Moroccan essentials - then and now

"Morocco is a land of milk and honey - except that the milk is often buttermilk, and the honey sold on the streets of Marrakech can be just a mix of melted sugar and water. In a land of magic, not everything is what it seems." Robert Carrier

The last of my Christmas

cookbook bonanza for now is one I have been trying to get hold of for a very long time, so thank you so much Bryn for the gift. I couldn't quite squeeze it all on to my scanner but almost.

Carrier was American but spent most of his life in England except for a ten year patch when he more or less moved to Morocco - specifically Marrakech, took up painting and produced this book, largely it seems to boost his income.

And I have to say that it was a mildly surprising book, mostly because of its apparent authenticity.

Some of the recipes are really a bit complicated and lots of them feature unappetising things like offal of all kinds. His descriptions of the feasts and the customs are also surprising in that, in many ways, not a lot seems to have changed over the centuries. Including the food. In one section he describes how he went to great lengths to install a charcoal grill at western cooking height in his kitchen, but his cook nevertheless preferred to squat on the ground with her own rather humbler brazier. I was also struck by how little impact the French seem to have had on the culture and food of the country, considering that they were its rulers for some time. He seems to think the French influence is really only noticeable in hotels and restaurants where there is a cheese course, an entrée and a dessert - none of which are traditionally Moroccan. The cultural exchange seems to have been all the other way with the modern influence of couscous and the older introduction of such things as eggplant into France by the Arabs.

So to pay tribute to the book I thought I would talk about what he sees as the essentials of Moroccan cuisine - as interpreted and remembered by me.

Some of the elements are the same as the Persian essentials I talked about previously - saffron and fruit for one. Like the Persians they often use fruit with meat - the now very well-known tagines are famous for this. But the other ones he mentions are preserved lemons, lemons themselves, coriander, parsley, cumin and red peppers - hot and mild. So similar but not quite the same. And it is very, very noticeable that the vast majority of the recipes in this book have at least one of these 'essentials' in them.

And these ingredients pop up in the trinity of spice mixes that is Morocco (well I think they are common across all of Mediterranean Africa) - chermoula, harissa and ras-el-hanout. And you can now, almost, get all of these in your local supermarket. You can certainly get what is called a Moroccan spice mix. For Moroccan food is very popular and really we do have to credit Robert Carrier for being the person to make it so. In Europe anyway. Of course, lots of others have jumped on the bandwagon and lots of native Moroccan and Arab chefs have also added to our knowledge and expertise, but really he is the one who started it all.

I decided I would look at his chermoula mix and compare it with others by Claudia Roden and Greg Malouf as well as his own more recent version. An interesting exercise. They are all similar but not - Greg Malouf, for example has none of the fresh herbs which actually make up a substantial part of Carrier's - and which I prefer because of that. Indeed I think when I have made it I have used his recipe, because he published it again in his New Great Dishes of the World as one of his 'new basics'. And the ingredients are pretty much the same - no they are the same, he has just slightly adjusted the quantities - a bit more heat for example. And isn't it interesting that in the 90s when he published this second version he would consider it a 'basic'. Harissa and ras-el-hanout too I might add. Here is his recipe. You mostly use it for fish and for chicken.

1 large sweet onion, finely chopped, 4 small or 2 large cloves garlic, finely chopped, 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin, 1/4 teaspoon sweet paprika, 1/2 teaspoon cayenne,

1/2 packet saffron threads, 6 tablespoons finely chopped fresh coriander, 6 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley, 6 tablespoons olive oil, juice of 1/2 lemon, salt. Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl.

The purpose of chermoula he says is, "not to mask the natural taste of the food but to enhance it. As the seasonings dissolve in the evaporating liquid of a tagine, for instance, during its long, slow cooking, they blend intimately with the food. Pan juices are then reduced over a high heat to complete the blending of flavours and oils, and spooned lovingly over the food to be served." These words are taken from the later New Great Dishes of the World, but they are actually the exact same words as used in A Taste of Morocco. He was ever a bit of a cheat like this - some of his recipes, for example pop up in a number of his books.

"The actor in Robert Carrier saw that surface mattered, so long as it convinced." Tom Paine

I gather he began working as an actor before eventually getting into cooking via public relations and food journalism. He was never formally trained - like Elizabeth David. All the training he had was by working for his beloved mentor Fifine in St. Tropez. And here in Morocco he seems to have learnt from his cooks, from his friends and from restaurateurs. But he was obviously a great observer and en enthusiastic student and seemed to derive great pleasure from passing this on to the world.

"While middle-class arbiters of British taste have always handed the palme d'or of postwar culinary revolution to Elizabeth David and her disciples, it was the showman, the publicist, the camp outsider Carrier who broadened the appeal of fancy foreign food and cookery into something that might be said to have been actually revolutionary - as radical, perhaps, for British mores as the contraceptive pill or the Beatles." Tom Paine - The Guardian

I also compared his then and now recipe for a chicken tagine with olives and preserved lemons, and again the recipes are more or less exactly the same, except the original is authentically called Chicken mqualli with olives and preserved lemons and the latter is Tagine of chicken with preserved lemon. By the 90s the term tagine had become very popular and tagine dishes were available for sale everywhere. I bought mine in Aldi!

And it's also worth comparing the presentation, both on the table and in the book. The picture at right is from A Taste of Morocco whose photographs frequently feature Moroccan artefacts in the background. And below is the more modern version - a succulent close-up of the food itself, which is not quite so artfully displayed - or is it? Is it just a different kind of artfulness?

And now I see that we still have a bit of the Moroccos artefact vibe, but not as much, and the presentation is rather more haphazard. It's exactly the same dish people.

I'm afraid I won't be cooking some of the things in this book - like brain salad or tagine of baby camel or gazelle, but there are a whole lot more that I will try. And I've already cooked the chicken tagine at left a few times. And very delicious it is.

For he is so good at making the exotic approachable, and fun. And I was one of the people described by Tom Jaine in his obituary of Carrier.

"His was the cooking that launched a million dinner parties: the great engine of British social change during the 1960s." Tom Jaine

His recipes, I find anyway, never fail as some other cooks' recipes do - Stephanie Alexander for example. And I do like Elizabeth David and have been heavily influenced by her too, and let's not forget Jane Grigson, Claudia Roden, Madhur Jaffrey, Delia Smith ... However, I really do think that this book was very probably one of the great game-changers in terms of introducing Western Europe and then the world to the wonderful food of Morocco. And in spite of what they say I also think that he is very, very authentic - camel, gazelle?

"The upper echelons of foodiedom were always a little sniffy about Bob Carrier - authenticity was not a word that sprung immediately to their mind or his lips. But he did more to change people's attitudes to food than many a more serious-minded cookery writer, and he knew the great secret that food is fun." Paul Levy - The Independent