Demonstration record
Solange Ben-Maimon
Home cook · b. 1941 · Fez
Carried a Fez kitchen to Marseille: pastilla, chraime, preserved lemon.
Ben-Maimon family kitchenStories
Demonstration record
Family recipe
Friday fish in Fez
Chraime is Friday. That is the first sentence. Solange’s sauce is peppers, tomato, cumin, paprika, garlic, a little water — not a soup, a bed. The fish goes in late so it does not break. In Fez the fish came from the market before Shabbat. In Marseille it came from the Vieux-Port and she complained every week that the water tasted different, then cooked it the same way. She tears bread, not rice, to eat it. The sauce is the point. The fish is the excuse to have sauce on Friday.
Recorded by Archive demonstration
Demonstration record
Oral history
A pie for both kitchens
Solange Ben-Maimon will not say that pastilla is Jewish or that it is not. In Fez, she said, the same street sold warqa to everyone who could pay for it. What changed was the table it landed on, and sometimes the filling, and sometimes the sugar on top. In Marseille she still dusts the pie, still hides cinnamon in the savory, still argues with her sister about pigeon versus chicken. Preserved lemon is for other pots, she says — unless the filling is too polite, in which case a little rind. She wants the record to show two things at once: this is how we made it, and other people made it too.
Recorded by Archive demonstration
Dishes cooked
Chraime
Demonstration record
חריימה, حرايمي
Fish cooked in a brick-red pepper sauce for Friday night, recorded in Maghrebi Jewish kitchens in this archive.
Pastilla
Demonstration record
بسطيلة
A warqa pie of Fez: savory, sweet, and spiced. Recorded in a Maghrebi Jewish kitchen and known also in Muslim kitchens of the same city.
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