The Kitchen
Morocco’s Southeast 2003
Bread is truly the staff of life among the Berber people of Morocco. Berbers prefer meat and lots of it, but the mainstay of their diet is bread. Bread is baked daily and is at its best before it is completely cooled. Once it has cooled it is, to my mind, merely a ‘vector’ for conveying the tagine to your mouth and for filling your stomach. It is made of wheat flour that seems to be a mixture of white and whole wheat as the bread is dark.
Here in this kitchen next to the family tent, the woman has her own small oven made of adobe. In the villages, the baking is done in a communal oven. Each neighborhood maintains its own oven. The women who use the oven take turns going into the desert to search for dried plants to burn as fuel.
Beasts of Burden
Mountain Berber women and jerry can laden donkeys fetch water. It takes two women to heave the cans onto the donkey’s backs when they are filled with water. It’s unusual to see Berber women wearing skirts that show their legs, but these women are older and their faces are covered so we don’t know who those legs belong to.