Recipe: Thanksgiving In Morocco

I left you with a cliffhanger at the end of my Hallowe’en/All Saints/Castañada post, in which I wondered how I was going to acquire a turkey for Thanksgiving here in Marrakech. Several of you took that musing quite seriously and reached deep into your contact lists for friends who were familiar with the area and could give advice on procurement. However, as with all things travel, the Thanksgiving challenges proved different than anticipated.

So here’s my recipe for Thanksgiving in Morocco, and I would argue that many of these items were needed for the first Thanksgiving as well. After all, just like the Pilgrims, we have left our comfortable home and are strangers in a new land.

1) Help from friendly locals

On our very first night in Marrakech, our cook/housekeeper, Khadija, greeted us unbidden with a turkey (“dinde” en Français) tagine for dinner. A few days later, we were nearly run down in the medina by this bicycle, which I subsequently chased down the street for a picture:

Without pork as an option in an otherwise quite carnivorous cuisine, Morocco has turkey in abundance. However, as it is usually cooked in parts, the problem proved finding an oven large enough to accommodate the whole bird. As with most of the other airbnbs we’ve stayed in, the kitchen (and oven) is tiny, and Khadija assured me that the local community oven would not take a whole turkey. So I gave up on that idea and asked Khadija to prepare another turkey tagine, this time with sage, potatoes, and green beans, all readily available and in-season. It was delicious, but somehow did not really taste like a Thanksgiving turkey. Nonetheless, it checked the box, and I was very happy to have the help.

2) Innovation

After turkey, what is the next most required, sine qua non element of a Thanksgiving feast? My family voted for cranberry sauce. Cranberries are, unfortunately, one of the few berries (Concord grapes and blueberries being the other notables) that are uniquely indigenous to North America. Our host told me that there might be something similar that I could hunt down in the mellah (Jewish quarter) and wrote down the word for me in Arabic, but this seemed a bit of a wild goose chase so I made no effort. The alternative I chose, ubiquitous in Morocco, delicious, and beloved by several of my children, was pomegranate. Also looks pretty and is seasonal for autumn, even back home. Plopped some of those shiny beauties on a grapefruit/orange salad for sourness and called it a day.

3) Dumb luck

Sweet potatoes were readily available, but I usually use yams because of the beautiful orange color and could only find true, white, sweet potatoes here. The other problem is that they are tiny (and frequently moldy), unlike the giant hybridized monsters in the US, so I had to get a million of them, making the roasting/scooping process more laborious. Nonetheless, the final result was amazing; ten times more delicious than my usual yams at home made in the same way. I might switch over to the white stuff when I’m back in the US.

4) Hard work

Those of you who know me well know that I am a big fan of pie, so to me personally, with the possible exception of turkey, pie is the most important element of Thanksgiving. Apples are plentiful and, after several years of concerted efforts to better myself in this department, I felt capable of producing at least some sort of crust, even without my food processor (or even a pastry blender, actually). I prefer to offer a choice of two pies, but I couldn’t find canned pumpkin, so I had given up and planned some sort of chocolate cream Oreo dream to appease the kids, but while I was in the local outdoor produce market looking for grapefruit, I spotted some gigantic hunks of irresistible pumpkin-like gourds. They called them “courges rouges” (red squash), but they looked right to me, and worst case scenario I end up with sweetened winter squash pie, so I went for it.

I was not excited about making any more pastry dough than I absolutely needed, so I opted for a ginger snap crust for the pumpkin pie. No ginger snaps in the grocery store, but they did have speculoos, and I’d seen a recipe for a speculoos crust online, so that seemed like a winner. Pie is not a thing here, although you do get some French-style tarts, and our home didn’t have anything that looked like a pie-pan, so I repurposed the bottom of a tagine dish for the pumpkin and used a frying pan that had lost its handle for the apple.

5) Good bread

As in some other places we’ve visited, traditional bread is made in Morocco by making dough at home and then having it baked by the local baker in the community oven. Jeremy’s father, Philip, is the usual breadmaker at his house and often bakes with the boys during our visits. He and Khadija whipped up some “no knead” dough, and off we went to the community oven, where baking our loaves cost only slightly more than the tip required for taking pictures.

6) Family!

Now what you really need for a proper Thanksgiving, even, I suppose, in the absence of anything to eat, is family. We do come automatically equipped with a relatively plentiful amount of that, but Jeremy’s parents happily filled out our numbers, and we can’t thank them enough.

7) Guests

I always enjoy Thanksgiving more when there is someone new and different at the table. Guests diffuse any uncomfortable family dynamics, create a more receptive audience for explanations of “What Thanksgiving Is All About”, and allow for a bit of culinary showing off. Our guest was Mostapha, the manager of our airbnb. He was a tremendous host for us while we stayed in Marrakech and a delight to have around. I hope he liked our weird food.

8) Gratitude

I am immediately tempted to wax cliché by saying how much we have to be thankful for, as we, during an even more privileged time than usual in our own blessed existence, are surrounded by surprising degrees of poverty and even pre-industrial ways of life on our journey. But we don’t really need to look outside our own nuclear family to be grateful. Just to wake up and breathe every day on this fair earth does it for me.

So Thanksgiving went off without a hitch and all of we Pilgrims were well fed. Now to figure out Christmas in Cyprus!