Beldi means local. In Morocco it means one specific object: the thick, slightly irregular glass you are handed in every café in the country, the one your parents drank from before you did.
It started in Casablanca in 1946. The glass is 100% recycled — bottles and flat glass collected around the city, re-melted in a furnace that runs up to 1,600 °C. Nothing is added: the green is the glass, the blue is the glass, the brown is the glass. Then a man puts a pipe to his mouth and blows.
Fifteen minutes a glass. That is the number that stays with me. Not fifteen seconds, not a mould on a line — a quarter of an hour of a person's breath, per piece. A ridge near the top, made in the turning; small bubbles caught in the wall where the furnace did not quite let go. Two glasses from the same batch are never identical, and the difference is not a defect. It is the record of the making.
When we first saw it sold, it was by the kilo, wrapped in newspaper. That is how ordinary it was: the glass of the café, of the kitchen, of the nous-nous — half coffee, half milk — and of the tea tray.
The craft nearly went. The factory we knew had run for years without making money, and it closed. What saved the skill, in part, was transmission: the glassblowers learned from one another, and the technique came down through exchanges with Italian glassmakers who worked alongside them. A mouth-blown object survives only as long as the hands that know how to blow it.
We buy the beldi glass because of that, and for what it does on a table. It is not delicate. It carries colour better than crystal. And it is one of the very few objects in a modern house that is genuinely made from what the city threw away.