Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/981116
1 9 June 2018 SNACKING NEWS BY ROBIN MATHER In Bath, Maine, a woman from Montreal, Canada, has slipped away from her friends' house to take a walk through the city's quaint downtown. Protected from the piercing cold in parka, scarf and hand-knit toque, she pauses on her solitary stroll to gaze at the display of stoneware backed by brilliant yellow panels in the kitchen store's window. Winter is long in these parts. Her eye has grown used to its muted hues of gray and white and brown. In this bleak landscape, with its abbreviated days and long nights, the stoneware's riotous colors and intricate patterns vi- brate with energy, excitement and the gifts of the sun. One piece in particular transfixes her. Something about the pitcher's intense shades of azure and lime green and cobalt, its depiction of leaping fish with flaring fins, floods her heart with joy. She imagines that if she held it near her ear, she would hear the sound of the sea. She forgets that her feet have grown so cold that she can no longer feel them. She fails to notice the fat flakes of falling snow col- lecting on her collar. She's been hit with what she, a French speaker, might call a coup de foudre — the thunderbolt that we call love at first sight. She wasn't shopping, let alone shopping for a pitcher. She doesn't really need a pitcher. But she must have that pitcher! Inside the store, called Now You're Cooking, she asks to see it. Owner Mike Fear plucks the pitcher from the dis- play and places it into her hands. He tells her that the pitcher comes from a company called Le Souk Ce- ramique, that its pattern is called Aqua Fish, and that it was hand-made and hand-painted in Tunisia. She caresses the pitcher's rounded belly, feels its heft, slips her fingers through its accommodating handle. She envisions it filled with sangria, or freshly squeezed or- ange juice. Reluctantly, she turns the pitcher over to look at the price. Her eyebrows rise in surprise and delight. It's far less expensive than she expected it to be. "Yes," she says. "Yes, I'll take it." The pitcher, were it as vibrantly alive as it looks, would welcome the warm hands that cradle it. Dozens of hands shared in its cre- ation, thousands of miles from Maine. But that was months ago and it has missed the human touch. It knows it was made to serve. In her poem "To Be of Use," Marge Piercy writes of the universal need for worthwhile labor: "The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real." "The Aqua Fish pattern has been my favorite for many years," Mike says, who adds that his store draws a number of Canadian customers. "Its stylized fish are a natural for the coast of Maine, but even without my retailer's perspec- tive, Aqua Fish speaks to me." Le Souk's stoneware has three things going for it, Mike says. "It's a beautiful line, a functional line and it's a well-priced line. Hav- ing those three attributes makes it a natural for us. Nobody else can touch it." When Mike and Betsy Fear opened Now You're Cooking's doors in 2000, "We got off to a really good start with all the basics in kitchen gadgets, cookware, cutlery, bakeware, linens and tabletop. But our dinnerware and serving pieces were mostly a utilitarian white. We needed something in that department with pizzazz. We saw a lot of fabulous Euro- pean pieces, but were a little intimidated by their price," Mike says. "After a couple of years, we found (Le Souk Founder) Doug Littrel at the International Home + Housewares Show in Chicago, and we immediately felt this would be a great addition to our store. Sixteen years later, we feel no different. Our purchaser Joan Cook, who designed that window, has a great relationship with Doug — she's a big fan of the company, and she and Doug always get together for dinner at IH+HS." Now You're Cooking's customers apparently share Mike and Joan's affection for Le Souk Ceramique. "In the early days, I saw Le Souk's products fill much more the decorative niche — I especially love the big platters; they're so big and vibrant and they demand that the cus- tomers look at and admire them. But today our customers are taking it for everyday dinnerware, too," he says. "If food can be enhanced by presentation, Le Souk's dinner- ware or serveware will make any dinner party a gour- mand's dream!" Le Souk Céramique Artisanal Tunisian Stoneware Continued on Page 20 brings fair trade to The desire to create work that is real, that creates durable joy, drives Doug, who founded Le Souk Ce- ramique in 1997 with his friend, the late renowned Tunisian potter Lotfi Zine. Le Souk Ceramique's Aqua Fish design, the one that captured the Canadian cus- tomer's heart, is one of a dozen patterns in the company's hand-painted stoneware line. The company's little sister, Le Souk Olivique, crafts bowls, servers and kitchen tools from Tunisian olive wood and was founded in 2014. Here in the States, Le Souk is headquartered in Clinton, Wash- ington, on Whidbey Island. Its Tunisian studios are in Nabeul, a seaside city about the same size as Scranton, Pennsylvania, which shares Scranton's industrial character. When Doug and Lotfi decided to form Le Souk, their friendship was grounded in two powerful forces. Lotfi was a true artist, driven by his need to create. Long before he died in 2002, the United Nations had sent him in the early '80s to Kinshasa in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo but then was called Zaire. The U.N. wanted Lotfi to open a ceramics studio there. Doug, 12 years younger, was still a teenager when he lived in Kinshasa with his diplomat father at the same time. He didn't meet Lotfi during their time in the sprawl- ing city of 11 million, but their shared knowledge of Africa's third-largest city created a bond between the dark-haired Tunisian and the strawberry blond American when they met by chance in Lotfi's mud-garage studio in 1997. The meeting came at a pivotal moment in Doug's life. As a U.S. State Department diplomat, he had followed his father into the Foreign Service. He'd done develop- ment work in Mauritania, then and still one of the world's poorest countries. By 1997, he had been reassigned to Tunis after witnessing the horrors of an internecine civil war between the government and Islamist rebels while sta- tioned in Algiers, Algeria, in 1996 and 1997. Observers came to call it "the dirty war," and the coun- try saw "extreme violence and brutality used against The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is per- haps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole. — Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"