Rafram Chaddad: Cooking Across Borders

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 252, ‘Remapping’

Certain foods remind us of other places, distant pasts. Since my mother moved to Jerusalem from our ancestral home Djerba, she has felt far removed from the fish she grew up with. Whenever I visited Djerba, I found myself haggling for fish in the Houmt Souk, taking them home, then cleaning and freezing them to bring to my mother. I would go through two airport security checks holding a polystyrene box and, when the security staff saw X-rayed fish skeletons, they’d ask, ‘What the hell?’ I’d mention my mother and her love of fish. She can get fish in Israel, but it’s different for her. All these years in a new country haven’t erased her memories of Djerba’s fish.

Years ago, I met the late Samir Zalatimo, who had a bakery under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His family came from the Libyan town of Zliten, in the days of free movement during the Ottoman Empire and, over the last two centuries, they married into Palestinian families from Hebron. Just as his ancestors had done before him, Samir used to make a paper-thin pastry called moutabak, which takes its name from the word tbak (tray). He filled it with cheese, walnuts and cinnamon, wrapped it like a textile from its four corners and baked it in his wood-fired oven, brushing it with syrup afterwards. When he was stuck at the many checkpoints between Hebron and Jerusalem and couldn’t get his cheese, he would still come to the bakery and just wait for the day to end, so he could return via the short yet heavily guarded route. Moutabak is referred to as katmer in the invented borders between Syria and Turkey, in Antep, Cairo and even Tunis, with different fillings but the same thin dough. I used to bring Samir boxes of sardines from Tunis, and he would tell me stories about Palestinians who went to work in the gas industry in Libya and used to breach the border and go to Tunis for fun and sardines. 

Perhaps it’s the freedom experienced by fish, who live without borders, that make them so coveted by people who are detained within specific confines.

In old Tripoli, walking down the same narrow streets as my ancestors who visited here, I went to Oubaya, an old restaurant on the second floor of a historical building. People were sitting on the floor; I joined them and asked the waiter what was in the kitchen. He told me about hraimi, ‘an old Jewish dish’. I knew it well from Djerba, so I asked for it. Served in a light red-orange sauce and eaten with hot bread, its success depends on the freshness of the fish. He brought a large piece of mnani (grouper), its sauce spicy and sweet. He saw my delight and told me the fish was from Biban – a bay between Tunisia and Libya. Many Tunisian fishermen, running afoul of Libyan law, cross the invisible border there to catch the big mnani. The former Tunisian dictator Ben Ali asked for a Biban fish to be brought to Tunis every day during his time as president.

Simone, a woman in her 90s, lives in the Marsa district of Tunis, by the sea. I am lucky enough to eat at her table occasionally. Her children are abroad, and she travels to see them every few weeks, carrying fish, fruit and vegetables. When the fisherman catches a mnani that’s about 11 kilos in weight – the size her mother told her tastes best – he immediately calls Simone. She cuts the big fish into pieces to freeze: the head is kept for her couscous soup; the whole body is cut into squares for her children, who are spoilt and only eat the fillet; and the belly is saved for the barbecue, to be served with rice and almonds.

I am preparing fish for my mother. I have just frozen some small mankou and the head of a shelba. The head of a shelba, eaten in a soup before spring, makes you hallucinate and return to the places you’ve been.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Beyond the Sea’

^{Main image: Rafram Chaddad, The Fish Smuggler (detail), 2018, printed X ray, wooden lightbox, glass, LED light, 43 × 35 cm. Courtesy: the artist}