#3 | marrakech 🇲🇦: red city, yellow bread, blue house
what a week. i was in marrakech for a birthday trip (thank you sanny) and it was wonderful to finally visit this city. i can’t fit everything into one update so consider this a part one.
fun fact: buildings in marrakech used to be made of red terracota, and to maintain the monochrome look, it’s now illegal to paint exteriors any other color. (with the exception of the jardin marjorelle, which is marjorelle blue.) hence the nickname “red city.”
on bread
flour and water, simple yet profound. bread culture might be easy to overlook because it’s so ubiquitous, but to someone who’s as interested in food i am (icymi, last week’s newsletter will tell you why food is so meaningful to me), it’s a fascinating window into people’s daily lives, habits, and culinary preferences. people say travel to learn, and i think i learn a lot from the different types of bread and how they are consumed in a country.
from bread alone, i understand that sweet breakfast is more common than savory, that a pre-dinner meal around 5-6pm is eaten before a late dinner, that there is a communal culture where everyone in a neighborhood knows (and potentially gossips about) each other, that home ovens are uncommon, that although some spices overlap, the food is not very similar to that of the middle east. (there is no pita bread.)
walking through the medina or old city, you’ll easily see five different types of bread, and that’s not including the occasional baguette or french pastry. just before 10am, women emerge from their storefronts with dough and oil, to slap various breads onto a griddle. square and flaky, round and flaky, round and puffy, round and dense. the breads are usually a cream or pale yellow color due to the semolina, and may also contain white flour and butter or ghee. they are served with butter, honey, jam, and/or cheese. the women go away before noon, but are back around 5pm, when it’s time for a late afternoon snack.
a woman selling a semolina-base bread called harcha, usually served with honey and cheese or butter.
but they don’t bake the most commonly-seen bread, stacked in every single corner store or roadside stall. these are white or wheat, and carts of it are regularly wheeled through the streets to be distributed. they are baked in communal ovens in the neighborhood, a necessity before there was electricity in the medina. even now, most households don’t have ovens. in addition to a hammam or bathhouse, every residential area has one of these. people bring their own dough, and sometimes you can see rounds of unbaked bread laid out on cloths near the oven. one family has two rounds, another has enough enough for eight to ten. maybe they are baking for a whole day. maybe they have guests.
a communal oven
as a tourist, i didn’t know what they were at first. from the outside, dark and doorless, they resemble an empty storefront. the large brick-lined wood oven is often easy to miss, the glowing opening obscured by the baker keeping watch. but if you stop by for a bit, you’ll see the baker shoveling in rounds of dough on an extremely long pole. a matriarch entering to collect her family’s baked goods. or you’ll smell a cart of bread exiting the premises.
this type of bread isn’t my favorite, but it’s consistent, and soaks up sauce pretty well.
my favorite one is more of a fritter.
you squash it with paper to cool it down, which also soaks up some oil and enhances the crispy-outside-to-soft-inside-ratio. also eaten with honey. the texture reminds me of a porras or youtiao.
five more things
i love the color of new taxis in marrakech. pale yellow, like whipped butter, soft and warm.
sometimes you won’t realize how beautiful something is until you take a step back and see it in the context of its surroundings. or in the case of the square blue fountain in the jardin majorelle, in a photo.
this one looks plain up close, especially compared to other fountains in palaces, but it’s beautiful from this perspective
eating twelve cookies in one day, not including other non-cookie desserts, might seem like a good idea. it really isn’t. unless you like the feeling of a sugar-crash-induced-headache. but i did learn which moroccan sweet was my favorite. it’s a plain-looking butter cookie (round, beige-colored, nondescript) and while the additions vary from place to place, it commonly has almond, orange blossom, sesame, and cardamom.
marrakech is only the fourth largest city in morocco. but you wouldn’t know from the airport, which is really nice.
culinary museums are amazing. there should be one in every city, modeled after the one in marrakech.
a fountain in the culinary museum
culinary museum, + some of my favorite architecture photos
the moroccan culinary arts museum has different exhibitions on common moroccan food groups. soup, salad, bread, pastilla, sweets, tea, tagine, and more. for each exhibition, there are videos cycling through the preparation of each item, so you can see how each food is made. text explanations are available in french and english. i had a greater understanding of (and appreciation for) the food i’ve been eating after learning more about them, and after watching some videos, added new items to my to-try list.
if you visit, do eat on the rooftop - the moroccan salads (9 different types) are really good, and so was the almond phyllo swirl or m’hancha. i only wish i could’ve tried more things.
being able to taste the food after learning about it is the best.
and did i mention it’s in a restored palace? the non-exhibition rooms in the riad are filled with furniture for cooking and eating, so you can imagine how a family might have lived there. because the museum isn’t that popular (definitely not compared to bahia palace next door), and because it’s quite shady, i felt like i could spend time slowly wandering through each section of the building, taking in the beautiful tiles and trees and fountains, the light and shadow and places they meet.
another other restored building i loved visiting was a beautiful coffeeshop — i’ll write about that in the next newsletter after sorting through my images.
three things that don’t bother me anymore when traveling
takeoff delays or waiting to deplane. i’m not a patient person, but a great book helps. before i travel, i always make sure i have a few book options on my phone.
people on the streets yelling “japan japan?” at me. and then when i don’t respond, “japan? china? korea?” and i don’t quite understand why as there’s no prize for guessing correctly. it used to make me slightly uncomfortable, mainly because i don’t like people shouting at me. but it’s happened to me on most continents and so i’ve simply stopped caring.
paying for expedited boarding, within reason. pay for it in lisbon (10 euros for a five-minute trip from entrance the gate, plus you can leave your laptop in your bag). don’t pay for it in marrakech (60 euros; didn’t seem like much of a difference in line length anyway).