Cooking, Eating, and Enjoying the Day of Sheep Sacrifice

This is the fifth entry in a week-long series on the Muslim Festival of the Sacrifice.

The women get up early to bake plenty of fresh bread (even if many of them now buy the bread on other days). This involves making the big flat loaves and taking them to the neighborhood public oven to be cooked (most people only have gas stove-tops at home, not ovens).

Most of my foreign friends who are married to Moroccans manage to skip the sacrifice part and show up later in the day. My Moroccan family would never hear of this. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to this part of it, and that has actually surprised me.

If you are late leaving your own house to go to your Moroccan in-laws for the actual killing, you see many of the poor, homeless, guardian-types, or seasonal-type workers already having been given heads, sitting around fires in open spaces in empty lots, cooking three heads or so over the fire. You can smell the roasting meat as you go by.

Now, we’ll pick up here from yesterday, where the butcher has now been paid and gone on to another house. The internal organs have been set aside, and the men are ready to begin cooking them. By now it is usually around 11:00 A.M., or even later. The heart, liver, and kidneys are first sliced into flat slabs no more than half or three-quarter inches thick (about one, or one and a half centimeters thick). They are put into a hand-held two-sided grilling rack and cooked over a charcoal fire in a small, clay barbecue pot which Moroccans use for grilling. I don’t have a photo, but someone named Jonathan does, where you can also see typical Moroccan tiles on the floor under the pot:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jonathannagar/CrazyMealsAndSnacks/photo#5056651469457886322

Once the meat is cooked through, it’s taken out of the grill and cut in strips about one inch (two cm) wide, then into squares. Next, the peritoneum (sheet of fat which came out of the abdominal wall) is cut into short, rectangular strips of the same width, and a small piece wrapped around each piece of cooked meat. The pieces, with fat wrapped around, are threaded on to a skewer to be laid across the charcoal fire.

No vegetables are added onto the skewers. (In fact, in America, the first time my Moroccan husband saw me add vegetables on the skewers between the pieces of meat, he was really shocked! This is just “not done” in Morocco, and in fact, would be viewed as an “insult” to guests. But this is a subject for a whole other post, some other time.)

The smoke from the fat dripping into this fire creates the characteristic odor of the day. It smells SO much better than a barbecue where a marinating sauce is used. It’s a strong smell, and it both permeates the house, and sticks to your clothes. This smell is perhaps one of the best moments of the whole day, and goes on for a couple of hours, until all the cooking of brochettes (shish kebab) is finished.

As each skewer comes off the fire, it’s given to someone directly, eaten together with the freshly-baked bread, now back from the public oven. Little dishes of cumin and salt are lying about to flavor the meat before eating. The internal organs, cooked this way, are incredibly delicious. (I think a lot of people in America have never been exposed to proper cooking methods for these things, and decent cooking methods are often unknown–which is why people have a bad impression of them– because we seldom eat these things in America, except for some people eating liver.)

While the men are cooking brochettes, the women are busy washing out the stomach, and then cutting up the stomach and lungs, which are made into a soup which has to cook quite a while. The inside of the stomach has a “short shag rug” appearance and feel (I’m afraid I don’t eat that; in fact, I’ve never even tried it), while the lungs are very spongy. As they are cut up into bite-sized pieces to put into the soup, it feels a bit like handling and cutting a firm, pink sponge (I’ve never tried eating these, either).

Once the soup is on the fire, cooking in the kitchen, some salads are typically prepared to be set out for those eating meat. These are often pieces of peeled, seeded, and chopped fresh tomato mixed with cut lettuce, and flavored with a bit of olive oil, cumin, and salt. The salads are served on several small shared saucers, placed around the low coffee-height table. There is so much other work to do today that they generally stick to simple salads. By this time, the women usually stop to eat, too.

Sometime after this, the mother of the family usually starts preparing the head, which will be eaten either for the evening meal (commonly served around 9:00 – 10:00 P.M.). If it is not served in the evening, it is sometimes served at noon the following day when is a common time for friends and extended family (or in-laws’ families) to show up.

The preparation of the head is very interesting. The mother of the family usually takes a hand-held plastic razor, like one would use for shaving face or legs, and carefully shaves hair off the sheep’s face. Then the head is steamed for several hours. It’s been years since I’ve seen this part myself, but I recall it being served on a big platter, where everyone pulls off the face meat (which is very delicate, and what all bologna-type products are made out of), eating it flavored with cumin and salt. I have tried the face meat, and it is surprisingly good and tender.

I think the skull is already cracked before it’s brought to the table, but I can’t honestly remember if the brains are taken out first and cooked separately, or if they are still inside the skull and eaten from there. I have never tried brains. I hear they are excellent, but I prefer to follow the advice of scientists and doctors not to eat the brains of any animal (because of prion diseases)–most people in Morocco have never heard this advice and wouldn’t be interested in hearing it, either. In any case, the brains would be eaten with pieces of freshly-baked bread. Nor have I ever tried the sheep’s eye, although this is considered a delicacy.

My husband brought  the neck home and cooked it for us last night. It was in one piece, bones in the center.  He put it into a big pot with a steam basket, and just steamed it for three hours.  He steamed some whole vegetables (carrots, zucchini, broccoli, onion, potato) and served them together with the meat, which was just on a platter.  The steaming juice (which had cooked down to about two cups, including the drippings which had steamed out of the meat) was delicious mashed into potatoes on the plate.  It actually reminded me a bit of New England Boiled Dinners, but was actually much more delicious.  We had fresh, home-made bread with it.

The second day, a dish is prepared with the hooves and forelegs of the sheep.  My Moroccan husband enjoys this dish, but it is also one I have never been able to try.

About 5:00 PM, married daughters who have been at their in-laws start arriving home at their own parents’ house, families in tow. Sometimes other guests arrive, and people don’t always know who might show up.

In the next entry, we’ll discuss how some women feel about this holiday.

Madame Monet