Enticing Spices and Blended Culinary Cultures Set Morocco's Cuisine Apart

by Judith H. Dern

Smell, taste, touch, and see. All four senses will be enchanted when discovering Moroccan cuisine. And if food is a door to discovering new cultures, as I've delightedly discovered on two visits, the door is wide open in this fascinating country.

Start with fragrant spices encountered while walking through a souk. At a riad, local restaurant or your own cooking class, taste tender, tagine-roasted chicken, fish, duck, or lamb; freshly prepared carrot or eggplant salads, while you enjoy flakey leaves of pastry holding the savory filling of a chicken b'stilla (authentically made using pigeon, but chicken works well), savor platefuls of couscous, along with bites of freshly baked, warm-from-the-oven khobz flatbread, and sip sweet mint tea. One mouthful of any dish and you'll want more, because every taste delights the senses. All are examples of Morocco's cross-cultural culinary magic.

If food reveals a country's history and traditions to enhance a vibrant culture, exploring the cuisine of the kingdom of Morocco offers discoveries in every dimension. This happens from your first walk wandering the hallways of a souk, the covered street markets where food vendors offer their wares ranging from colorful pyramids of spices to mountains of olives and dates and stacked jars of glistening preserved lemons, where flat loaves of khobz bread are baking and ready to take home still warm, and where handmade pottery for cooking tagines entices cooks. Without question, from city to city, each with its own distinct dishes, the fragrances, sights, and tastes of Moroccan cuisine are guaranteed captivating.

The delights of Moroccan cuisine can be traced to the multiple intersecting cultures of this North African country. First are the original indigenous Berber tribes with many of this population still making homes in mountain caves. Farmers and herdsmen, for centuries they have lived across all North Africa, from Egypt westward to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Berber cooking traditions bestowed Morocco with couscous, along with savory one-pot stews called tagines, which are cooked stovetop in a special ceramic dish also called a tagine.

Add the culinary contributions of other nomadic cultures from North Africa and Europe and the resulting mix is sophisticated, fresh, fragrant, and delicious. From roaming Bedouins, to Arabs arriving from the seventh to the 14th centuries and instilling Islamic culinary customs, to the Ottomans and Moorish invaders from Spain, plus Sephardic Jewish and, most recently, Syrian refugees, and it's easy to see why Moroccan cuisine expanded even further. Each group brought its traditional dishes, taking advantage of local resources and adding to the country's culinary kaleidoscope of tastes and textures.

To these influences, add another from Europe, one connected to the French occupation of Morocco from the early 1900s until 1956. During this colonization period, French residents introduced café culture, grape growing and wine making, baguettes and croissants, soups and seafood, plus their relaxed lifestyle. It's a mix mingling still with today's modern, Arabic Morocco.

For this diverse blend of culinary cultures to mingle and thrive, Morocco's verdant landscape and hospitable climate are unquestionably an essential foundation. From abundant sunshine to rich soil, the country's North African location offers ideal resources for growing small crops and fruits, and raising animals used in many dishes. It's a landscape abundant with green growing orchards of oranges and lemons, date groves, vineyards, and small farms seen while exploring the countryside, all signaling of platefuls of deliciousness waiting to be discovered. Don't hesitate to come visit and grab a fork and a handful of just-baked khobz flatbread. Mint tea will be poured in elegant silver-handled mugs and served wherever you stop.