Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco

ONE

Moroccan Food

There are people, alas, who do not like Moroccan food. More than a century ago a certain Edmondo de Amicis had a dreadful experience in Tangier. He wrote: The Arab dishes, objects of our intense curiosity, began to circulate. I tasted the first with simple faith. Great Heaven! My first impulse was to attack the cook.

I have met people who have tasted couscous at some "couscous joint in Paris and were unimpressed, or who ordered a Moroccan specialty" at a Moroccan hotel and were served a tagine (a stew) consisting mainly of grease. At the Parisian "couscous joint" they were undoubtedly served the Algerian version of that great dish, undeniably robust but about as delicate as a fiery curry. And the friends who suffered at the Moroccan hotel endured an infuriating and disgraceful situation: with less than half a dozen exceptions there is no fine Moroccan restaurant in Morocco; in fact, in the gastronomic capital of Fez it is nearly impossible to find a restaurant that serves even halfway decent Moroccan food.

But those fortunate ones who have dined at a Moroccan home, or attended a Moroccan diaffa (banquet), know what the others have missed. Moroccan food is great, by any definition of that word. It may be the last of the great undiscovered cuisines—a situation I hope this book will remedy.

There are at least four Moroccan dishes (and probably many more) that can be compared, without exaggeration, to such great and unique specialties as the sukiyaki of Japan, Peking duck, bouillabaisse, and paella Valenciana.

First there is couscous, the Moroccan national dish, which Craig Claiborne has called one of the dozen greatest dishes in the world. I have included here recipes for seventeen versions of Moroccan couscous and descriptions of many more. Imagine a platter piled high with fine, light, tender, delicate grains of wheat flour that have been steamed over the broth of a delicately and exotically spiced chicken or lamb and vegetable stew. The grains are served along with the vegetables and meat, and doused with its delicious gravy.

Imagine, too, bastela,* the most sophisticated and elaborate Moroccan dish, a combination of incredibly tasty flavors representing the culmination of all the foreign influences that have found their synthesis in Moroccan culture. Bastela is a huge pie of the finest, thinnest, flakiest pastry in the world, filled with three layers—spicy pieces of pigeon or chicken, lemony eggs cooked in a savory onion sauce, and toasted and sweetened almonds—and then dusted on top with cinnamon and sugar.

And then there is mechoui, the Berber version of roasted lamb. The entire animal is roasted on a spit after the meat has been rubbed with garlic and ground cumin. When cooked the lamb is fully crisped on the outside, and so tender inside that you can eat it easily with your fingers—which, in fact, is the way Moroccans eat.

Or take djej m’sharmel,† one of the four versions of the famous Moroccan chicken, lemon, and olive tagine. The chickens are slowly simmered with soft, luscious olives and tart, preserved lemons in a silken sauce seasoned with saffron, cumin, ginger, and paprika. Like mechoui, the final result is meat that can easily be eaten with the fingers.

I could go on, could describe the exalted heights of shad stuffed with dates; spiced balls of ground lamb simmered in a seasoned tomato sauce in which, at the last minute, eggs have been poached; djej mefenned, braised chicken covered, at the very end, with a delicate coating of eggs; a rich stew of lamb, prunes, and sesame seeds that looks, when served, like a starry night; chickens and squabs stuffed with couscous grains and honey and nuts; Moroccan brochettes; the infinite graces and refreshing tastes of Moroccan salads; gazelles’ horns, crescent-shaped pastries filled with cinnamon-flavored almond paste; and m’hanncha (also known as the snake), a sublime coil of stuffed and browned pastry. The list is endless; I have described only the beginning. What about fresh green barley sprouts grilled with wild herbs and served with cold buttermilk? What about fish simmered with tomatoes and green peppers on a bed of celery or fennel stalks? What about the rich harira soup of chick-peas, vegetables, lemon, eggs and myriad spices? What about zucchini and tomatoes stuffed with delicately spiced ground meats? All these are part of the extraordinary Moroccan cuisine, and there are many more.

The Prerequisites for a Great Cuisine

To my mind four things are necessary before a nation can develop a great cuisine. The first is an abundance of fine ingredients—a rich land. The second is a variety of cultural influences: the history of the nation, including its domination by foreign powers, and the culinary secrets it has brought back from its own imperialist adventures. Third, a great civilization—if a country has not had its day in the sun, its cuisine will probably not be great; great food and a great civilization go together. Last, the existence of a refined palace life—without royal kitchens, without a Versailles or a Forbidden City in Peking, without, in short, the demands of a cultivated court—the imaginations of a nation’s cooks will not be challenged.

Morocco, fortunately, is blessed with all four. In its ever-changing landscape and geographical situation are riches that rival those of France. Situated in the northwest corner of Africa, only a few miles across the straits from Europe, with a Mediterranean coast and an Atlantic coast, with green fertile agricultural belts, five mountain ranges, and encompassing areas of desert, Morocco has every type of environment except tropical jungle. In this small but highly variegated space some of the finest raw ingredients may be found. There are the mint, olives, and quinces of Meknes; the oranges and lemons of Fez and Agadir; the pomegranates of Marrakesh; the almonds, lamb, and za’ atar of the Souss; the dates of Erfoud; the shad of the Sebou River; rosebuds from the Valley of Dades; walnuts, chestnuts, from the Rif; Barbary figs, also known as prickly pears, from the region of Casablanca; the honey of Tagoundaft; the barley of the Dra; the cherries of Sefrou; the melons of the Doukkala; the fish caught by the men of Essaouira; the seafood collected by the men of Safi; and the spices that for thousands of years have been brought to this country, first by Phoenicians, then by Senegalese traders and caravans that crossed North Africa from Arabia, the Sudan, and the Middle East. It is all there—Morocco is, literally, a land of milk and honey.

As for cultural influences, there have been an enormous number. The indigenous culture is Berber, and Berbers still constitute a good 80 percent of the people. (Berbers are not Arabs; ethnically they are Hamites with a suspected Nordic strain* but they embrace Islam, and it is in fact this common religion that holds the country together.)

In 683 Morocco was invaded by Arabs in what the painter-writer Brion Gysin has so aptly called the Damascus Thrust. An Arabian conqueror named Ogba ben Nafi reached Morocco in that year, and his invasion was followed by other waves of Arabs bringing the religion of Islam and the cultural influence of Arabia and the Middle East.

The Arabs, as everyone knows, went on to conquer Spain. Their Spanish empire, known as the Andaluz, founded in 711, produced a great and delicate culture, less strong in terms of military might than the kingdom of Morocco, but perhaps more graceful, excelling in such refinements as the art of courtly love and magnificent architectural feats. (Some of the greatest buildings in Morocco, the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakesh, for example, were designed by Andalusian architects.) For centuries there was cultural exchange between Morocco and Muslim Spain; their reciprocal influences were perhaps as great as the original influence of their Arabian invaders.

Each of the great dynasties of Morocco—the Almoravides, the Almohades, the Merinides, the Saadians, and the Alaouites—included, at one time or another, kings whose power went far beyond the borders of present-day Morocco. Idriss II, the son of an Arabian shrif, founded Fez in the ninth century, and for hundreds of years that city was known as a center of Arab culture. The Almoravides, whose king Yusuf ibn-Tashfin (1061–1106) founded the city of Marrakesh, possessed an empire that encompassed half of Spain, more than half of Algeria, and extended as far south as Senegal. The Saadians were powerful as far south as Timbuktu, and Moulay Ismail (1672–1727), the man who built Meknes, was highly regarded by Louis XIV, with whom he exchanged many letters, including pleas that le Roi Soleil convert to Islam.

Morocco, on account of the invasions of Arabs and the exterior adventures of Moorish kings, was strongly influenced by Middle Eastern culture and the culture of the Andaluz. The Arabs learned culinary secrets from the Persians and brought them to Morocco; from Senegal and other lands south of the Sahara came caravans of spices. Even the Turks made a contribution; though their sixteenth-century North African conquest did not penetrate Moroccan territory, their cultural influence was felt within its borders.

From a culinary point of view these cultural influences can be seen quite well in the three gastronomic centers of the land. In the Berber city of Marrakesh the food is basically Berber, with a Senegalese and African influence. In the Arab city of Fez the cuisine shows the influence of the Andaluz. And in the Andalusian city of Tetuán the Spanish influence is strongest, with some Ottoman traces. Portuguese influence may be found in the cuisine of the Portuguese settlement cities on the Atlantic coast, and here Essaouira, a city of white buildings and blue shutters, became the home of a large Jewish population who worked out their own variations on the national cuisine. The Moroccans picked up tea-drinking from the British traders; and the French, from the forty-four years (1912–1956) of their protectorate, left behind some Gallic touches. There are indeed an enormous number of outside influences—the African spice meets the Andalusian chick-pea, the Saharan date confronts Middle Eastern pastry, Berber butter competes with Spanish oil—and then all merge to become Moroccan food.

The greatness of Moroccan culture? This nation had its days when its influence radiated thousands of miles from Fez, a city that was preeminent in theology, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and metallurgy when Europe was deep in the Middle Ages. Fez was an Athens, a city of enormous vitality and refinement, and Moroccan knowledge of agriculture and irrigation (Marrakesh is basically a huge grove of palms, an enormous man-made oasis) made Spain flourish. In fact, after the fall of Granada and the final expulsion of the Moslems from Spain in 1492, Spanish agriculture began to suffer a reversal.

The high culture of Fez was developed in parallel with the rich folk culture that had strong Berber origins: that mad charge of horsemen known as the fantasia; Berber trance-dancing; the great Berber pilgrimages (moussems), which are today important tourist attractions; folk music and poetry; and the basic cuisine of the mountains and plains.

This cuisine would certainly be worthy of attention even on its peasant level, but, as developed in the kitchens of the royal palaces of Fez, Meknes, Marrakesh, and Rabat (the four royal cities), it reached summits of perfection. The Moroccan dynasties always originated in powerful warlike tribes, whose leaders, as soon as they obtained power, were quickly refined. Thus the Saadians, who came from the pre-Saharan Valley of the Dra, were transformed from primitive tribesmen into regal monarchs, their tombs in Marrakesh being among the most lavishly decorated in all Morocco. (The garden of these tombs, by the way, is filled with a glorious ambrosia, the result of high, thick hedges of rosemary.) In the same way, in our own time Thami el Glaoui, whose power rivaled and sometimes exceeded the power of the sultan, was transformed from a feudal warlord of the High Atlas stronghold of Telouet, into the pasha of Marrakesh; friend of Winston Churchill, he dealt with premiers and presidents of France, and moved, in the latter half of his long, ruthless, and now generally discredited life, in the most civilized and refined international circles.

These monarchs and lords, as soon as they learned to entertain in regal style, began to make great demands upon their chefs to produce some of the great cosmopolitan specialties of Morocco. A case in point is bastela, which had humble origins in a simple Berber dish of chicken cooked with saffron and butter. It was combined with the primitive Arab pastry called trid, enhanced when later Arabs brought the fine art of Persian pastry making to Morocco, and was further embellished with Andalusian ideas until it became the bastela we know today.

People still speak with awe of the food served in the king’s house. One hears rumors of mounds of pigeons each differently stuffed, flowing to diners on golden platters and then being whisked away, only to be replaced by equally luxurious foods. Meknes, a royal city conceived like Versailles as a place devoted to court life, was where much of modern Moroccan cooking reached its final form.

Moroccan Cooking—A Shared Heritage

Unlike her American or French counterpart, a young Moroccan girl, recently married, cannot go to a bookstore and find a text that will teach her how to cook. This cuisine has not been codified; there is no Moroccan culinary establishment, no Moroccan equivalent of the Cordon Bleu. The cuisine developed in the kitchens of the palaces is found throughout the land in less luxurious forms.

It is not surprising that nearly all Moroccan cooks are women, for cooking is considered woman’s work, and a Moroccan wife spends much of her time preparing food. The cooking knowledge that is passed from mother to daughter, mother-in-law to daughter-in-law, is also shared in another way. When a family feasts, the female relatives and neighbors will come and help with the work. This constant cross-fertilization, this sharing of culinary knowledge, has kept the culinary art alive in a country where the number of literate people is extremely low. A person who cannot read or write, who cannot note things down or find knowledge in books, must develop his memory to an extraordinary degree.

The Philosophy of Abundance

There is a fine Moroccan restaurant in Marrakesh, called La Maison Arabe, which has sometimes been called one of the greatest restaurants in the world. I think this is an exaggeration, but I cannot deny that La Maison Arabe, run by Madame Larochette, whose dishes are prepared in accordance with the methods of the legendary Rhadija of the household of the Glaoui, is probably the best Moroccan restaurant in the world. The food is always fabulous at La Maison Arabe—I have never failed to eat extremely well there—but there is something about this famous restaurant that I do not like. Though the food and decor are Moroccan the spirit is not. One is served, for quite an extravagant price, only as much as one can eat. If you are four people you will get sufficient food for four. The philosophy is French middle class—parsimonious, rigid, and austere. (Once when I asked for a second glass of mint tea I was told that the kitchen was closed, and, besides, the house was out of mint.) This is not the way a dinner in a Moroccan home is served. The thing that is missing at La Maison Arabe is the philosophy of abundance.

Arab hospitality is legendary—an embarrassment of riches, total satisfaction, abundance as an end in itself and as a point of pride for the host. At a Moroccan diaffa (banquet) so much food is served that you can’t imagine who is expected to eat it. Dish after dish is offered, each piled high. After a few bits, if there are many courses—and at a grand diaffa there can easily be as many as a dozen—these platters will be whisked away. To puritans like us this may all seem vulgar, ostentatious, showy, and chauvinistic. To Moroccans it is the essential requisite of a feast.

At my first few diaffas I worried about these barely touched, high-piled platters going to waste. Later I learned the truth, that not a speck of them would be wasted, for the kitchen was filled with people—women, children, relatives, servants—all of whom would finish off every crumb.

Moroccans have large, healthy appetites; perhaps it takes them longer to achieve that state of total satisfaction which they call shabaan. The fact that after an entrée of bastela or an array of salads, or both, a mechoui, a succession of tagines (chicken, lamb, and fish), and an enormous platter of couscous, there still remain a dessert of fruits and nuts to be devoured and then some glasses of mint tea to be drunk strikes many foreigners as decadently lavish. But even in a poor house such an abundance of culinary riches can be presented when the occasion warrants, because the vegetables vastly outweigh the meat in tagines; the sauce is always what counts, and the lack of expensive ingredients goes unnoticed.

Nineteenth-century foreign travelers to Morocco have described some incredible dinners. Walter Harris, a correspondent for the London Times around the turn of the century, wrote of a dinner in Marrakesh at which he was served with seventy-seven different dishes (he selected only fifteen to try). A certain Dr. Leared, who wrote a book entitled Visit to the Court of Marocco [sic], told of a dinner given by the prime minister at which he was served thirty dishes of meat and poultry, twelve salads, and thirty-two sweetmeats.

Here is an extremely verbose description from a nineteenth-century book about Moroccan cuisine that may give some notion of the Moroccan sense of culinary abundance:

Now the Moorish paradise is a glutton’s dream. Its soil, of whitest wheaten flour, is irrigated by rivulets of milk and wine and honey. The musical branches of the immeasureable tuba tree, which adorns the celestial palace-garden of the Prophet of Islam, are laden with exquisite fruits, and ready-dressed banquets of thrice a hundred courses in golden dishes, such as the Slave of the Lamp served up to Aladdin. In short the haven of the Moor is an elysium wrought out of a pastry-cook’s shop and a harem where the existence of the blessed will be one eternal guzzling-bee, somewhat similar to Sydney Smith’s description of the future state of beatified epicures—"the eating of pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets." No wonder therefore that the Moor’s summum bonum here and hereafter is repose and abundance.*

Moroccan hospitality is notorious for its flourishes and sweet suffusion, well conveyed in this nineteenth-century dinner invitation:†

To my gracious master, my respected lord. . . . This evening, please God, when the King of the army of stars, the sun of the worlds, will turn toward the realm of shades and place his foot in the stirrup of speed, thou art besought to lighten us with the dazzling rays of thy face, rivalled only by the sun. Thy arrival, like a spring breeze, will dissapate the dark night of solitude and isolation.

After sending out an invitation like that the host was virtually obligated to serve a great succession of exquisite courses.

I have noted that the Moroccan banquet bears a curious and striking resemblance to the Chinese. First, the dining process is communal—many people crowd around a circular table and serve themselves from central dishes. In China the last dish before dessert is always rice; in Morocco it is couscous, another and perhaps more fanciful grain. In both countries the number of courses can go very high, and it is a point of pride for the host to offer his guests as many different things as he can. Each cuisine plays games with its diners’ palates, playing off salty against sweet against spicy, and varying the textures of successively offered dishes so that the diner will experience a full range of culinary pleasures. Each also ends its meals with what is basically a ceremony of tea.

There is another resemblance in the actual cooking process, discussed more fully in Chapter 6; the pastry for bastela, called warqa, is made precisely the same as the dough for Chinese spring rolls—a method of pastry making unique to these two regions of the world. But the two cuisines differ in their basic ways of preparing food. The key to the preparation of a Moroccan tagine (stew) with its spices and accompanying vegetables and fruits is long, slow simmering in a shallow, glazed earthenware pot. In the city of Tetuán there is a saying that food should be cooked until it is standing in the sauce. The great amount of spices naturally gives Moroccan food a piquant flavor, but not, usually, a spicy-hot one. Your tongue and lips will not be burned, as they would be by the hotter types of Chinese food, such as Szechuan, or those from India or Korea.

An old book on Andalusian cooking describes this process so well that it might well be describing the Moroccan tagine-simmering method itself:

The philosophy of the Spanish [i.e., Moroccan] cuisine is strictly oriental—it is the stew or pilaf. The prima materia on which the artist is to operate is quite secondary; scarcity of wood and ignorance of coal prevent roasting; accordingly sauce is everything; this may be defined to be unctuous, rich, savory, and highly spiced. . . .*

How to Eat Moroccan Food

With the exception of couscous (which is sometimes eaten with a spoon) Moroccans eat with the first three fingers of their right hands. This is in the tradition of the Arabs, who always, before they dine, go through an elaborate hand-washing process. At a Moroccan dinner a servant or a young member of the family assists each diner by holding a basin beneath his hands, pouring water over them, and then offering him a towel from an extended arm.

Bread is very important in Moroccan dining, both as food and as an implement for grasping hold of meat or vegetables, swirling them in the gravy of a tagine, and then transporting them to the mouth. Moroccan bread, being highly absorbent, is also ideal for sopping up the savory juices.

Bryan Clarke, in his book Berber Village, describes the folklore of eating with the fingers: To eat with one finger is a sign of hatred; to eat with two shows pride; to eat with three accords with the Prophet; to eat with four or five is a sign of gluttony.

Though couscous is sometimes eaten with a spoon, any self-respecting Moroccan will eat his national dish with his fingers—a difficult process for an unschooled foreign visitor. A nineteenth-century travel writer described this process miraculously well:

With the points of the fingers of the right hand a portion of grains is drawn towards the side of the dish. It is fingered as the keys of a pianoforte till it gathers together; it is then taken up into the hand, shaken, pressed till it adheres, moulded till it becomes a ball; tossed up and worked till it is perfect, and then shot by the thumb, like a marble, into the open mouth.*

However, such delicacy has not always been observed. A very old book entitled Account of Barbary, published in 1713, contains the following passage:

When he (the Sultan) is intent upon a piece of work, or eager to have it finished, he won’t allow himself to go to his meals, but orders some of his eunuchs or negroes to bring him a dish of kuscoussoo [couscous], which he sits down and eats after a brutish manner; for as soon as he has rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, he thrusts his arms into the dish up to his elbows, and bringing a handful from the bottom he fills his mouth, and then throws the rest into the dish again, and so on till he is satisfied.

A Moroccan meal is best eaten in a traditional dining room, which also doubles for receptions. The walls are lined with luxuriously cushioned divans and a circular table is set up in a corner. After the meal, for the serving and drinking of mint tea, the diners will spread out and lounge on the divans so they can stretch their legs.

Some Moroccan families cover their table with a piece of opaque plastic and simply throw bones and other inedible bits right onto the table. Afterwards the servants simply roll up this plastic sheet—bones, garbage, and all—and carry it away.

All of this may sound barbaric—no pun intended on the word Berber, from which the word barbarian originally comes—but it is actually an extremely sensible way to eat, ranking with Chinese chopsticks and Indian hands and fingers, and opposed to the decadence of using all sorts of silver utensils. I find that Moroccan food always tastes better when eaten Moroccan style—the contact between fingers and a hot tagine, fingers and a crisp bastela, fingers and a tender mechoui, always adds to the pleasure—and I urge everyone to eat a Moroccan dinner this way. It is sensible, too, in that there will be far fewer dishes to wash, since the cooking vessels (earthenware tagine slaouis) double as serving platters and communal plates.

I also urge everyone to make Moroccan bread. It is not at all difficult enhances Moroccan food enormously, and makes eating with the fingers pleasureful and tasty.

Moroccan Regional Specialties

Moroccan food is more or less homogenous; the country is unified, and its cuisine is distinct, even from the other two countries of the Maghreb, Algeria and Tunisia. But, like all countries with great cuisines, Morocco has its regional specialties.

The three great gastronomic capitals, Fez, Tetuán and Marrakesh, have developed their own variations of particular dishes, as well as some dishes that are special and unique. And considering its modest size, Essaouira must also be thought of as a great city of food, as, to a lesser degree, should Tangier, Safi, and Rabat. But it is in the regions of Morocco—the Rif Mountains of the north; the Middle Atlas area, which is totally Berber; the Souss in the southwest; and the pre-Sahara—that one finds the most spectacular differences and inventions in food.

The pre-Sahara and the outlying oases are a little harder to get to than Fez or Marrakesh, but they are among the most fascinating places in Morocco, and anyone who has the chance should visit them. In the farthest reaches, wandering Arab tribesmen not only eat camel, but also gazelle and hedgehogs, jackals and desert foxes, which they serve with simple, flat loaves of bread made from Indian millet, wheat, or barley. In some parts of Morocco there is even a bread made with locusts!

The people of the Souss are hard working, and they have huge appetites. There is a tree that grows only in their area, the argan, that produces a nut from which a delicious oil is extracted and then used in various foods. The hamburger of the Souss is asidah, a pyramid of cornmeal mush served in a wide, shallow wooden dish with a knob of fresh butter on top. Here, too, you may have a chance to eat the famous bluefish, or the tiny, delicious bird called the ehyell.

Baraka

Finally, a word about one of the most mysterious things in Morocco—a land, by the way, that according to many of its inhabitants is inhabited by numerous spirits and supernatural powers—a kind of magic called baraka. Baraka, according to those who know, is the power to multiply food. Thus a person with baraka can live on very little; if