{"id":128839,"date":"2024-01-20T06:16:05","date_gmt":"2024-01-20T06:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/?p=128839"},"modified":"2024-01-20T15:06:47","modified_gmt":"2024-01-20T15:06:47","slug":"the-culinary-cuisine-crossoads-culture-of-marseille-by-michael-roberts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websitedesigns.com.au\/elankanew\/the-culinary-cuisine-crossoads-culture-of-marseille-by-michael-roberts\/","title":{"rendered":"The Culinary Cuisine & Crossoads Culture of Marseille-by Michael Roberts"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Culinary Cuisine & Crossoads Culture of Marseille-by Michael Roberts<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

\"Michael<\/p>\n

Source:<\/span><\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Tristan Rutherford &\u00a0Rebecca Marshall in AramcoWorld in\u00a0 March\/April 2018<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.aramcoworld.com\/Articles\/March-2018\/Marseille-s-Migrant-Cuisine<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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Five hundred years later the Mediterranean became Rome\u2019s nexus of trade and empire, and Marseille became one of its maritime centers. Now,\u00a0mucem<\/span>\u00a0exhibits olive-oil amphorae from Anatolia, soapmaking paraphernalia from Syria, and sailing charts that show how to navigate from Algiers without running aground on the island of Mallorca.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/form>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Culinary historian Emmanuel Perrodin says the city\u2019s cultures, traditions and foods influenced by centuries of trade and migration throughout the Mediterranean make Marseille unique.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/form>\n\n

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Atop the museum, Emmanuel Perrodin, Marseille\u2019s leading culinary historian, sips black coffee. The panorama over France\u2019s third-largest\u00a0 city takes in the seemingly limitless sea, ramparts of 17th-century forts and a few cereal silos from the 1920s. Passenger ferries chug to and from the modern successors of the Roman trading ports of B\u00e9ja\u00efa and Annaba in Algeria, as well as the Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur city has a particular geography,\u201d says Perrodin. \u201cMy favorite Marseillais saying is, \u2018First you have the sea, then the city, and beyond that is another country called France.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Perrodin explains that, like Alexandria, Egypt, Marseille was a \u201clighthouse city.\u201d A key commercial gateway, a port city that has attracted all comers, it thrived as a polyglot trading colony while Paris was still just a village. Believed to have been established around 600 bce by Greeks from Phocaea (now Foca) on the west coast of Turkey, the city\u2019s more recent arrivals have included Russians, Armenians, and Berbers from Algeria\u2014among the latter the parents of France\u2019s greatest soccer player, Marseille-born Zinedine Zidane. Most recently, in the decades following independence, families from former French colonies have come here, along with many more.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/form>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Sharing some of her Tunisian upbringing at her shop, La Palme d\u2019Or, Jiji Azizi sells dried herbs, nuts, spices and regional foods, including dried hibiscus.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

With human traffic came food, and with food came recipes. Dates entered Europe here, says Perrodin, and \u201carguably\u201d tomatoes and bananas.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSafeguarding your favorite foods is perhaps the most important cultural act,\u201d he says. \u201cThree times per day you reinforce your cultural identity in your heart\u2014and your stomach.\u201d Most curiously of all, the recipes that came first to Marseille\u2014take North African\u00a0merguez<\/i>\u00a0lamb sausage, for example\u2014would now be eaten by a Cypriot French family in Paris, or by a Congolese French family in Normandy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur national dish is couscous. Tajine [from North Africa] is served in French schools. If you imagine French cuisine as a tree, the leaves are in Paris, but the roots reside in Marseille.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Seeds of the city\u2019s culinary evolution can be found a few blocks north in the district of Noailles. On the corner of Rue d\u2019Aubagne, one can see a Tunisian\u00a0leblebi<\/i>\u00a0soup store. An Ivorian snack bar sells\u00a0alocco<\/i>\u00a0fish with grilled plantain\u2014and nearby is Marseille\u2019s last remaining ricotta cheese creamery. A young woman with her smartphone tucked into the elastic of her headscarf continues a phone conversation as she shops for fruit. A young boy warns \u201cyalla!\u201d<\/i>\u00a0as he weaves his bike down the street, fishing rod in one hand. The roars of scooters and the calls of hawkers render the street a maelstrom of multiculturalism, a 21st-century Babel where one could conceivably order lunch in English, Spanish, Arabic or French.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such telegenic scenes are backed up by tales of economic necessity. The story of 37-year-old Jiji Azizi, who manages the spice emporium La Palme d\u2019Or, also on Rue d\u2019Aubagne, is a mirror of migration into Marseille. \u201cNo one of my generation consciously moved here. We were born here instead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1950s and 1960s, she says, the Mediterranean was a more open sea. Azizi\u2019s father was one of seven brothers and sisters sharing a home in Africa\u2019s northernmost city, the Tunisian port of Bizerte. \u201cIn that position you just moved to France,\u201d Azizi says. Fortunately, his fragrant store was a success. \u201cArmenians, Algerians, Greeks\u2014we all eat the same halvah, dolma and all the rest.\u201d Azizi proudly claims she is Marseillaise, before being of Tunisian roots or French citizenship. \u201cPerhaps it\u2019s like Italians in New York. Despite being there for one century, some people are Sicilian first, then American second.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Such stories are commonplace. B\u00ealine Sy arrived in Marseille aged 18 months in 1979. Her parents lived in Vietnam\u2019s southern colonial resort of Dalat, a leafy town that, once part of French Cochinchina, was base for soldiers of Arabian and African origins serving in the French Army. \u201cWhen I return there, I get laughed at because I speak Vietnamese with a Marseillaise accent,\u201d she says. In the mid-1960s waves of American soldiers came to her family\u2019s town. A decade later Sy\u2019s parents fled from communist authorities with their nine children.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Along the busy Rue Halle Delacroix, B\u00ealine Sy poses at her family\u2019s store,\u00a0 Tam-Ky, which the Sys started after emigrating in 1979 from Vietnam, when she was a baby. Today the shop sells everything from produce to dried seaweed to prepared Vietnamese dishes.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The family\u2019s Marseille fruit stall grew to become Tam-Ky, now the area\u2019s largest international food emporium, on the bustling Rue Halle Delacroix. Sy\u2019s checkout now rings orders of Mauritian\u00a0piments<\/i>, Madagascan\u00a0kumbawa<\/i>\u00a0citrus and Indonesian pepper to patrons from Senegal, Cambodia, Mali and much of the rest of the world. A final novelty is the curious circumflex above Sy\u2019s forename, B\u00ealine. \u201cIn Vietnam we wear conical hats,\u201d she explains, \u201cso I put one on the \u00ea of my name. When you move to a new country, you can do anything you want.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Other recently settled residents are plying their wares through France, like Mediterranean traders of two and half millennia before. Around the corner from Azizi and Sy, down past a sweet-smelling shop selling\u00a0mahjouba<\/i>\u2014crepes, North African-style\u2014another with flipflops and a couple of halal butchers, Joseph Azzi set up his Le Cedre du Liban (Cedar of Lebanon) bakery in 1995.\u201cLebanese are everywhere,\u201d says Azzi. \u201cSaudi, Africa, London, Brazil.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He walks past crates of pomegranate molasses to fire up his flatbread machine. With a whirr and a clunk, the timeless, round Arab loaves bake and then cool along a 15-meter conveyor that snakes underneath the flour-dusted ceiling. Stacks of flatbreads are sealed into plastic bags before being couriered along former Roman roads\u2014now fast autoroutes\u2014to Nice in the east and B\u00e9ziers in the west. The fact they are eaten with restaurant\u00a0falafil<\/i>\u00a0or supermarket couscous is testament to Marseille\u2019s status as France\u2019s\u00a0ville carre-four<\/i>\u2014its crossroads city.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Joseph Azzi, owner of Le Cedre du Liban (Cedar of Lebanon) bakery, stands next to his 15-meter conveyor belt that enables him to produce seemingly endless amounts of pastries and breads that he ships across France.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet now, as it has been for centuries, arrival also often means struggle. Some of Marseille\u2019s most recent newcomers arrive with more recipes than official papers or networks of helpful friends. Some learn quickly they can rely on Fatima Rhazi, a grandmother originally from Morocco who acts as a kind of great aunt to Marseille\u2019s migrant women. Her organization, Femmes d\u2019Ici et d\u2019Ailleurs Marseille (Marseille Women from Here and Elsewhere) was formed in 1994 to foster dialogue through food.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSome new ladies are timid for all sorts of reasons, but when cooking in our communal kitchen they open up.\u00a0 Believe me, women have the same problems all over the world,\u201d says Rhazi. By sharing recipes, they learn food preparation, hygiene and language skills useful for both household management and employment. And it works: 1,257 previously unemployed people who have passed through Rhazi\u2019s workshop are now in paid work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rhazi\u2019s backstreet office-kitchen includes a 500-book library with (titles such as\u00a0La Cuisine du Monde<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0D\u00e9lices du Maroc<\/i>) that serves as a recipe vault for almost every Mediterranean, Arabic and African dish. Some hand-me-down methods remain handwritten in Arabic. Others reside on the hard drive of the association\u2019s creaking computer. \u201cI\u2019m from Morocco, which has three couscous recipes, but our association regularly makes 11 different varieties,\u201d Rhazi says.<\/span><\/p>\n

This culinary archive at Femmes d\u2019Ici et d\u2019Ailleurs Marseille is important also because, as an entirely self-financed organization, it is a database that helps support large-scale catering for weddings, birthdays and other events, all of which help pay for the organization\u2019s many services. When\u00a0mucem<\/span>\u00a0hosts 300 guests for an exhibition opening, they often call Rhazi first. At such times, she then calls upon volunteers who hail anywhere from the steppes of Mongolia to the golden sands of Ghana to work the 20 gargantuan cooking pots and countless tajines in the adjoining kitchen. \u201cCustomers can also dine in the upstairs restaurant. We call our cuisine\u00a0oriental<\/i>. The term is meaningless,\u201d Rhazi says with a smile, \u201cbut it pushes all the right buttons.\u201d Dishes can include light-as-air black-eyed pea\u00a0accara<\/i>\u00a0fritters from Senegal and herbed Moroccan chicken with a lemon\u00a0confit<\/i> sauce.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Image Source:<\/strong>Thuppahis<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Moroccan-born Fatima Rhazi founded Femmes d\u2019Ici et d\u2019Ailleurs Marseille (Marseille Women from Here and Elsewhere) in 1994. Its communal kitchen became a hub for skill-building in cooking, household management and employment.\u00a0Right:<\/i>\u00a0Her notes on culinary techniques she learned from her mother are part of the group\u2019s archive. In 2009 the French government made her a\u00a0chevalier<\/i> (knight) in the national Legion of Honor.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Rhazi\u2019s own early travels influenced her palate, too. Raised a few miles from the Algerian border in Oujda, around four decades ago she was Morocco\u2019s 200-meter and 400-meter women\u2019s running champion, and this took her to competitions throughout the Mediterranean. She speaks, for example, about a Sephardi dish from the Tunisian island of Djerba called\u00a0skhina<\/i>. For religious reasons, Tunisia\u2019s Jewish community required a Saturday feast but could not prepare food on the Friday Sabbath. So the recipe of eggs, rice, spices and meat is slowcooked overnight into a state of delicious caramelization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recognition of Rhazi\u2019s work, and by extension Marseille\u2019s culinary m\u00e9lange, came in 2009 by presidential decree. France\u2019s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself of Greek and Hungarian parentage, together with Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who is the second of 12 children of Moroccan and Algerian heritage, visited Femmes d\u2019Ici et d\u2019Ailleurs Marseille.<\/span><\/p>\n

To Rhazi\u2019s consternation, Sarkozy and Dati did not give her a check: Instead they knighted her, declaring her\u00a0chevalier de la l\u00e9gion d\u2018honneur<\/i>, the nation\u2019s highest order of merit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI am a knight without a horse,\u201d she jokes. Then with her characteristic self-confidence, she asked France\u2019s president to assist 17 migrant families who were struggling without the correct paperwork. \u201cI\u2019m tough because I have six brothers. That\u2019s why I fight for women.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At a gourmet level, it is migrant and migrant-fusion recipes that can be found all across Marseille. The restaurant atop\u00a0mucem<\/span>\u00a0serves a prime example with its culinary deconstruction of the famed city dish bouillabaisse, a \u201cpoor man\u2019s stew\u201d that infuses imported saffron and tomatoes with local rockfish. Then there are hipster-Maghreb patisseries such as MinaKouk that create avant-garde pigeon\u00a0pastilla<\/i>\u00a0as well as Franco-Arabian macarons. Marseille tourism bosses sell the city by inviting food bloggers from across France, North America and Asia. An Instagram generation strolls the street snapping Tunisian favorites like wafer-thin, oozy-egg\u00a0brick \u00e0 l\u2019<\/i>\u0153uf<\/i>, or Turkish\u00a0mant\u0131<\/i>, a ravioli topped with creamy yogurt. Marseille chefs of every background are grafting contemporary takes onto a culinary movement that first set sail in Aegean triremes 2,600 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Restaurant AM par Alexandre Mazzia has received a Michelin Star for its artful fusions of flavors. Chef Mazzia, who grew up in the Republic of Congo, says his dishes \u201care a metaphor for the influences every resident transmits.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Nowhere is this trend more compelling than at AM par Alexandre Mazzia, a restaurant a block from the Stade V\u00e9lodrome, home of the top-ranked soccer squad Olympique de Marseille. Here Michelin-starred chef Alexandre Mazzia has turned Marseille\u2019s migrant flavors, including Turkish sumac and Nigerian manioc, into world-beating fare. \u201cMy own story is typical of Marseille,\u201d says Mazzia. His paternal grandfather was an Italian saxophonist who made a mean saffron risotto, while his mother\u2019s father was a Corsican fisherman. \u201cTherefore, it was psychologically easy for my Marseille family to emigrate to Congo in the 1970s.\u201d There, Mazzia\u2019s father took a job selecting hardwood timber for global export from the rainforest of Mayombe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mazzia was born in 1976 in Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. Like Marseillais of other backgrounds, he grew up eating\u00a0saka-saka<\/i>, a pesto made of manioc, fish and palm oil. \u201cWhen I came to live in France at age 15, I felt at home in Marseille,\u201d he says. \u201cIndeed, my dishes are a metaphor for the influences every resident transmits.\u201d And what fusions they are: Algae chips dotted with sweet-potato jellies, topped with bottarga roe; langoustines wrapped in balls of tapioca, a West African staple, that pop in the mouth like caviar and a frozen Franco-Maghreb gem of raspberry and harisa, whose flavor serenades like Mediterranean waves and then sears like the Sahara.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Residents walk along the Le Vieux Port (The Old Port), where for centuries people from across the Mediterranean stopped to trade\u2014and where many began a longer journey, staying on and investing themselves in the fabric and future of France\u2019s third-largest city.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

It\u2019s a long way from beef bourguignon. As Mazzia says, \u201cPeople from Paris now come to me. The restaurant is booked solid for the next two months.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mazzia now works on culinary projects across the city including private after-hours access to the Mus\u00e9e Cantini gallery of fine art, where paintings like Paul Signac\u2019s \u201cEntr\u00e9e du Port de Marseille\u201d show steamships delivering goods from across the globe. Mazzia takes inspiration from these canvases\u2019 watery rhythms to create dishes for intelligentsia-based foodways road-tested for centuries by migrants.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe staff at my restaurant l\u2019AM come from 11 countries, from Comoros to Korea,\u201d he says. That is as many nationalities as fielded by the current Olympique de Marseille soccer team, which has won the Coupe de France trophy a record 10 times.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe richness of Marseille is its mix of cultures,\u201d he says. \u201cTogether we win.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n