- The day before my vacation to Morocco seemed a poor time to sample new foods
- I could determine no reason why we would’ve slaughtered a sheep, which means the reason was probably: it was horribly ill.
After dinner, Jainabou brought out a bowl filled with roasted pieces of sheep. Unfortunately, the bowl only contained those pieces you’d least want to eat, most of them unidentifiable. Actually, the only pieces I could identify were four hooves and a skull. Everything else was fatty, goopy, and charred. I probably would’ve had trouble classifying them even if I were familiar with ovine* internal anatomy. I hadn’t been told to “eat” that frequently since I first arrived in village almost two years ago. I could only reply with a nod because my mouth was filled with the roasted innards. I’d been trying to store the “food” in my cheeks, chipmunk-style, so I could later spit it out in the privacy of my pit latrine.
After we’d each eaten a couple of handfuls, Amadou grinned and set to work cracking open the skull. He scooped out the brains—the best! he exclaimed—and handed me some. It seemed dangerous to trust the culinary tastes of someone who’d just been forcing burnt chunks of fat on me, but I took a chance…and it turns out Amadou was right! Brains are best! The brains were warm and had a comforting texture, somewhere between oatmeal and feta cheese. Having not been directly roasted, the brains were also cleaner in appearance than what I’d previously been eating and not covered in soot. Best of all, there were no clinging goopy dripping blobs of fat. But lets hope the sheep didn’t die of some zoonotic** neurological disease.
*Who knew? There actually is a use for this word.
**Google tells me this is the word referring to a diseases transmissible from animals to humans. I added this footnote so you wouldn’t think that’s a word normally floating about my vocabulary.
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