Fetching Firewood
Morocco, somewhere between Ouarzazate and Merzouga, 1998
Women are sent out to fetch vegetation to burn for bread baking. You can’t really call it firewoood, it is some kind of dried plant. It burns hot and quickly. In most villages there is a communal oven. Families take turns sending one of their women to gather fuel for the oven. These women are lucky, they have donkeys to carry the load. Most times the women must strap huge piles of the stuff to their backs.
Cooking, other than bread baking, is done on a compressed gas cylinder. A device to hold a pot or pan is attatched to the top of the cylinder and it makes a one burner stove. The tagine is set on that. The gas cylinder is in constant use for tea making, although some families use a charcoal burner as was done before the gas cylinders were available.
I once saw a girl who worked in the Peace Corps trying to convince a gathering of Berbers to use a solar device to cook their food. In that way they would not have to buy the gas cylinders. The device was a box with a glass lid. A person would prepare the tagine (stew) in the morning and set it in the box. The sun would cook it over the course of the day. I think the box cost 500 MAD at the time, which would have been about $50.00 USD. I remarked that that was a large amount for most of the families and the girl said yes, but in the long run they would save much more.
I myself wouldn’t have wanted one, if I were a Berber housewife. I’d have had to change my routine and make dinner right after breakfast and I wouldn’t feel like it. But most of all, I’d want to smell my dinner cooking and if you used the solar box, sitting out there in the yard, you wouldn’t be able to smell your food. You couldn’t anticipate the deliciousness of the meat and vegetables bathed in sauce. A daily pleasure would be missing.
We all remember the days when someone else did the cooking for us. We’d walk into the house and smell dinner. It is one of the life’s pleasures. My mother was a good cook and I can remember coming in on a cold day and the warm house would be filled with the smell of frying chicken and baking biscuits. I took it for granted then. I had no idea how much pleasure her cooking gave to all our lives.