"Would You Like Some Cake With That?" And Other Colonial Legacies

Mkhabez, an Algerian sweet cake, iced in French style.

Few cookies from the Middle East have icing. In the grand scheme of cuisine history, this makes sense -- the idea of creaming powdered confectioner’s sugar with butter until it can be spread isn’t exactly practical in the regions where what came to be known as “Middle Eastern” or “North African” food first developed, where some of the most prevalent ingredients were semolina, dates, and honey. Diversity grew naturally from the geographic differences across the area, each country with its unique climate and food culture developing the area into a diverse tapestry of culinary delights. Seldom among those desserts considered Middle Eastern will you find a shred of icing.

Except in Algeria, of course, where the prevalence of royal icing in desserts is widespread enough to make it a unique case among its neighbors. In Algerian pastry, the vestiges of colonialism still survive even within a state actively trying to eliminate them -- in sweets, of all places. It’s unlikely, however, that such efforts will be made to eliminate the icing phenomenon from Algerian cuisine. The French, when they came to Algeria, brought with them a food legacy far more enduring -- and more palatable, apparently, given the ways in which the Algerian culinary landscape shifted after independence -- than their ugly political history. Icing is the perfect example. The French fusion with Algerian cooking becomes evident in what is called in both French and Arabic gateaux glaces, iced cakes which are, despite their very European name, Algerian to their core. The concept is simple: North African cookies, with distinctly Algerian composition and Arabo-Tamazight names, are simply too tasty to ignore. Royal icing, similarly, was too good an offer to pass up. The union of the French art of pastry-decorating with the Algerian art of cookie-baking produced the modern Algerian bakery culture. It changed the way Algerians looked at their food for the foreseeable future, as French-style pastry shops line the streets of Algiers selling intricately-decorated and frosted cookies like arayech and mkhabez. France left its mark on Algeria, certainly. Just not in the way its governors at the time had intended.

French influence in Algerian food has made the baguette a staple. If the intricate designs of the gateaux are for special occasions, the baguette is a staple food. Economic analyses have actually demonstrated that it is consumed on a daily basis by most Algerians, and given that women tend to be the primary cooks of the home, this is a choice as much driven by them as by the men in their families. The staying power of France in Algerian food, by extension, demonstrates a gendered legacy, a reflection of the ways in which sex roles have effectively led to significant cultural shifts. Women are the decisionmakers in the kitchen; thus, when French superimpositions of gender and economics are removed, their tenacity depends upon the woman’s desire or willingness to maintain them. Algerian women may have rejected much of French influence, to varying degrees, but they have been the ones to embrace its food, to take what is salvageable from the wreckage of the imperialist legacy and create cuisine that reflects the history of a country defined by change, a nation of mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, bound by the choices they make in the kitchen which come to define how society sits at the table.