Taste of Morocco

"If we’re travelling anti-clockwise we should head to Morocco . The great thing about Moroccan food is that you can go off and do your own thing once you’ve learned a bit about it. You can make up your own versions because the spices and colours are so enchanting. With Moroccan food, I always go back to Robert Carrier. There’s a very beautiful illustrated edition of the book. You turn over a couple of pages and you can’t wait to start cooking. You feel you’re going to be able to conjure up all this magic and colour from it. That’s true. But the publishers will get around to that eventually! The other thing about Robert Carrier is that he makes it manageable. Many ‘ethnic’ cookbooks are so complicated. My pet hate is when they tell you to take a portion of a recipe from one page and use it with a recipe from another. In the end, you give up. The fact that you have a lot of lamb and chicken but also a lot of fruit. And the spices are slightly different from the Middle East. But the main thing is the sensation of the fruit and nuts with the meat protein. You don’t really get that with European food. One of my favourite recipes from the Carrier book is his version of harira soup – the lentil broth Muslims drink during Ramadan. This soup is also alluded to in the Old Testament. Esau is said to have ‘sold his birthright for a mess of potage’, which always fascinated me when I was young. In Italian we call it un piatto di lenticchie . Many Muslim communities have different versions of harira . But Robert Carrier’s is probably the first version I made. The lentils, ginger, saffron and other spices take on a completely different character. It’s a meat soup, made with pieces of lamb and a meat stock. But you can do a vegetarian version. The dishes in some of his other books are certainly the things that people would eat in restaurants in those days: steak diane or something like that. But he had a house in Morocco and lived there, so this particular book feels different."