Flavours of Morocco
MOROCCAN FOOD IS ABOUT FAR MORE THAN JUST TAGINES, FOOD BLOGGER NARGISSE BENKABBOU TELLS ELLA WALKER
YOU might think you know what couscous is, but Nargisse Benkabbou is about to change all that. “When I came to England and people were eating their couscous completely differently, I thought, ‘This is really weird’,” says the food writer wryly.
“In Morocco, the stuff in the packet, we call it semolina,” she explains. “We have a dish we normally eat on Friday and it’s steamed grains of semolina topped with vegetable broth and meat – and that is couscous. If you order couscous in Morocco – unless you’re somewhere really touristy in Marrakesh – they’ll always bring you the whole dish.”
This is just one of many snippets of information about Moroccan food Nargisse is hoping to illuminate with her debut cookbook, Casablanca.
“People think it’s something exotic. They’re excited about it, but they don’t cook it at home because they think it’s very complicated, and it’s not,” says Nargisse, who was raised in Brussels before moving to the UK, and shared her recipes and food writing through her blog, MyMoroccanFood.com, before penning her book.
“My mission is to bring Moroccan flavours into people’s homes.”
The Leiths-trained cook, who was prestigiously crowned Observer Rising Star In Food 2018, really started her own cookery education as a child.
“My oldest memory of my mum is coming home from school and her writing down recipes in front of the TV,” she remembers. It was Nargisse’s job to assist in the kitchen, peeling and chopping, and to be a fellow flavour interrogator when they ate out.
“She would ask me, ‘What do you think? Is it rosemary? Is it thyme?’ Then we’d go home and try to reproduce it.”
The trouble was, her mum always took the lead, “so when I started cooking on my own, I realised, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know this, I don’t know that’. I started calling my mum...”
Luckily, she had a very good palate, “and that’s how I started reproducing my mum’s recipes over the phone,” she continues.
Even now, following a stint training in political science, which gave way to the insistent hunger to pursue cooking professionally, Nargisse admits with a smile: “I still call her.”
Although her food is informed by the dishes her mother and aunts fed and taught the London-based chef, Casablanca is not dedicated to traditional Moroccan cooking.
Although the pages may be scattered liberally with traditional Moroccan ingredients and dishes and woven through with what gives Moroccan food its essence (vibrance, aromatics, spiciness, sourness and the “influences of so many civilisations – Persian, Arab, French, Ottoman, Turkish”) – Nargisse gives her food heritage a twist.
“I aim to share traditional dishes and make them more accessible,” explains Nargisse, who is also a supper club host.
“I’ve been eating this food all of my life, and I know how far I can go when I want to tweak a recipe to make it accessible for someone who doesn’t know about Moroccan food, so that’s what I do.”
She also loves to invent fusion dishes – a recent success was Moroccan almond cookies (ghriba), made with Chinese matcha.
Do traditional Moroccan cooks mind her playing with classics?
“Questions come more from the older generations, but my uncles and cousins will also tell me what I’m doing is really great,” Nargisse muses. “It’s very emotional and makes me proud I’m able to share my heritage.
“Every time I share a traditional recipe, there’s part of my mum in the recipes and my grandfather – for me it’s a wonderful way to give an homage – it makes me really happy.”
Casablanca: My Moroccan Food by Nargisse Benkabbou, photography by Matt Russell is published by Mitchell Beazley, priced £20. Available from octopusbooks.co.uk