A Gift Tagine Proves All Is Not Lost

Jessamyn Rodriguez’s first tagine — a shallow terra-cotta dish with a tall peaked lid, painted all over with stars — never made it home from Morocco. She bought it in Marrakech on a backpacking trip and hauled it across the country in a tote bag, whose straps finally gave out while she was waiting for the ferry back to Spain. The tagine fell and shattered.This turned out to be a good thing. “It was the biggest, most garish tagine you’ve ever seen,” said Rodriguez, 39, the founder of Hot Bread Kitchen, a nonprofit bakery in New York City that trains low-income immigrant and minority women and rents kitchen space to small businesses.Among the first women Rodriguez hired was a Moroccan baker who listened to the story of the lost souvenir, and offered in its stead a modest unadorned tagine that a Moroccan home cook would actually use. She also taught Rodriguez to make the pot’s slow-simmered stew (also called a tagine), which grows tender from spirals of steam pent up under the lid’s bell curve.
The dish reminds Rodriguez of how much she has learned from the women of Hot Bread Kitchen, which she started in 2007 in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn. The idea came to her in 2000, when she applied for a job at the microfinance organization Women’s World Banking; a friend misheard it as “Women's World Baking.”For seven years, while pursuing a career in immigration advocacy, she prepared to open what she envisioned as a “United Nations of bread,” taking baking classes and apprenticing under the chef boulanger at Daniel.Her first employee was a woman from Puebla, Mexico, by way of Brooklyn, who was willing to share her tortilla recipe. Soon they couldn’t keep up with demand. Rodriguez commissioned a stationary bike equipped with a mill so she could grind corn while pedalling. Her boyfriend (now husband), Eli, a wine sales director at Sotheby’s, gamely pitched in. “I’d call him and say: ‘There’s too much corn tonight. You’ve got to come over,'” she said.Rodriguez, née Waldman, spent part of her childhood in rural Ontario, where it was hard to find challah for Sabbath dinner. She learned to braid dough on a rickety dining table that now stands at the heart of her Upper West Side apartment. Her father, who died when she was 12, found the table in a barn. “There isn’t a lot I have from him,” she said.Almost every night, she, Eli and their two children sit down to dinner at that table. “If we don’t, I don’t feel grounded,” she said. She saves tagine for special occasions; more often, she grabs tortillas before leaving the office. “The philosophy is, if you have a good tortilla, you can throw anything on it,” she said.The tortilla recipe appears in Hot Bread Kitchen’s first cookbook, published this week. Also revealed are the secrets of m’smen, a buttery, chewy flatbread that Rodriguez discovered on her long-ago trip to Morocco. Like a good tagine, the recipe eluded her for years, until she finally met the Moroccan baker.“Can you make m’smen?” she asked her. “You’re hired.”
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