The village the Zadi family farm is located in is not even on the map.
We are not sure how we settled there. My grandfathers dressed in blue like the Tuaregs, my cousins wore Kabylie coats as children and we are sure we are Badwi Bedouin as well. We speak Arabic and an Arabized version of Tachawit, we do not speak any "pure" dialect of Tamazight (Berber)..
Our words for food are sprinkled with Tamazight words. We call bread made from semolina flour Kesra (bread made from wheat flour is called Khobz, Arabic for bread) and couscous seksu.
Our family cooking on the farm is not typically contemporary Staifi, in the sense not everyone in Setif has a farm with over 100 sheep, a dozen goats, a couple of cows and chickens. We also have olive, lemon, peach and pear trees, a vegetable garden and grain fields. My uncle has a dry goods store where he sells grains, dried fruits, nuts and spices.
Life on a farm in Setif begins as it does on any other farm in the world. The rooster crows, we wake up.
My cousin Jamila prepares breakfast for me everyday, usually kesra and fresh buttermilk. After breakfast my cousin Omar and I pick some fresh fruit and take the sheep up to the mountains to graze. We come back for lunch which is usually seksu and fresh buttermilk or kesra with grilled meat and salad of wild greens and herbs, or kesra with different vegetable dishes. Dinner is usually more elaborate and includes seksu, chorba soup, grilled and braised meat dishes and a range of vegetable preparations.
My aunt hand rolls seksu almost daily, some she cooks fresh, some she dries for storage. The cows are milked daily for fresh milk, butter and butter milk. A sheep or lamb is slaughtered about once a week, depending on the size of the herd at the time. The carcass is hung in the cool cellar. We eat chicken 2-3 times a week.Olives are picked to be cured and for olive oil. The olives are hand pressed on stone mills resulting in an opaque green, thick and intensely fruity oil. I have never heard of anything like it outside of North Africa and The Middle East. Lemons are picked to be used fresh and preserved in salt for later use. It's a process of preparing what is available for daily consumption and preserving foods for times of scarcity.
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Are they also called "Persian limes?"
Posted by: Farid Zadi | August 23, 2005 at 08:14 PM
Do you preserve the "black lemon" in setif? I heard once it is actually a lime, is that true?
Posted by: Ed McGaugh | August 20, 2005 at 02:27 PM