By the 1930s, after roughly twenty years of colonial rule, most Moroccans relied on imported green tea sweetened with refined sugar as a critical part of their daily sustenance. French capital had collaborated with Protectorate officials to establish a sugar refinery in Casablanca and beetroot and cane fields in several different parts of the country. Private tea companies started business, marketing their product with images of the sultan and the ‘Alawi dynasty. Tea and sugar were more accessible to average Moroccans than they had ever been, but not everyone saw this in a positive light. In this paper, I examine the critical response to rising tea and sugar consumption during the colonial period. Scholars such as Sahar Bazzaz, Rahma Bourquia, and Etty Terem have recently turned their attention to the resistance to tea and sugar consumption in the late nineteenth century, particularly the movement led by the Kattani brotherhood. This critical attitude towards new consumption practices, particularly with the official establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, did not disappear. This paper uses a series of poems performed by imyadzen, or traveling poets, that deal specifically with tea, sugar, food supply, and hunger. These poems were recorded by the French officer Arsène Roux in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly in the Middle Atlas region, and they offer a window into the growing culture of atay in rural Morocco. Although tea and sugar were common in the cities and towns in the late nineteenth century, the population of Morocco remained overwhelmingly rural through the 1930s. For some pockets of the country, tea and sugar had only recently become regularly available. By analyzing this set of sources, I demonstrate how local, rural consumers experienced French colonial alimentation and ravitaillement policies. I show how they made sense of their own sustenance. This paper offers a counter-narrative to the idea of sweetened tea as a symbol of Moroccan national identity and as a staple that Moroccans simply could not live without.

The first print cookbooks published in Egypt and Morocco present examples of hybridity that belie straightforward narratives of colonial rule. In the mid-twentieth century, French cuisine and British domestic science were both key influences shaping Egyptian foodways. Cookbooks addressing Moroccan housewives emerged in the context of both the French ethnographic tradition and contemporaneous Egyptian debates about gender and domesticity. Drawing on a corpus of cookbooks published between the 1930s and the 1970s, this paper situates Egyptian and Moroccan cookbooks in the “reciprocal, if convoluted, flow[s] of ideologies and social processes” experienced between metropole and colony (Clancy-Smith & Gouda, 1998) while grounding them in their material contexts. Early Egyptian and Moroccan print cookbooks were the direct result of colonial exchange. In Egypt, the first such cookbooks written for housewives were published in Arabic by Egyptian women who had studied domestic science in England. The first such Moroccan cookbooks were written by European settlers or Moroccans writing in French. Though diverse, these cookbooks share several features stemming from conventions of European cookbook writing during this period. One example is the way they translate Egyptian and Moroccan recipes into a European culinary idiom through their treatment of sauce as a culinary category. For Egyptian author Nazira Niqula, French “mother sauces” like béchamel were ideal because they could offset the undesirable odors associated with local fowl, like duck, to produce a dish that both rooted in the Egyptian countryside and palatable to the sophisticated diner. Moroccan author Latifa Bennani Smires prefaces her book with a description of the four most prominent sauces used in Moroccan tajines, echoing the four mother sauces of French cuisine. Sauces are a salient window into transformations of culinary cultures because they are closely linked to stove technologies: historians of French cuisine have noted the evolution of emulsified sauces like béchamel alongside new kinds of stoves. During this period in North Africa, new stove models manufactured in the metropole were often introduced to the colonies and produced locally soon after. The choice of cooking equipment was central to the sauces described above. I draw on archival material to contextualize these cookbooks against the background of the culinary equipment available to their authors and readership. This paper offers a narrative of culinary history aimed at broadening understandings of how both ideological conceptions of food and the material means connected to its preparation circulated and shifted within and among metropole and colony.

The North African specialty of couscous holds a particularly meaningful, if ambiguous, place in the French culinary pantheon. The dish has consistently ranked among the French’s top favorite food in national polls since 2004. It is a ubiquitous and regular offering, not just in ethnic restaurants, but also in cafeteria, collective catering, fast food joints, and supermarkets. Notably, by the end of the twentieth century, France was the leading producer and consumer of couscous in Europe. Paradoxically, this specialty has also had the potential to crystallize anxieties about sexual, racial and national identities, colonial legacies and immigration. Because couscous is considered both as familiar and exotic, authentic and industrialized, homey and cosmopolitan, it provides a unique window into how colonial legacies are embodied and reprocessed into new hegemonies, and new forms of resistances. My paper examines how a number of works by contemporary visual artists of Maghrebi origins, working in and out of France, have used couscous as a material, building on its rich social, historical and symbolic connotations, and thus have reinvigorated the cultural capital of the dish. Recently exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia’s Untitled (Gardhaïa) (2009) represents a scale model of the ancient Algerian city of Gardhaïa, made entirely out of cooked couscous. Placed on a very large dish that mimics the one used to roll and serve couscous, this couscous feast of sorts is ironically served to two large pictures of Le Corbusier and Pouillon, both modernist architects who were inspired by the clean lines of the ancient city but never acknowledged this influence. As building block and offering, couscous clearly highlights the fact that the colonized fed the colonizer ideas and models, as well as food. Attia’s work is also an homage being paid to his mother’s couscous and to the gestures and culinary know how that make this dish, which he likens to an art form. My paper also focuses on lesser known artists and their works such as “Ni, ni, ni” (2007) by Zoulikha Bouabdellah, “Handmade: Graines” (2012) by Ymane Kakhir, and works by Mehdi-Georges Lalou and Yazid Oulab, exhibited together in Paris. These works demonstrate that couscous, moving from the colonial burlesque, via industrialized food, to highbrow contemporary art, has become a tool to reflect about, and not just reproduce, the past, and propose a more convivial future.

When Sino-Muslim Tang Yichen recounted his Japanese-sponsored hajj in a journal published in 1938, he spent a few pages ruminating on the universality of tea. Although the Muslims he encountered on his journey from Japanese-occupied Beijing to Mecca prepared the beverage differently, he remarked that all Muslims could take solace in the shared pleasure of sharing a pot of tea with their co-religionists around the world. Around the same time as Tang embarked on his hajj, the Japanese Islamic Association published a number of privately-circulated dossiers for imperial officials along with a number of journal articles in well-read circulars about new markets for tea grown in Manchukuo and Japan in the Middle East. Avid tea drinker themselves, members of the Japanese Islamic Association observed Middle Eastern tea drinking habits to report back to imperial officials on the viability of the region as a place for Japanese tea exports. These were concerted endeavors by the Japanese imperial government to insert themselves into markets throughout the Middle East. Their efforts provide new ways of thinking about the intersections between religion, economics, and diplomacy during WWII. This paper attempts to unravel some of the ways that the well-travelled and highly-educated members of the Japanese Islamic Association explained Middle Eastern tea drinking habits to both everyday-Japanese readers and imperial policy makers. Their efforts were two-fold: to expand markets, and to make “Middle Easterners” legible to the subjects of the ever-expanding Japanese Empire. Through a close reading of a number of texts produced between 1938 and 1941, the paper provides a new look into the ways that scholars of Islam in Japan represented Middle Easterners as both similar and different to the Japanese. My observations about tea form part of the larger conclusions for my book project which bring into question both the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Japanese Empire while examining Japanese constructions and perceptions of the “other” beyond their East Asian colonial possessions. In conclusion, I draw attention to the lasting impact that both Japanese consumer products and the transnational actors who worked in the service of the Japanese Empire, such as Tang Yichen and the members of the Japanese Islamic Association, had on the non-aligned movement in the early 1950s.