Breadwinners to win your hearts...

           Two Moroccan beauticians used to live on the other side of my street. We had a casual chat at the Afghan baker’s shop in our neighborhood almost daily.  They would invite me to visit their country, as a kind and courteous gesture, at the end of short exchanges of pleasantries while waiting for our hot flatbread straight from the tomb-shaped, clay oven. I would respond with the same courtesy: "Next vacation, Insha Allah, for sure", hoping to go there one day, but not expecting it to ever happen. 

     However, last summer vacation my wildest dreams came true. I found myself traveling alone through a mountain village in Southern Morocco, where a Berber widow taught me how to bake flatbread on hot pebbles in the courtyard of her house. Her dexterity in wetting a peel and using it to lay the flattened, moist dough on a bed of hot pebbles was awe-inspiring. She baked each bread to a golden sheen. (Gotcha! Don’t be taken in by my outlandish lies. I was just kidding. I have never been outside of Asia. The above was only one of the many flights of fancy of a born daydreamer.)

The moment captured in the photo is from the Samosa Souq in Abha during last Ramadan. (This souq is an informal and makeshift two-hour-long market selling Ifthar delicacies only during the 9th month of the Hijri calendar.) By the way, slapping the leavened, flat, elongated bread onto the preheated, clay-lined walls of the vertical oven is itself an art requiring great skill. It looks deceptively easy, but onlookers attempting a trial are bound to come up short.

Don’t think of bread as only European-style loaves. It is one of the oldest forms of cooked food. I haven’t consulted an anthropologist or ethno-archaeologist about this, but my intuition just points in that direction. Speaking from my understanding, during the times we had to survive only on the things we grew ourselves, we cultivated a few patches of rice or wheat. Once harvested, we dried, threshed, winnowed and sieved the grains, ground them into a flour, added some water and salt, then kneaded the dough for making flatbread. 

This is true about every group of people that ever survived on this planet we continue to share living on. Just change the grain grown according to where you live – rather like we did in a substitution table in our grammar school - and the final output changes accordingly.

      Corn and cornbread made in beehive-shaped mud ovens in the Nile Delta; rice and flat rice Pathiri baked in earthen pans by the grandmas of Malabar; wheat and elongated, ovate pita bread of Southern Saudi Arabia; hectors of wheat fields and rising butter naans of North East India - these are just a few to help you with this exercise.