To most people from anywhere else, Moroccan cooking is one huge explosion of exotic beauty – made all the more so by the faces and clothing of the cooks and servers, the shimmering fabrics flowing all around, and the otherworldly architecture giving human life a chance to survive in the vast desert. Yet far from being one huge explosion, it is many, ignited by conquest across a thousand years or more.
In particular, while the people of Morocco may strike a newcomer as one people, they are actually the result of wave after wave of quite different people. That means the Berbers who’ve carved out a life among these sands forever, the Arab armies from the east who swept across for real estate, and the Moors who made a cultural highway between the east and their long-conquered Spain. Later on, there were Ottoman Turks and even the French, bringing their non-Arabic language and some of their famous (read: fancy) cooking techniques.
Stare for a moment at a globe or map and you’ll learn from important things about Morocco. It sits at the northwestern edge of the African continent, far north across the Sahara Desert of the green jungles and grassy plains we see in all those safari movies. Though it touches the Mediterranean, its most important coast is on the Atlantic Ocean around the city of Casablanca, most famous for the movie of that name. And where Africa in the form of Morocco seems the curve north to almost close off the Mediterranean, Europe in the form of Spain seems to curve down.
These are the Straits of Gibraltar, only eight miles across at their skinniest. In ancient times, people called these the Pillars of Hercules, fearing that monsters waited in the darker, deeper ocean beyond. And if their ships weren’t swallowed whole, they’d soon topple off the end of the world.
What you might also see is a road – not a built or official one but a road of dry land all the same. Someone, you recognize, could walk or (even better) ride horses or camels from Arabia to within only eight miles from Europe. It could be done for military, social or religious conquest, as the Moors did holding onto Spain for 700 years, giving the world almost everything we now call “Spanish.” But it could also be done for trade.
Fortunes could be made carrying and selling things of value from one population to another. For cash or sometimes with the exchange system known as barter. Yes, fortunes could be made trading from the east past Egypt and all across the slice of North Africa often called the Magreb. The name refers to its centuries vaguely unified under Arab control.
With so much later history, it’s amazing how much of the native Berber culture and cuisine remain in Morocco. It’s a testament to how much people hold onto their identities, even when more powerful others try to erase them. The two most famous foods of Morocco, especially at Moroccan restaurants in the United States and elsewhere, are Berber creations. The tagine was a way of slow-cooking meat to make it tender with almost no water in the desert, recycling every bit of steam with a graceful, totally brilliant shape of pot. And couscous, not like the rice it resembles but actually a tiny hand-rolled shape of pasta, also relied on steam to be cooked. Both foods were part of Morocco since before anyone can remember.
Still, the conquering Arabs brought many important things. In pursuit of trade, of doing business, they carried spices – starting with salt, the most important spice, but also richly flavored powders of every color and taste. They contributed their love of mixing “sweet” spices like cinnamon and nutmeg with “savory spices” like salt, pepper, cumin and coriander. The classic Moroccan dish sometimes spelled bastilla is the result, a chicken stew in pastry often sprinkled with… powdered sugar! The Moors did their bit for Moroccan cuisine too, dropping off some of the citrus trees they were taking to grow southern Spain. Lemon, lime and oranges would forever abound. California, Florida and Texas can thank Spain for citrus industries all they want, but they’re mostly thanking the wrong people.
Over the centuries, the Berbers, Arabs and Moors found their way into the Ottoman Empire, the Turks. These brought a genius for cooking meat on skewers over open fires – think: shish kebabs. And the French, when they took over for a good while, brought their sauces and their skills baking bread. When you’re enjoying a Moroccan-style dinner today anywhere in the world, yes of course, you can simply enjoy it. But this is a dinner that took more than a thousand years to prepare.
