Learning about Moroccan Culture through its Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Raymond A. Sokolov coined the word “gastroethnography” to describe a method of examining a society in his book Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats.
Gastroethnography proposes the study of another culture through the preparation of its food, food items that are worthy to be eaten, table etiquette, geography, and historical events.
Who prepares meals and in what situation gives us ideas about social organization. In the article “Une Odeur de Sainteté” by Mohammed Kacimi El-Hassani, readers can see that traditionally in wealthy Moroccan families, it was always the female family members who prepared meals and not servants. Female family members ensured that that foods were made with fresh ingredients to prevent food poisoning. Cooking allows many women to express creativity as well.
This creativity comes after a long apprenticeship in the kitchen that begins early. Moroccan cuisine requires many hands to reduce spices and nuts into powder, for example. The wealth of able hands challenges the need for food processors, and purists say that ingredients prepared by hand taste better. Measuring cups and recipe books are rare in the traditional Moroccan kitchen.
Ingredients for meals come from Morocco’s Saharan climate up to its sea coasts. Moroccans traditionally like to mix different flavors in their dishes, and it is easy to see this tendency in their national dishes described by Claudia Roden in her book Mediterranean Cookery: Moroccon tagines are stews cooked with meat and fruits usually; Couscous features a tagine with steamed small pasta; and Bisteeya, a pigeon pie decorated with patterns made by cinnamon.
The etiquette around a Moroccan meal is characterized by hospitality. Visitors are offered many dishes that must demonstrate shaban, or abundance. Diners who eat in the traditional manner use the three first fingers of the right hand along with bread to bring food to their mouths. At the end of the meal, Claudia Roden writes in Mediterranean Cookery that diners drink three glasses of mint tea.
This refined cuisine and its meal ritual are born out of the combination of geography and history. Morocco only lacks arctic regions and tropical rain forests to offer its inhabitants a wide range of food products. From a historical standpoint, Moroccan cuisine has benefitted from three important periods – the Arab immigrations in the seventh century; the Kingdom of Andalusia in what is today’s Spain, and the Columbian Exchange that brought New World products to the Mediterranean and beyond such as peppers and tomatoes.
Good cookbooks can be a first foray into a foreign cuisine, if you cannot learn from cooks of a particular culture like that of Morocco. The best cookbooks tend to be information packed, contain photos of processes not only finished products if they are included, and attempt to provide recipes for people from all levels of society. Some of the best cookbooks around, by the way, have no photos or images in them. These seem to be the kind of cookbooks that home cooks cherish.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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