Tajine Tafraoute Project

As one who was present at the groundbreaking of the Tajine Tafroute Project, I’ve been invited by Anna to weigh in on the experience. Maybe because I have a slipshod memory for the details of meals, I’m very gung-ho about the notion that context is everything. I’m going to go along with Douglas Bauer who writes, in his introduction to Death by Pad Thai, “For what makes the subject of food the scrumptious stuff of story is not the perfect balance of the recipe or the genius of the chef; it’s the narrative of what’s humanly at stake as we sit down to eat; what thoughts and emotions are stirred, revived, put into play, by the table we’re called to, by those who call us to it.”

For me, then, my first tastes of tagine–yes, Anna was kind enough to allow me to dip my spoon over the table in our cramped quarters and partake–have many associations. The story I was writing at the time, called “Urban Planning: Case Study Number Six,” which is roughly speaking about a city in which food conquers all; Morocco itself, which makes me think of my friend Ross, who traveled to Morocco many times, coming within a hair’s breath of marrying a Moroccan woman, once getting into a verbal sparring match with a snotty Moroccan princess; and Anna’s stories about Tafroute, about her experience of eating a snake, and about fire-eating. For me, these things are inextricable from the eating of tagine.

Also, I must note that this was the second night in a row that I had eaten at Amanouz, so I felt a little bit like a regular. Given that Northampton is bursting at the seams with restaurants, you might think that I’d be a bit reluctant or resentful when Anna steered us toward this place, but I embraced it. For such a tiny place, the menu was pretty extensive, plastered all over the walls so that your eye had to rove to make sure you weren’t overlooking any options. The night before I’d come alone with a notebook and ordered a spicy angel hair pasta merquez, or lamb sausage dish that had proved the perfect muse for my urban planning piece, especially washed down with a glass of white wine. My page was filled with scrawl that went outside the lines, forming stairways up and down the page and by the time I stood up I knew I had the bulk of the story down in the notebook. Exiting into the cold night I found myself wandering until I spotted the window of the Bikram yoga studio that I remembered reading about on the website. As it turned out, the class was scheduled to start in fifteen minutes, too coincidental to pass up by thinking logically, and so my first experience of hot yoga took place with spicy lamb and white wine rocking in my stomach like something stowed aboard a ship during a storm. Somehow I got through the hour-and-a-half class without passing out or puking.

So all of this was part of my foray into tagine. Those sensations, still somewhat fresh, and on top of it Anna’s tales of herpetogastronomy and pyroacrobatics, of specialty dog restaurants in Vietnam, of documentary projects and seductive Nicaraguan revolutionary feminists. We talked about all of these things and more over several days, but a blurring takes place where all of them may have transpired on the sidewalks of Northampton in light, persistent rain, punctuated occasionally with startled expressions from Anna that such a place could exist at all.

Place: Amanouz Café, Northampton, MA. Birthplace of the Tajine Tafraoute Project.

Tajine Partner: Tim Horvath, short-story writer. (We’d met that week at Wellspring House, an artist/writer’s retreat).

How I found out about it: from Tim, who’d eaten there two days earlier while researching a story.

I’ll admit: I was a bit disappointed as I walked to the counter. Half the menu was taped onto the wall (written on bits of colored construction paper), and the other half was written on a chalkboard. From the outside, this place had looked like a sit-down restaurant. And, for a dish as serious as a tajine, it seemed weird to pay first and wait to have it delivered, café-style.

I know. I was taking things waaaaay too seriously. But cut me some slack. I was primed for a religious experience.

I told the Moroccan guy behind the counter that the best meal of my life had been a tajine in Tafraoute. (I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant.) He nodded. He said he was from Tafraoute. Then, we both smiled. There wasn’t much to say.

There were no free seats, aside from a tiny table squished next to a refrigerator, so I squeezed in and hoped that I wouldn’t have to get up to pee during the meal. I glanced at the steaming plates of food on everyone else’s table, but I didn’t see the familiar clay tajine pot anywhere. This was disturbing.

I remembered that real tajines usually cook for a long time: about hour or so. This Amanouz Café couldn’t possibly serve up the real thing. (This, of course, is when Tim suggested that I embark on a quest to replicate the original tajine Tafraoute experience.)

Finally, after about twenty minutes, the tajines arrived, served in clay pots. The waitress lifted the conical tops and we dug in.

My tajine was delicious! I had it served over rice — totally inauthentic, I know — but it was moist all the way down to the bottom, with enough juices to flavor the rice. The vegetables (sautéed onions, thin slices of tomato, chopped carrots, green pepper, chunks of potato) were the perfect consistency, soft and easy to cut with a fork. There were four gigantic meatballs, each infused with an amazing array of garlicky spices (not too hot though — just right). The tajine was topped off with a cooked egg and a scattering of green olives.

I ate heartily, but only made it through half the dish. Good Jew that I am, I professed my wish to “get it to go.” But, like an even better Jew, I ended up digging in for a second round.

Rating: 8/10

An excellent tajine. Not transcendental, though. And I certainly couldn’t have had a spiritual experience squeezed up against a fridge.

Restaurant details:

Amanouz Café
44 Main St
Northampton, MA 01060
(413) 585-9128
www.amanouz.com