"Manage with bread and butter till God sends the jam."

Moorish Proverb.

If the ordinary regulations of social life among the Moors differ materially from those in force among ourselves, how much more so must the minor details of the housekeeping when, to begin with, the husband does the marketing and keeps the keys! And the consequential Moor does, indeed, keep the keys, not only of the stores, but also often of the house. What would an English lady think of being coolly locked in a windowless house while her husband went for a journey, the provisions for the family being meanwhile handed in each morning through a loophole by a trusty slave left as gaoler? That no surprise whatever would be elicited in Barbary by such an arrangement speaks volumes. Woman has no voice under Mohammed's creed.

Early in the morning let us take a stroll into the market, and see how things are managed there. Round the inside of a high-walled enclosure is a row of the rudest of booths. Over portions of the pathway, stretching across to other booths in the centre—if the market is a wide one—are pieces of cloth, vines on trellis, or canes interwoven with brushwood. As the sun gains strength these afford[page108] a most grateful shade, and during the heat of the day there is no more pleasant place for a stroll, and none more full of characteristic life. In the wider parts, on the ground, lie heaps two or three feet high of mint, verbena and lemon thyme, the much-esteemed flavourings for the national drink—green-tea syrup—exhaling a most delicious fragrance. It is early summer: the luscious oranges are not yet over, and in tempting piles they lie upon the stalls made of old packing-cases, many with still legible familiar English and French inscriptions. Apricots are selling at a halfpenny or less the pound, and plums and damsons, not to speak of greengages, keep good pace with them in price and sales. The bright tints of the lettuces and other fresh green vegetables serve to set off the rich colours of the God-made delicacies, but the prevailing hue of the scene is a restful earth-brown, an autumnal leaf-tint; the trodden ground, the sun-dried brush-wood of the booths and awnings, and the wet-stained wood-work. No glamour of paint or gleam of glass destroys the harmony of the surroundings.

But with all the feeling of cool and repose, rest there is not, or idleness, for there is not a brisker scene in an oriental town than its market-place. Thronging those narrow pathways come the rich and poor—the portly merchant in his morning cloak, a spotless white wool jellÁb, with a turban and girth which bespeak easy circumstances; the labourer in just such a cloak with the hood up, but one which was always brown, and is now much mended; the slave in shirt and drawers, with a string round his shaven pate; the keen little Jew[page109] boy pushing and bargaining as no other could; the bearded son of Israel, with piercing eyes, and his daughter with streaming hair; lastly, the widow or time-worn wife of the poor Mohammedan, who must needs market for herself. Her wrinkled face and care-worn look tell a different tale from the pompous self-content of the merchant by her side, who drives as hard a bargain as she does. In his hand he carries a palmetto-leaf basket, already half full, as with slippered feet he carefully picks his way among puddles and garbage.

"Good morning, O my master; God bless thee!" exclaims the stall-keeper as his customer comes in sight.

SÁÏd el FarÁji has to buy cloth of the merchant time and time again, so makes a point of pleasing one who can return a kindness.

"No ill, praise God; and thyself, O SÁÏd?" comes the cheery reply; then, after five minutes' mutual inquiry after one another's household, horses and other interests, health and general welfare, friend SÁÏd points out the daintiest articles on his stall, and in the most persuasive of tones names his "lowest price."

All the while he is sitting cross-legged on an old box, with his scales before him.

"What? Now, come, I'll give you so much," says the merchant, naming a price slightly less than that asked.

"Make it so much," exclaims SÁÏd, even more persuasively than before, as he "splits the difference."

"Well, I'll give you so much," offering just a little less than this sum. "I can't go above that, you know."[page110]

"All right, but you always get the better of me, you know. That is just what I paid. Anyhow, don't forget that when I want a new cloak," and he proceeds to measure out the purchases, using as weights two or three bits of old iron, a small cannon-ball, some bullets, screws, coins, etc. "Go with prosperity, my friend; and may God bless thee!"

"And may God increase thy prosperity, and grant to thee a blessing!" rejoins the successful man, as he proceeds to another stall.

By the time he reaches home his basket will contain meat, fish, vegetables, fruit and herbs, besides, perhaps, a loaf of sugar, and a quarter of a pound of tea, with supplies of spices and some candles. Bread they make at home.

The absurdly minute quantities of what we should call "stores," which a man will purchase who could well afford to lay in a supply, seem very strange to the foreigner; but it is part of his domestic economy—or lack of that quality. He will not trust his wife with more than one day's supply at a time, and to weigh things out himself each morning would be trouble not to be dreamed of; besides which it would deprive him of the pleasure of all that bargaining, not to speak of the appetite-promoting stroll, and the opportunities for gossip with acquaintances which it affords. In consequence, wives and slaves are generally kept on short allowances, if these are granted at all.

An amusing incident which came under my notice in Tangier shows how little the English idea of the community of interest of husband and wife is appreciated here. A Moorish woman who[page111] used to furnish milk to an English family being met by the lady of the house one morning, when she had brought short measure, said, pointing to the husband in the distance, "You be my friend; take this" (slipping a few coppers worth half a farthing into her hand), "don't tell him anything about it. I'll share the profit with you!" She probably knew from experience that the veriest trifle would suffice to buy over the wife of a Moor.

Instructions having been given to his wife or wives as to what is to be prepared, and how—he probably pretends to know more of the art culinary than he does—the husband will start off to attend to his shop till lunch, which will be about noon. Then a few more hours in the shop, and before the sun sets a ride out to his garden by the river, returning in time for dinner at seven, after which come talk, prayers, and bed, completing what is more or less his daily round. His wives will probably be assisted in the house-work—or perhaps entirely relieved of it—by a slave-girl or two, and the water required will be brought in on the shoulders of a stalwart negro in skins or barrels filled from some fountain of good repute, but of certain contamination.

In cooking the Moorish women excel, as their first-rate productions afford testimony. It is the custom of some Europeans to systematically disparage native preparations, but such judges have been the victims either of their own indiscretion in eating too many rich things without the large proportion of bread or other digestible nutriment which should have accompanied them, or of the essays of their own servants, usually men without any more knowledge of how their mothers prepare the dishes they[page112] attempt to imitate than an ordinary English working man would have of similar matters. Of course there are certain flavourings which to many are really objectionable, but none can be worse to us than any preparation of pig would be to a Moor. Prominent among such is the ancient butter which forms the basis of much of their spicings, butter made from milk, which has been preserved—usually buried a year or two—till it has acquired the taste, and somewhat the appearance, of ripe Gorgonzola. Those who commence by trying a very slight flavour of this will find the fancy grow upon them, and there is no smell so absolutely appetizing as the faintest whiff of anything being cooked in this butter, called "smin."

Another point, much misunderstood, which enables them to cook the toughest old rooster or plough-ox joint till it can be eaten readily with the fingers, is the stewing in oil or butter. When the oil itself is pure and fresh, it imparts no more taste to anything cooked in it than does the fresh butter used by the rich. Articles plunged into either at their high boiling point are immediately browned and enclosed in a kind of case, with a result which can be achieved in no other manner than by rolling in paste or clay, and cooking amid embers. Moorish pastry thus cooked in oil is excellent, flaky and light.

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