Eid Kabir

Leaving my apartment in the morning I was struck by the intense smell of sheep. I thought to myself how very different the smell of stinky, rain-soaked, dirty sheep would be compared to the delicious aroma of the cooked sheep meat to come. The streets of Rabat were deserted except for a few men walking around with very large knives and rubber boots, presumably butchers.

When arriving at my friend’s home we took a peek in the bathroom to see the star of the show, the sheep. He was dirty and smelly and really not at all appetizing. His tail was long unlike the cropped button tails of fluffy white sheep in children’s books.

We ate breakfast and I would have eaten substantially less if I had known how much food was to come. All at once, the butcher arrived and set into motion a fast stream of events that started with the struggle of dragging the sheep down the stairs and ended with carrying it back up the stairs, minus the skin, feet, head, and a few quarts of blood.

In the backyard the butcher pinned down the sheep as another man held its legs together and with a quick prayer and one fast motion, crimson blood was spraying everywhere. The sheep kicked for a few minutes as the mother used her squeegee to get the blood off the stone patio and into the garden (I wonder if it works as a fertilizer?).

The first thing was the removal of the head which twisted around 360 degrees before coming off. Then the legs were broken off at the lowest joint. Next the butcher cut a small hole in the skin near the thigh and proceeded to blow air in the space between the sheep’s skin and meat. He made a sheep balloon! Everyone pounded on the inflated sheep as if it were a drum. Finally a rope was looped between the leg bones and the sheep was hoisted up and hung to be skinned. Quick light movements of the sharp blade brought the skin off quite easily and when it got difficult toward the neck area, the butcher used his foot for leverage.

After being skinned it was difficult to tell that the carcass in front of me used to be a sheep. It could have been a goat, dog, pig, or small donkey for all I knew. It seemed so much smaller without the thick wool.

A quick slit down the middle revealed a large sack of a stomach filled with black liquid which went immediately into a bucket. Next the intestines were uncoiled and set in another bucket where they were filled with water and cleaned out. The kidneys were sliced out of the back wall of the carcass and then heart looked surprising small except for the large hollow aorta. Once the abdomen cavity was empty water was poured through the carcass to clean it out. Then all the buckets, filled with various organs, were brought upstairs followed by the sheep carcass which was carried delicately like an infant.

Clean up was intense as there was lots of blood and dirt from the animal but the apartment was thoroughly disinfected after a few minutes.

In the kitchen the preparation of the liver and heart was under way. Onions were sliced, coriander chopped, and oil drizzeled over bite-sized pieces. The fat (which had been stretching outside the window) was brought in and looked like a large spider’s web. It was cut into strips and wrapped around the pieces of liver and then put on a skewer. The grill was full of white hot coals and the liver was precooked first and then when the skewer with the fat was put over the flame the whole room smoked up. Even with the windows open it was burning my eyes. However, it was all worth it when I got to finally eat the kabobs.

With fresh bread made that morning I ate piece after piece of heart and then moved on to the boulefef (liver wrapped in fat). The fat was no longer visible as it had mostly cooked away but the taste was still present. I was given a small piece of spleen which was well done and it reminded me of the crispy part of a well cooked hamburger. With one skewer in hand with just a few pieces left on it, the mother insisted that I trade it in for a different full skewer with meat that was ‘still hot’. Because of that, the number of bare skewers stacked in front of me at the end of the meal was not an accurate representation of how much food I consumed. Thankfully there were salads to eat so I could feel somewhat healthy as I ate skewer after skewer of meat.

Before I knew it the meal was over and it almost seemed anticlimactic. It reminded me of the moment on Christmas morning after all the presents are open and everyone is sitting among piles of wrapping paper thinking “what now?” We finished lunch and there was a whole day of Eid left which resembled any other day. The adults took a nap and we sat in the salon talking about music and cultures and language, our stomachs full of meat. In the corner, the skinned sheep was laid down on a blanket to dry out and it looked just like a sleeping dog, so we named him “Fido”.