we found a dedicated bisara stall on a corner in a steep alley of the dyers souk and settled in. The short bar was filled with standing take-away orders, so we bellied up to the low wall below the steaming cauldron and stood in the street to have a bowl, keeping an eye out for the odd loaded donkey or run-away moped.

The soup handed down was two shades of green: the familiar thick opaque pea-soup color with a transparent green olive-oil color on top. First we tasted just the soup; it was unremarkable, even bland and boring. Blending in the olive oil improved the mouth-feel, but the taste was unmoved. Our furrowed brows met as we wondered what all the fuss was about. Why was it hopping busy? Indeed, why was anyone eating here?

We looked up and saw the take-away orders flying out, the soup-server filling containers brought by the buyers. He added to each the common duo of salt and cumin, and not just a little either. So we followed suit, adding first some salt and then some cumin, each pinched from its own vessel shaped like a mini tajine. Cumin is the constant companion to salt on every table in Morocco, even to the near exclusion of pepper. Hmmmm. Better, but not good, not yet. The salt had helped, but the cumin was lost. So we added more, as the soup-server had. The flavors started to focus. To be sure, the salt asserted itself alone, but more remarkable was the cumin. The cumin had surprised the taste buds by twisting the salt into a different flavor profile on the tongue. It also blended with the pea flavor and brought out some of the olive oil flavor too. What a sudden and unexpected surprise! It was an OK snack, though I was still not sure it was guide-book worthy.

But what was the third condiment the soup-server was adding? Ahhh, ground harissa. He added it, so then we did too. Disappointingly, it seemed to just lay there, adding a welcome red speckle to the green soup, but little else. Moroccans use a lot of harissa. It’s a thin red chili pepper that is dried and ground to a powder with seeds. In Morocco harissa is usually served in a small bowl, the ground peppers mixed into a slurry with olive oil. Here in North America, you can buy it in a tube (think anchovy paste), a mixture of ground harissa peppers, olive oil and garlic.

We continued to taste the bisara every so many minutes, and finally there it was - a flavor that was compelling. The soup had leached the capsaicin from the ground harissa and it had added a bit of a kick. But more importantly it had sharpened the cumin and pea flavors. Here was a soup that I too might eat everyday, as so many others were doing. This green mass called bisara really was filled with interest and nuance, a moving target on the tongue. It was finally the amazing experience we’d been looking for. As the harissa asserted itself, each bite was better than the last so we did what any self-respecting foodie would do, we ordered another bowl.

Jay Sames
jay.sames@gmail.com