Le Grand Mechoui at Revest-des-Brousses

Right after we bought our home in Haute Provence--when we were confronted with a house that needed total gutting and restoration, plus an immense, falling-down agricultural building that we planned to restore into more living space in  "Phase Two"--I was dreaming of a big mechoui.  This big, Moroccan-style lamb roast would be a celebration of our new home with neighbors we hadn't even met yet.  Cars would be parked along the road.  Curious people would stop by, enticed by wafts of roasting meat perfumed with wild thyme and cumin. In the outline of the cookbook I was (and am) working on, I even included this mechoui as one of the "stories" that would make my book irresistable.  I felt like a bit of an imposter at the time, but I don't anymore!

Near the end of a meeting about the progress of construction on our agricultural building (we're going to have to come up with a name for this second house), which was, of course, far  behind schedule, our contractor and close friend Nunzio suggested we have a mechoui.  I looked at him as if he had read  my mind.  What were we waiting for?  All phases of our construction weren't going to be done for years yet.  Nunzio was right; there was no point in putting off the party!  Bastille day was only a couple of weekends away; let the planning begin!  We agreed that Nunzio would line up someone to do the actual roasting, while we would take care of the rest.

Of course, the lamb was easy:  it would come from our beloved neighbor Jean Claude, who has appeared many times in these pages.  He and his wife Agnes raise organic lamb that spends summers in mountain pastures near the Italian border.  In short, it's divine.  Part of our plan was to invite all the people who had worked on the house, many of whom are Muslim.  So Jean-Claude thoughtfully had the lambs sacrificed hallal so that none of our guests would have trouble consuming them.

Denis blithely thought we'd cook the lamb (or lambs, as it turned out because of the guest count), have some dessert (that took care of his two favorite parts of the meal), and that would be it!  But I had an agenda.  And it was to celebrate the richness of Moroccan cuisine and culture along with our roast lamb.  It was mid-july, and the potager was bursting with beautiful vegetables.  I planned an array of Moroccan-inspired salads based on whatever the garden was offering that weekend.  Plus, a truly classic Moroccan dessert:  home-made cornes de gazelles.  I planned to use delicious cooking to really mix up the ethnically French guests with the Moroccan-French, who, for me were in a sense the guests of honor.

This all sounded good, but I knew it would require a fearful amount of work on my part.  I decided to go down to the house a week ahead in order to shop and start cooking stepwise days ahead as much as possible.  It turned out we were planning on around 30 people, so we'd be roasting two lambs instead of one.  (Jean-Claude's lambs usually weigh in around 24 pounds.)  The salad menu evolved as vegetables ripened in the garden, and I came up with a  list of "must-haves," plus some optionals that I would only make if I had time near the last minute.  The final list ended up as Florentine onions braised with orange juice and orange flower water,;chickpea salad with tapenade dressing (nod to our Provençal side); roasted red peppers with cumin and preserved lemon; purslane, tomato and bread salad; traditional salade mechoui of roasted eggplant, peppers and tomatoes; garden potato salad with Moroccan flavors; purple carrots cooked with saffron and raz el hanout, and tiny zucchini sliced and marinated five minutes with olive oil, lemon, mint, and marjoram.

Denis and I don't do much of any large-scale entertaining ordinarily.  At the last minute, he decided that the salads should all be put out for admiration and salivation on a table under the lavoir.  A big embroidered tablecloth given to us by some Lebanese friends came in handy for this!

 I was so tied up in the kitchen that I barely got to monitor the progress of the lambs, but Denis kept a close eye on them.  I'd put together a special basting mixture of thyme, parsley, cumin, salt and pepper, and various red peppers--all pounded in a mortar and mixed with prodigious amounts of butter.  To apply the baste, our roaster made a basting mop of wild thyme branches bound to the end of a rather long stick.  I guess you could say this 'broom was the maghrebien -Provençal version of the string mop used by Texas cooks to slather barbecue sauce on their roasting beasts.

Because I love ingenious improvisation, I particularly appreciated the mechanism that had been set up to turn the lambs.  It consisted of a bicycle wheel somehow connected to a small electric motor of undoubtedly recycled origin.  This gizmo had been put together by the father of the fellow who did our roasting, and for me, it lent a decidedly authentic air to our mechoui.  When I watched it turning our roasting lambs, I felt as if I were somewhere in North Africa.  As anyone who has spent time in Africa knows, that continent's people are the world's geniuses of improvisation. 

I was so preoccupied (and occupied!) in the kitchen that I barely noticed the time passing.  Denis popped his head in to let me know that the first of the lambs would be done soon and that guests were starting to arrive.  I decided the moment had come to go out and look at the lambs.  A part of me was after all mistrustful of turning over this crucial task to someone else, but I'd had no choice.  But the sight that greeted my eyes when I went outside to take a look made my mouth water:  golden-brown, crisp skin oozing savory juices.  Aromas savory enough to make you feel like growling to keep other animals away from your prey.




Cars were pouring into our driveway and Denis beckoned me over to the lavoir.  Guests had gathered around the salad display and, as he was fielding questions he had no idea how to answer,  he insisted I explain each dish.  Still in my cooking clothes,  I greeted everyone, then held up each salad and briefly explained its origin, ingredients, and how it had been made.  I'm actually quite shy of moments like this.  I don't like to be in the spotlight, preferring that folks just accept my offerings and enjoy them.  But to most of our guests, these particular offerings were quite exotic, and they were buzzing with questions. Now that I'd emerged from my kitchen whirlwind, I had to admit that the salads, bright with warm vegetal colors, looked inviting enough to make anyone's stomach rumble. 

Our lamb roaster gave us the signal that the first lamb was ready (we had put the second one on about an hour later so that some later-arriving friends could still enjoy the meat hot off the spit).  We'd set up a rough-and-ready trestle table under the roof connecting our two houses (or house and house-to-be), and a collective effort quickly transported all the salads over to it.  One of the last-minute options I'd opted for was to bake some Moroccan barley-cumin bread.  Normally, I'm not big on bread with seasonings mixed into it, but in this recipe of Moroccan food TV star Choumicha's, the cumin is subtle, the barley lent a heavenly grainy flavor, and the barley semoule on the outside an irresistable nutty crunch.  My six loaves disappeared in the wink of an eye. 

Meanwhile, to a murmur of excitement, the first lamb arrived at the carving table.  Nunzio took over as master of ceremonies here, and he was ready to carve.


I looked up and down the long table with satisfaction and joy.  While many French dinner parties--and this is especially true in Paris--are highly stilted affairs, with guest lists carefully studied for just the right mix of compatibility and contention to ensure a lively but supposedly civilized evening,  this dinner party--if you could call it that--was entirely different. 

It was a celebration of many things:  Of our joy with this house; our appreciation of all the artisans who had worked on it; our love of North African cultures and cuisines; and most especially, of this inimical region of Haute Provence, with its long history mixing a tradition of immigration, of hard work and frugality, of a cuisine of sun-drenched fruits and vegetables; of the fragrant wild herbs surrounding us on every hillside.

Our guest list was a curious mix of new and old friends, people who had worked on the house, neighbors, farmers, intellectuals, and farmer-intellectuals.  There were ethnic French and Belgians as well as North African and Italian immigrants--members of communities which often stay among themselves in France, despite the country's official policy of  "integration."  Well, I have this to say to all the legions of French bureaucrats who devised this doctrine:  True intégration is when you all sit down, break bread together, and appreciate each other's cuisine!  When I took a moment to recognize the cultures of the Maghreb and how they enrich all of our lives here in France, I got a big smile from Mustapha (photo right).

Denis and I exchanged happy glances when a lively discussion started between our dear friend and neighbor Jean-Claude (sheep rancher and farmer) and Jacques, a retired high-level European bureaucrat (photo left).  European regulation of French agriculture is a hot topic for French farmers, and Jean-Claude was telling Jacques how the shepherds in mountain pastures would howl like wolves to augment the official wolf count of  the European wolf inspectors.

Since our mechoui, Jacques and his wife have become regular customers at the farmers' cooperative store where Jean-Claude presides on Saturdays.  And Jean-Claude has been called upon to supply numerouos lambs for other lamb roasts in the region of Pertuis, near Nunzio's home.  New friendships, new ties that bind--who could ask for a better reward for a week's cooking?


Not even 100 handmade cornes de gazelles redolent of orange blossoms could be sweeter than that!

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