Preparing the Oula, My Mother and I Found Common Ground

I grew up in a village located between the Mediterranean and fields of tomatoes and peppers in the Cap Bon peninsula in Tunisia, the birthplace of harissa. My playground was the beach, my family’s farm, and my grandparents’ houch—a central patio at the heart of traditional houses. Each year, at the height of the season, my mother, aunts, cousins, and I gathered there. We would arrive the night before and sleep side by side before waking early, while it was still cool.

By morning, the house had filled. My mother’s cousins and neighbors joined us; trays, coffee, and bundles of cloth—used to lay couscous grains out to dry in the sun—were passed from hand to hand. Crates of freshly picked tomatoes lined the walls, and huge bags of semolina and flour were stacked nearby. Everyone knew what to reach for—even children. My cousins and I filled basins with water to soak the garlic, knowing it would make it easier to peel.

By the time the first joyous zaghrouta (ululation) resounded through the home, the work had already started. It always began with tkesksiss—the act of making couscous from scratch. Large metal trays and sieves were set out, and the oldest women, their faces marked with Amazigh tattoos, took their place around them, sleeves pushed back, hands already dusted with semolina. Water, flour, a repeated movement—rolling, sieving, gathering, then starting again. Years later, a French friend attended a tkesksiss. She called it la danse des mains—the dance of the hands. There is only one way to learn that dance: you watch, you repeat, you try again. Slowly, it settles somewhere deep, until you no longer have to think about it.

Around us, the courtyard filled with other gestures: tomatoes split and laid out to dry, baklouti peppers—the indigenous variety used for harissa—strung into long garlands, figs opened to the sun.

This is the oula—never just a way of preserving food, but a way of living in step with the seasons: fermenting, drying, distilling, transforming. Even after we moved to France when I was eight years old, we would return to Tunisia every summer to participate in the oula. This matriarchal practice defines Tunisia’s food culture. As much as I see it as poetic, it was born centuries ago out of necessity—it was a way to make provisions for the year ahead, when winter brought scarcity. In the absence of fridges, fermenting, sun-drying, and preserving in salt were the only ways to keep food from spoiling. The practice didn’t fade with the modern age; women across generations have kept it alive.

My mother and I were responsible for mixing and roasting the ingredients for bsissa, a nourishing powder made from roasted barley and pulses, over the clay oven. Making bsissa—a tradition passed down through generations—is an art, yet nothing is measured or written down. When I was younger, the ingredients didn’t make sense to me—the combinations felt unlikely, even wrong. I would question my mother, and she would explain, patiently, why each one mattered.

At that time, I was a wild child, later a rebellious teenager—sneaking out, pushing back against anything that felt assigned to me simply because I was a girl. I felt that girls were being prepared to be good cooks, then good mums, while the boys roamed freely—at the beach, unburdened by such expectations. My mother had conservative expectations of what a “good girl” should be: dainty dresses and good behavior. I was skateboarding with Wu-Tang Clan blasting through my Walkman. Later came cigarettes. It created constant friction between us.

What made it more complicated was that my mother had raised me to be independent. She insisted on good grades, a career, financial autonomy. “Never depend on a man,” she would say. And yet, she was also attentive to the persistent social pressures of the village, where girls were expected to be demure and to know their place. She wanted both for me: freedom and conformity. I resisted the latter with particular force.

And yet, participating in the oula felt different. Those moments, standing side by side, were the only times we didn’t argue. It was in that courtyard that my education in cooking began—though my love for cuisine came much later. The oula was precise, limited, and that drew me in. The gestures stayed with me even when I tried to evade them. My mother had made sure of that.

When I was a student, and my family was living in France, I stopped spending much time in the village—I had internships, other things to do. I remember joking to my mother that she was better off without me there, and that offhandedness led to a more open conversation than we’d ever had. She told me how difficult diaspora life had been for her, and that she wanted to share with me the traditions she loved, the things that kept her close to her family—so that I could inherit them, and carry them on after she was gone.

In France, a country where differences are often expected to fade, the oula was how we held our ground. It showed up in small, everyday ways, like when the mother at a sleepover asked what I at for breakfast and I answered “bread and olive oil”—an answer that puzzled everyone. I remember the reaction, but I never saw how we ate as something to hide. If anything, it made me more determined to hold on to what we did at home. Our kitchen followed a different logic. Peppers hung from the balcony, homemade merguez sausages dried in the open air, trays of caraway seeds were left in the sun to toast. My parents spend more time in Tunisia since retiring, but the routines of how they prepare and keep their food have always remained the same.

I live in London now, but I also follow the same traditions and habits. In markets, I look for produce that still carries the season, for spices that haven’t faded. Everything begins there—the rest comes by instinct. When I cook for friends and family, I don’t measure. In Tunisia, we say: Your eyes are your scale. It carries through in the way I gather people around my table. I often invite guests to look into my cupboards, to smell the ingredients I use.

I’ve turned one of the cupboards into an “oula room.” The products of oula—spices, couscous, preserved vegetables and fruits—move through my cooking not as relics, but as living ingredients, carrying with them the memory of the people who made them.

Hand Me Downs is a series, with a new essay appearing each day through Mother’s Day, celebrating the gifts—tangible and intangible—that our mothers give us.