Making Moroccan
Couscous by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My
usual dining fare when I lived in Paris (France) for seven years was French
food. My no-surprises dinner routine
came to a halt when one of my childhood friends gave me a cookbook called Mediterranean Food by Claudia Roden,
which was a tie-in book for a BBC series the author hosted on the same topic.
I
perused the pages of Mediterranean
Cookery and discovered the subtly spiced cuisine and culture of the North
African country of Morocco. I loved
Roden’s section on traditional cooking utensils and finally discovered that the
clay pot with a triangular lid I had seen in markets was called a tagine.
The
stew made in a tagine was also called a tagine I learned from Roden. I thought one word for two different things
made language learning easy.
I
read through the recipes and made preserved lemons with and salt and used them
to flavor a fish and tomato tagine.
My
husband Laurent wanted a savory tagine, so I next tried a tagine chicken stew
flavored with cinnamon, ginger, and saffron served over the tiny pasta called
couscous. He thought that was divine. It certainly smells good when you lift the
tagine cover.
When
we came back to the US, a bookseller recommended Paula Wolfert’s cookbook Couscous and Other Good Foods from Morocco to
me to practice my Moroccan cooking skills in Madison, Wisconsin. I could buy the ingredients in a university
town with no problem in the 1990s.
I
used Wolfert’s cookbook to make a Moroccan-inspired salad of torn iceberg
lettuce leaves with cashews strewn on top of them and tangerine sections
surrounding the salad. I use
orange-blossom water to make a dressing for this salad that makes Wisconsin
winters feel warm.
The
cashews and tangerine sections seem to be a nut and seed protein
combination. The tangerine flesh surrounds
seeds, so I thought I had made a sweet tasting sirloin steak. (I need Purdue University’s chemical
engineers to weight in on that judgment, but the salad tastes good in any
case.)
I
still love cookbooks that list pantry items, provide photos of ingredients used
in the recipes, and provide drawings of traditional cooking items used in other
cultures. I feel I can stay at home yet
travel with cookbooks like these.
The
following cookbooks about Morocco might encourage you to try some of the dishes
from this country:
Mediterranean Cookery by Claudia Roden
The Food of Morocco by Paula Wolfert
Couscous and Other Good
Food from Morocco by
Paula Wolfert
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
