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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Manna in the Sand

Under the stars in the Algerian Sahara, our guides make bread in the sand.

One kneads dough in a mixing bowl while another prepares the fire. When the cinders are ready, Salah moves them to the side, and creates a saucer-shaped crater in the sand into which goes the flat round of dough. The whole thing is covered with the cinders and left to cook.

Half an hour later, they again move the cinders and lo, the bread.

Curiously, the sand doesn’t really stick – there’s a thickness to the crust that doesn’t allow it to grab and any little bits disappear with a quick rinse of water.

We’re so far from the rest of the world that at night, there’s no light pollution. Warm bread under the stars.



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Monday, May 26, 2008

The Little World of Don Guido

This afternoon, I hitched a ride with Guido to his cabin where I figured I could work unconnected while he puttered around in the garden. He picked me up in his 1970s Renault R4 and headed back through Ispica for an impromptu tour of the old part of town.

“That’s my church,” he said, rounding a corner, cresting a hill and pointing out the window all at once. “Now, neutral!” he said, batting the old car’s dash-mounted stick shift back and forth with his hand and letting the car coast. Next, he passed through streets so narrow, I had previously thought it was a pedestrian area. “Modern cars don’t fit.”

Five minutes out of town at the cabin he uses both as an artist’s studio (he’s a well-known artist, with an affinity for mail art) and a base for his gardening, his mulberry tree has a carpet of fallen berries below it. A week after I was here last, the berries on the tree are now a little bigger, a little riper and a lot tastier. With high wire comic panache, Guido again brings out the umbrella and fills up a plate of berries for me to nibble on while I write.

Later, I help him sweep and shovel up the berries on the ground and return them to the earth as compost for his olive trees. Near a stack of firewood, he identifies four kinds of wood just by looking at the cross sections: carob, fig, almond and olive. I ask which type is the best for cooking.

“For baking bread?” he replies, “Olive. You take a few branches and throw it into the oven and it smokes, giving flavor to the bread.

“In the forties and fifties, when the olive trees were pruned, the farmers would put the bunched-up trimmings in bushels around the tree to dry. Later, they would load the bushels on a back of a cart and sell them in the countryside. At home, you would put a few bushels in the oven and let them burn,” he says. “When the tile in front of the oven was warm, you’d scoop out most of the cinders and put your bread dough in.

“Now, it’s different. Things are…” he trails off, whipping his hands around in the air looking for the word, “…globalized.”

There’s no malice in the word, he just uses it like the name of a country he’s never been to; he hasn’t reinventing the bread making process, he’s just sharing what he knows.

“Here, it’s peaceful,” he says. “Here, I’m good.”

“Here, have a glass of wine.”

This is Joe Ray reporting (hic!) from the Motherland.



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