ReportageBreaking the fast is usually a moment of conviviality and greedy reunion. For the second time in a row, the health crisis upset them, but we were still able to follow the development of a “ftour” dinner worthy of an era without Covid-19.
Shortly before nightfall, the round table set up by Fouzia Ayaou shines with delicacies that await only the official hour of breaking the fast – theiftar or ftour – to be shared. Steaming pumpkin-shaped soup tureen, surrounded by crispy briouates, spongy white baghrir, the almost fluorescent glow of a mint-cucumber lemonade, the glazed dome of a tagine dish from which will soon escape the scent of cumin, coriander, turmeric… The buffet with multiple shapes, textures, colors and scents stirs up the appetite of this Franco-Moroccan family from Noisy-le-Sec (Seine-Saint-Denis) who, like several million practicing Muslims in France, abstain from drinking and eating from dawn to sunset, in this month of ramadan.
Fixed this year from April 13 to May 12 by the Hegirian calendar, these thirty days celebrating the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad are usually experienced as a period of both meditation and celebration, of deprivation and profusion. For the second time in a row, the health crisis has complicated the religious practice of this meeting, the fifth pillar of Islam, as it thwarted the conviviality of the greedy reunion of the ftour.
“ Usually my husband and I entertain and go out a lot, especially on Saturday and Sunday evenings. There, we usually eat alone with our daughter, sometimes with a neighbor or a little bit of family ”, Fouzia Ayaou is saddened, specifying that the meal will still be out of the ordinary, in terms of both dishes and quantity, if only to feed an unexpected guest.
Diurnal abstinence does not prevent the place taken by food at the heart of a day. Tunisian chef married to a Breton woman, with whom he runs the restaurant A mi-chemin (Paris 14e) crossing with generous finesse the culinary repertoire of her native and adopted lands (from veal kidney to star anise to sprawling octopus couscous), Nordine Labiadh remembers her adolescence in Zarzis, a coastal town in the south-east of France. Tunisia. “ During the month of Ramadan, I would go to the market in the morning ”, confides the one who had become the ” right arm “ from his mother, while his father worked eleven months out of twelve, in the Renault factories in the suburbs of Lyon. “The shelves were never as well supplied as at that time, everything was conducive to consumption, especially when an empty stomach makes you want to buy everything. “
You have 76.99% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.