African

This dazzling emerald green sauce is incredibly versatile.

This easy, robust soup, contributed by Marti Hall, has several elements of a certain style of traditional African soups—chilies, sweet potato, and a creamy peanut base. The grain of choice in an African soup like this would likely be millet, but here, quinoa, the nutritious South American super grain, makes for a delightful fusion.

This soup (called harira in Arabic) presents a compatible duo of lentils and chickpeas. It can be served all year round, but is especially appealing as a transitional early fall soup, using fresh tomatoes. Serve with fresh pita bread.

This delicious stew looks and smells as enticing as it tastes. My sister-in-law, Toni Atlas, provided the inspiration for this recipe.

Moroccan food has a distinct earthy flavor from the combination of cumin and turmeric. Cinnamon also is a characteristic element here, and raisins add a touch of sweetness. This recipe also works well using lamb or turkey.

Once, when I was visiting Paris, my friend Emile from Gabon, Africa, made this dish for me. I was amazed that cooking with peanut butter could be so good.

Lamb shanks lend themselves to slow cooking, so I like to make this hearty dish-in-one on a weekend and then have it later in the week in a second incarnation. Shanks are often found two to a package in the supermarket, so it’s less hassle to buy the whole package and enjoy them twice. I’ve adapted this recipe from Claudia Roden, who taught me always to have a jar of my own preserved lemons in the fridge to give that final spark to so many Middle Eastern and North African dishes, and I’ve followed her advice.

This Mediterranean-inspired dish not only is light and healthy, but also has depth of flavor with a contrast of textures and temperatures. Most home cooks tell me they’re intimidated by cooking fish with skin on; they find it tears or doesn’t crisp up as it should. There are two keys to success: one is patience and the other is a well-seasoned cast-iron pan, preferably one that has gone through generations of use. The second alternative is to cheat and use a nonstick frying pan.

This Moroccan-inspired recipe is one of those dishes where less is more: a big, sweet onion stuffed with cinnamon- and cumin-scented ground lamb and plump apricots. While you may be tempted to put the whole spice cabinet in the lamb filling, the simple duo of cinnamon and cumin does the trick. The fruit plays off the rich gaminess of the lamb and the spices add a subtle background flavor to tie it all together. This stuffed onion is perfect for a weeknight dinner with a green salad and steamed basmati rice, or elegant enough to make as a starter for a dinner party. The best part is that you can do this all ahead of time and just pop the stuffed onions in the oven before dinner. Sweet!

We use this aromatic spice mix to flavor roasted vegetables and baked or grilled shrimp or fish.

This elegant herbed couscous is a lemon lover’s delight. We like it best made with all of the herbs. The flavor develops beautifully overnight in the refrigerator.

Exotic, easy, and healthy, too, this simple dish is just delish.

You can make this dish again, subbing cubed white or dark meat chicken for the lamb if you have extra spice blend on hand.

Visiting eighty-five-year-old Aimée Beressi and ninety-one-year-old Lydia Farahat is like crawling into a cozy casbah. Friends since they left Egypt in the late 1950s, they get together once a week at Lydia’s apartment on Rue Dragon, right near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For more than forty years, the two have been discussing recipes, current events, and the Egypt of their childhood. When Aimée was growing up in Cairo, there was no school on Thursday, so she helped her mother and aunt make the cakes and cookies for the Sabbath. The word rosquettes, which comes from the Spanish rosquillas, refers to round cookies with a hole. Aimée still bakes a batch each week to bring to her friend of so many years.

The word Cassolita comes from the Spanish word cassola or cazuela, which refers both to a round clay pot and that which is cooked in it. A Sephardic squash dish from Tétouan, Morocco, this cassolita is scented with cinnamon and caramelized onions and gets a nice crunch from the almonds. It is typically served with lamb couscous (see page 236), although it goes well with any hearty meat dish. When I made it for a dinner party for my editor, Judith Jones, all the high-powered foodies attending asked me for the recipe. It can be made ahead and then reheated before serving.

When Suzon Meymy rubs the grains of ready-made couscous between her fingers to separate them, she thinks about her mother, the couscous-maker of Mogador. Unlike Suzon, her mother prepared couscous from scratch. First she would take a kilo or so of coarse semolina, moisten it with a little water, and carefully separate the grains. Then she would rake the fingers of her right hand through the semolina in sweeping circular movements, creating the tiny pellets of couscous. She would rub them against the weave of a fine basket to shape them, and they were then laid out to dry. Afterward, she would pass the couscous several times through a wood-handled sieve to obtain granules of uniform size. Finally, she would steam the couscous twice in a couscoussier, a special pot similar to a doublelevel steamer, which was filled with different kinds of hearty meat-and-vegetable stews. Today, with the availability of presteamed “instant” couscous, the process is much easier. Even so, Suzon mimics the gestures she learned from her mother, rubbing her fingers through the grains. Each time she makes this dish, it is a return to her childhood, her family, and a life that is no more in a small coastal town in Morocco. Although with instant couscous you really don’t need to steam the couscous, I still do, to fluff it up and make it lighter. If you do not have a couscoussier, use a regular stockpot with a vegetable steamer. If the holes are too big, simply line the steamer with cheesecloth to prevent the couscous grains from falling through.

While I was having lunch at Au Rendez-vous/La Maison de Couscous in Paris (see page 112), the owner brought out some of the magnificent Tunisian Sabbath stew he was cooking for that evening. It was made with a special North African kind of wheat berries, meat, a large amount of oil, onions, and a mixture of coriander, caraway, and harissa, the spice combination of peppers and garlic. This is certainly a later variation of the thirteenth-century recipe for orisa, a famous nutritious porridge brimming with soaked wheat berries, chickpeas, pounded meat, melted mutton fat, and cinnamon, found in the Manuscrito Anonimo, an Arabic-language Andalusian cookbook. Among the Jews of Tangier it was a simple meatless dish consisting of crushed wheat spiced with red pepper. I have made a vegetarian version that can accompany any meat dish or be served alone.

This couscous dish, originally made especially by Moroccans at the Maimouna, a post-Passover celebration, has become pan–North African in France now that Tunisians and Algerians are preparing it. They also make this dish, using butter and accompanying it with yogurt, at Shavuot, a late-spring holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai and the abundance of milk in the springtime. Sweet couscous can be made with either couscous or rice, although I prefer the texture of the couscous with the raisins and nuts.

If Jewish-Arab relations are better in Marseille than in any other city in France, it is in part due to people like Martine Yana. A Moroccan-born Jewish sociologist married to a Tunisian, she is the head of the Centre Culturel Juif (Jewish Cultural Center), near the Grande Synagogue in downtown Marseille. When La Radio de la Communauté Juive (Radio of the Jewish Community) went on the air in 1981, Martine hosted a weekly talk show in which she invited Jews to chat about their culinary customs. “We followed people’s holiday traditions in Tétouan, Salonika, Turkey, and Marseille,” she told me in her office. “And we got their stories.” This was the period when people were beginning to open up about their experiences in World War II and their Jewishness in general. Like many other French people, Martine thinks philosophically about food. She asks the guests on her programs why they eat certain foods and about the symbolism surrounding them. “I was surprised that so many people didn’t see the greater meaning in what they were doing,” she told me. As head of the cultural center, she has taken it upon herself to present Jewish traditions in France proudly to the outside world. When the mayor of the city of Marseille chose to feature the country of Algeria at a city exhibition, for example, she made sure that there was a Jewish presence and set up a pavilion featuring traditional handmade costumes and cuisine. Last year, during the annual Ramadan festival in Marseille, she suggested to the head of the Arab Cultural Center that there be a Jewish booth. He agreed, and her team of assistants joined her in organizing Hanukkah games for the children and distributing pamphlets on Jewish religion and customs. To their surprise, the curiosity about Judaism made the booth a huge success. Clearly, the time was right. In her cookbook, Trésors de la Table Juive, Martine gathers stories and recipes that cover the breadth of Judaism in France. She includes dishes like this old Provençal spinach-and-herb omelet. The omelet, often served cold, is similar to the North African omelets called m’hemmer, flavored sometimes with chicken and calves’ brains, sometimes with vegetables. Today they are mostly eaten cut into small squares as an hors d’oeuvre on special occasions, such as weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I love this rendition, with its bright-green color, served hot or cold as an appetizer, or as a main dish for brunch. Use the recipe as a guide, and vary the greens and herbs seasonally, according to your whim.

Harissa is available supermarkets all over the country, or you can make your own (see page 33).