Tangier and the Imaginary Maître d’Fromage

Chickens hang upside down, their throats slit and esophagi dangling. Cow heads sway from ropes. Men carry just-killed sharks over their shoulders. The smell of mint, the color of saffron, and the light of bare bulbs fill the air.

It’s the day before Ramadan, which means we need to move quickly through the medina to find a slice of Berber goat cheese before it’s gone.

Ramadan means no eating, drinking, or smoking from dawn until sunset, so the people of Tangier are flooding the medina to buy special foods they’ll store for the monthlong occasion of contemplation and community.

The day before Ramadan is cause enough to draw the mountain people of the Rif and Jbala down from their highland fields and into the city to capitalize on the holiday. Many are Amazigh rather than Arab, and today they’re conspicuous in their striped skirts and wide straw hats, many with sheep and goats in tow.

The Mediterranean—more or less the center of the world—has always excelled at creating mutts. Its peoples have mingled for millennia through trade, conquest, and migration. The Berbers—Amazigh, as many call themselves—are an exception in the Mediterranean: the oldest people of North Africa, here long before the Arabs, with their own languages and customs. In their mountains and deserts—and in its cities—the Amazigh have kept their languages and customs alive.

“Hold on to your wallets,” Mohammed says, as I tell him we have to find the Berber goat cheese before it’s sold out.

We cross under arches and pass old men with ancient beards, cloaked figures like preschool ghosts, and nine-year-olds selling toys and Fanta. Mohammed samples a round of cheese—a white pie wrapped in palm fronds.

"No good,” he says. “We keep looking.”

“Sorry,” I mutter to a shopkeeper as I bump into a row of dead chickens, setting them swinging. It’s hard work keeping up with Jane and Mohammed, who move like wind through the narrow passages.

The International Zone

From the mid-1920s until 1956, Tangier was a kind of free-for-all International Zone, run by a shifting committee of European powers—Britain, France and Spain among them, with the United States joining after World War II, Britain, and France. This is the Tangier we know best—a pre-hippie come-as-you-are city that attracted writers and painters, gay men escaping persecution at home, beatniks, smugglers, spies and, darker still, men who came to exploit the city’s poor boys.

Walking through the city, which owes as much to Spain, Portugal and France as to the rest of Morocco, you can’t escape the legacy of this strange era. An old European man with a crooked nose, deep tan, and straw hat tells us he came to Tangier decades ago for the lifestyle. When I ask about the International Zone days, he kisses his hand and throws it in the air.

“Such beautiful times. Fantastic. That was life. Life was right here in Tangier.”

Long before this—six hundred years before the International Zone—Tangier stood at the western edge of the Muslim world, far from its heartland. From that edge, Tangier sent out the world’s most extraordinary traveler.

Ibn Battutah was a Berber from the 14th century, though thoroughly Islamized. At just 21, he left Tangier alone, on a donkey, seeking insight by traveling toward the center of the Islamic world. His journey would span much of his life and cover some 75,000 miles—about three times the distance traveled by Marco Polo.

According to Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who retraced Ibn Battutah’s path in a 2001 travelogue, Ibn Battutah was likely inspired by a predecessor, Ibn Jubayr—a 12th-century Spanish Muslim whose pilgrimage to Mecca and subsequent travel writing captivated Arab audiences. Ibn Jubayr’s accounts may have planted the seed for Ibn Battutah’s quest.

A Pact About Cheese

At home, Jane makes the pasta, but I shave the Parmigiano-Reggiano. One day, during this ritual of what I call mutual responsibility, one of us asked the other: What if we committed to a quest? A journey around the world to the towns and countrysides where artisanal cheeses are made.

What if the theme had been something else? Stage clowns? Palm trees? Artichokes?

But with this particular whim, we made a pact to explore the world’s artisanal cheese towns. To taste farmhouse cheeses in the very places they were born.

We’re not cheese fanatics. Rather, I see cheese travels the way Jerry Garcia described improvisational music: you need a thin structure, and beyond that, whatever happens, let it happen.

The cheese is the note in the key, and when you end a passage, you land back on that note. For vegans and Cheez Whiz loyalists alike, don’t despair—because in artisanal cheese is a glimpse of humanity and the far corners of the Earth. 

An Invented Hero

Ibn Battutah had a hero. We didn’t. So we invented one.

We imagined a maître d’fromage—a fictional cheese expert named St. Deuberex Montclair. He was a vaguely European gentleman who, in the innocent years before World War I, penned an imaginary tome titled The Cheese Traveler. In it, he outlined the greatest known artisanal cheeses of his time—places he had never visited, but dreamed of, and knew only from the wheels and wedges that came across the counter of his city fromagerie. Later in life, he would leave the shop behind and go find them.

Like Ibn Battutah, we begin in Tangier—but for different reasons and in different directions. Cheese was likely born in the Near East, perhaps as early as 8000 B.C., and North Africans were making it by 5000 B.C.—even if its most iconic global forms evolved in France, Italy, England, and Switzerland.

Montclair wrote: “This is why you take your first steps at the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Southern Pillar of Hercules points its cultural finger north, to Europe. You nod to the origin and you walk toward the majesty.”

Jben

The spidery narrows of Tangier’s medina finally lead us to a small kiosk selling only Berber goat cheese. Mohammed samples a few and at last says, “Very good.” He buys a pie, and the three of us sit on stools, picking at the tofu-like wedge.

The cheese is soft and mild—yogurtlike, even. In Tangier it’s a Ramadan favorite at iftar, when the day’s fast is broken. They’ll spread this cheese on bread with olives and honey. For us, it’s a taste of cheese in its earliest form. 

This Berber mountain cheese is known locally as jben.  Farm families in the Rif and Jbala mountains, and across Morocco, make it from goat’s milk, or sometimes a mix with cow’s milk.

Its short fermentation and simple preparation give it a clean, tangy flavor, somewhere between yogurt and ricotta. Jben remains one of Morocco’s most enduring farmhouse cheeses.

But jben is more than a local specialty; it is a living remnant of one of the oldest human food traditions. Long before aging caves, fresh cheeses like jben were made by letting milk curdle naturally—sometimes helped along by rennet or a wild thistle—then straining it through cloth. Its simplicity—milk, a little rennet or thistle, time, and gravity—means that a bite of jben is a bite of cheese prehistory. In its texture and taste, you can imagine how the first nomads preserved milk, how cheese spread across the Mediterranean, and how something so ephemeral became a staple across civilizations.

Syllesty Styleen

While we eat, Jane asks Mohammed what kind of movies he likes.

“American!” he says.

“Which ones?” I ask.

“Syllesty Styleen!”

“Sylvester Stallone?” Jane says.

“Yes, Rambo! He’s American, yes?”

“Italian American.”

“Italian American?” he repeats, contemplative, while chain-smoking Moroccan cigarettes. I wonder whether it’s just a habit, or if he’s purging before Ramadan.

“I love this guy, Rambo!” he says. “He’s in the trees, he’s in the air, he’s on the rocks. And these China people can smell him, you know? They can smell that he’s there...” He stubs out his cigarette and exclaims, “but he—rat-a-tat-a-tat—and he gets ’em!”

That evening, Mohammed wishes us well, and we retreat to the El Minzah Hotel wine bar, where the radio plays Frank Sinatra, Jobim, The Buena Vista Social Club, Nina Simone, and Cesária Évora. Above us hangs an autographed photo of Jacques Cousteau, seated in this very spot years ago.

Tonight will be a raucous affair in Tangier. Dogs will howl and the city will stay up late, past the drummer’s pre-dawn rounds, until we finally get to sleep around 4 a.m.

Tomorrow, St. Deuberex Montclair’s grave will shake in anticipation as we ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to seek out some of Spain and Portugal’s most special cheeses.