Making Moroccan Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Making Moroccan Cuisine by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sitting in my Parisian kitchen when Florence was a baby I sipped a Lavazza coffee, I thought of how bored I was with French food seasoned with thyme, bay leaf, and parsley for seasoning – this flavor combo is called bouquet garni.  French grocery stores sell the herbs in mesh bags, so you can easily put it in soup for flavoring.

I thought the dishes listed on Moroccan menus outside restaurant doors in Paris looked good, but Laurent always said the restaurants were too expensive.

I think he wanted me to learn how to cook.  I had some cookbooks in my bookshelves and used Mediterranean Cookery by Claudia Roden to cook Moroccan food.

I perused the pages of Roden’s book and learned about the traditional utensils and finally discovered that the clay pot with a high triangular lid in markets was called a tagine.

Moroccans prepared stews in tagine pots and called the stews, tagines, too.  You have fewer vocabulary words to remember, if a language is structured this way.

I made two tagines.  The first one was called tagine bel hout (fish tagine with tomatoes) and the second was a tagine made with chicken and vegetables.

I used a Moroccan preserved lemon in salt to make a Moroccan, baked fish dish made with lemony, flavored cilantro.  You can buy preserved lemons at the Super Market in France.  Preserved lemons in glass jars give North Africans in France jobs, so I bought them.

To make Moroccan baked fish, I boiled and peeled tomatoes and cut them in thick slices with olive oil all over the bottom of a pan.

I put chopped garlic, cilantro, and a little cayenne with oil between the cod fillets and put them on top of the tomatoes.  More tomatoes went on top of the fish.  Slices of preserved lemon went around the edges.  I baked the dish for 45 minutes after doing all the preparation work.

Laurent does not like preserved lemon, so I retained the technique without that particular ingredient.  I modified this dish when I lived in Stuttgart, Germany to go with the local ingredients of that country.

In Germany, I would place chopped onions on the bottom of a round, baking dish along with dry garlic flakes.  Then, I would place frozen, white or salmon fish fillets on top of the onions.  I placed sliced and peeled potatoes and put them around the edges of the fish.

This looks like a flower.  I put about ¾ cup of olive oil over all of it with some salt.  I covered the dish with a baking lid and baked the fish for one hour in a 500 degree Fahrenheit oven.  My Italian neighbors got the recipe before I left Germany.  I love knowing I started a trend with Calabrians around my building in Stuttgart.

Another Moroccan dish I showed my daughter Florence how to make when I was studying French children’s literature and francophone children’s culture at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin was Moroccan tangerine and walnut salad.  I used a recipe for this dish from Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfert.

The recipe had an exotic name, Shlada Bellecheen.  Basically, you thoroughly clean iceberg lettuce and crisp it in the refrigerator.

When the lettuce is chilled and crisp, you tear it up into bite-sized pieces and spread it out over a platter.  Then, you spread chopped walnuts over the lettuce.  The tangerine sections go around the edges of the plate.  The dressing was simple: lemon, orange-blossom water, and a little sugar.

Our family would eat this once a year on the holidays and put it in a cut blue-and-yellow fish-shaped plate on Thanksgiving.

When my francophone culture class at Edgewood College asked us to do a children’s culture project, I took in this salad as my project.

I told my classmates, “Royal women in Morocco cooked for their families to ensure religious purity.  What that really means is that they wanted to make sure their families were not poisoned.”

The young women in my class laughed.  They already spoke Spanish and had learned to speak French fluently in our French-only class.  They were all going to be French teachers for middle-school and high-school students in Wisconsin.

I also shared with them some more information about the salad, “In Detroit, we say that nuts are meat.  If you combine them with tangerines, which have an ovary around seeds, you are pretty close to having a full-protein according to Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian.

Children like this salad, because of the tangerines and sugar, but you should limit serving it to once a year due to the sugar.  You can certainly adjust the level of sugar you use.

Florence initially did not like this salad, but I think she takes it to work now sometimes.

I have some book recommendations for Moroccan food and general books on the Mediterranean below:

-Couscous and other Good Food from Morocco by Paula Wolfer

-Traditional Moroccan Cooking: Recipes from Fez by Madame Guinaudeau

The following books contain some information on Moroccan food:

-Little Foods of the Mediterranean: 500 Fabulous Recipes for Antipasti, Tapas, Hors d’oeuvre, Meze, and More by Clifford A. Wright

-A Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden

-Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon by Claudia Roden

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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