I was going to say I’ve had a lack of recent food adventures because I was thinking of the gross cheese sandwich with that Italian mushroom pesto and a small handful of my roommate’s five-cheez Italiano blend dairy product (sorry, Aaron, it wasn’t much), but then I also remembered the fabulously heartwarming return-to-NYC fried-chicken feast that Tamara prepared to mark my return from exile in the sun country. Man, that chicken was so tender it was like chicken pudding, wrapped up in lard-flavored crisp.

But I digress–what I was leading up to was AV’s report on Eid al-Adha in Fes. Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, commemorates….oh crap, my heathen upbringing is showing…Abraham? almost killing his son. So instead, everyone kills a sheep. For weeks before the feast, vacant lots are filled with sheep for sale–kind of like a Christmas tree lot, but with a different smell. What I very clearly remember of Eid in Cairo is a man pulling a cart stacked high with freshly yanked-off sheepskins, and the whole pile was making this rhythmic squelch-squelch sound. Also, the streets literally ran with blood. It was very impressive.

Here’s what Adriana has to say, very lightly edited:

So, the Eid. This is the holiday where every head of the household slaughters a ram. It turns out that you need a place to keep the things, and since urban areas don’t necessarily come prepared with temporary grazing land, people keep them wherever they happen to have room. The rooftop is one popular option: it’s common in the medina to see sheep on the terraces, hanging out amongst the clothes lines.

Today there was another place where I saw a sheep hanging out: a living room. We (Josie, her husband Jamie, and I) went to the house of Kim’s (another Fulbrighter) host family when she lived in the medina over the summer, and there is one family that lives in the downstairs of the house, and another that lives in the upstairs, so there was a ram in the living room downstairs, and one on the roof upstairs.

The slaughter, which is an annual act of DIY butchery (they were showing a how-to segment on a news program the night before), happens pretty early in the day. We showed up at Ahmad’s house a little past eight-thirty in the morning, and we stared for a little while at the sheep that was hanging out in the living room downstairs (all of the furniture had been taken up and was in a pile on one side of the room, and the ram was tied in a corner), and for a little while at the one that was on the roof, and were fed tea and coffee and cookies in the salon (which, according to Kim, happens at Eid. It happens a lot here. The tea-and-cookies part, not the staring at sheep part).

And then a guy showed up, who (for some reason) I thought was a friend of the family who was there for the Eid, but it turned out that he was the butcher (the people who don’t know how to properly kill and butcher the animal can hire butchers to do the job for them, apparently). And then it was time for him to kill the ram.

(The faint of stomach are advised to skip the following four paragraphs):

We went upstairs to the roof to watch; there was definitely some God-talk (not much, but a couple of sentences) involved, and the slaughter was carried out in the halal manner. The animal was held down by Ahmad and his wife, and the butcher cut the ram’s jugular (or what I presume to have been the jugular), and then the animal was bled for a while. The pool of blood that results is, on the one hand, surprisingly small and, on the other, surprisingly large. At some point during this whole process (not too far into it; after the legs were broken at the knees and put into a neat little pile), I felt pretty faint and so I went downstairs and watched the television for a while. I don’t know how long afterwards, Josie popped her head in to tell me that the head was being taken to wherever it is that the head gets taken. They walked out the door, and I followed them.

I must not have been very quick, because by the time I got to the door, Ahmad, Josie, and Jamie were all gone, so I walked out the door and through the series of turns that eventually leads to a (main-ish) street. They weren’t there, so I walked down the street a ways, and since it was Eid, the streets were much more empty than they’d normally be in the medina, but there were also lots of kids in the street preparing fires. It turns out that those were for the heads. I wandered around for a bit, then wandered back to the house. Aya, the seven-year-old downstairs, offered to show me where it was that Ahmad, Josie, and Jamie were, but as we headed out the door, they arrived, so it was back upstairs to sit around and drink tea and eat some cookies.

At some point, Josie, Jamie, and I decided to go for a walk, and so we went through the streets of the medina up to the Bab Bou Jloud (the main door to the city). The air was full of particulate matter from all the burning, and there were skins in the streets, and one cat looked particularly happy, and purposeful, and too intent upon finding something to eat to play the part of lazing street cat. We sat at a cafe, and drank some coffee and juice, and a funeral passed by, and we eventually headed back down the Tala’a Kibira to the family’s house.

While we were gone, the ram downstairs had been slaughtered (this in the living room), and parts of the ram upstairs were being made into kebabs. The ram downstairs had been sufficiently bled, and the head removed, and it was suspended from a rope, and they were in the middle of skinning it. For some reason, we (the three foreigners) were assigned various tasks: Jamie and I helped to skin it, Josie cut out the liver, and I cut out the heart and pulled out the intestine. The girls downstairs took great interest in this whole process, and Aya was particularly fond of the lungs (I have a picture of her holding them up by the windpipe): the two younger girls at some point chopped up the lungs (on the floor) and ran out of the house with them, one or two pieces in each of their hands, to go feed them to the cats. One thing that I found particularly funny was that the second girl (Kawthar) was wearing an off-white knit outfit for all this. The two girls returned full-handed a minute or so later, and announced that there were no cats around, and so they put the lung-bits into a plastic bag to take to the cats later.That’s when Ahmad from upstairs announced that it was time for us to go up to lunch.

The first parts of the animal that get eaten are the heart and liver; I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this meal. Josie and I had explained that Jamie couldn’t eat liver, figuring that only one person could possibly get out of eating any given organ. For those of you not familiar with Moroccan/Middle Eastern dining, it is customary for one to be forced to eat more than one could possibly fit (or, in this case, want to eat, which in my case was any). An eating strategy had to be found: obviously, deliberate chewing and general slowness of food consumption were a beginning. Josie figures that the only food that counts as having been eaten is food that you have been _seen_ eating, and so it was decided that we should only eat when watched, and be sure to push food around. This went pretty well as a strategy, and Fatima (Ahmad’s wife) wasn’t there, since she was on the roof preparing more meat, and she, apparently, is the major food-pusher in the family, and I figure we got off pretty easy. The liver tasted pretty awful (I ate four small pieces, which had been made into a kebab, and was the absolute smallest amount that I figured I could get away with eating), but it was wrapped in a layer of fat, which took some of the edge off.

There were orange slices with cinnamon on top, which were delicious, and after the meal there was tea and some cookies. As soon as this was served, we figured that it was a good cue to excuse ourselves. Josie and Jamie gave Khadija, the sullen thirteen-year-old at the house, a couple of little gifts that they had brought her, and then we all left. It was a little after three pm when we got home from the entire Eid, and the rest of the day was spent in Josie and Jamie’s apartment, and the smell of cooking sheep liver wafted through the air of the non-bleating city.

Mmm. Which all reminds me, we’re planning another lamb roast in February, for Victoria’s birthday. Can’t wait…