Rechta, chorba, msemen: in “Cuisines of North Africa,” recipes like meatballs

"We eat culture," physical chemist Hervé This, the famous inventor of molecular cuisine and traveling companion of Pierre Gagnaire, is fond of saying . This phrase has rarely rung as true as in this collection of North African recipes by journalist and author Farah Keram. She composes 48 recipes like so many life stories from Algeria to Tunisia, two countries where part of her family lives. "It was almost a feeling of urgency to want to capture and convey what North African cuisines tell and carry within them," she writes. "The beautiful, the sacred, the nourishing, but also the unspoken and the food realities experienced on the southern shore of the Mediterranean."

Like many people of Maghrebi origin living in France, Farah Keram took time to come to terms with this culinary culture, when she did not reject it - in this her words echo those of the journalist Nabil Wakim, who recounted in a fascinating book - Arabic for all : why my language is taboo in France (Seuil, 2020) - his complex relationship with Arabic. She also speaks of a vague feeling of shame, of a culture perceived as illegitimate, in a France little inclined to value differences. Child