Meet the Tunisians

“Is that something your mother taught you?” Paula Wolfert wanted to know.

Wolfert, cookbook author and one of the world’s most respected experts on Mediterranean cooking, was looking over the shoulder of Philadelphia-based, Tunisian-born baker Taieb Dridi on Saturday while he deftly kneaded semolina dough with one hand.

This was on a stage at the Ritz Carlton Marina del Rey, before attendees at a four-day conference on the cuisine of Tunisia put on by the American Institute of Wine and Food. Wolfert, playing the role of a foodie Oprah, questioned every step in the process as Dridi made the griddle bread called melaoui.

“Yes,” Dridi told her, “my mother kneaded bread this way.”

“Well, let me show you something my mother taught me,” Wolfert countered. She swiftly grabbed a dish towel and placed it under Dridi’s bowl as an anchor.

Dridi looked sheepish, but he had the last laugh when he produced several versions of the Tunisian flatbread good enough to provide the tortilla with a little competition.

After lunch, however, Wolfert demonstrated the Tunisian snack food brik (a parchment-thin Tunisian pancake deep-fried with various fillings, almost always including a raw egg) and captivated the crowd on her own. She gave her R-rated description of the proper way to eat a brik (sucking from the center and without letting any of the yolk drip) and then invited the audience up to the stage, where she challenged them all to assemble and fry their own briks. (Let’s just say some of the resulting briks were, well, unusual.)

To convey the true spirit of Tunisian cuisine, though, there was perhaps no better ambassador than Abdel Haouari Abderrazak, chef at the Ulysse Palace Hotel Djerba. His lunch of Tunisian cooking Friday had most of the conferees still raving the next day. During a Saturday afternoon briefing, at which many audience members grilled him for the recipe for his lentil and fava bean soup, Abderrazak instead slyly said: “Caraway, pepper and quite a bit of feeling.”

“Aren’t you leaving something out?” asked a woman anxious to re-create the dish.

“Ah, yes,” Abderrazak said, then smiled. “For good measure, a seed of craziness.”