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Claudia Roden: 'Morocco taught me to be free and joyful'
Cookbook writer Claudia Roden reveals how a solo research trip to the North African country gave her a fresh perspective on life
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Travelling to Morocco on my own in 1983 – a research trip for my first Mediterranean cookbook – convinced me that talking to home cooks in their kitchens was the way I wanted to explore cuisine, even though it wasn’t the done thing back then. Strangely, my being alone helped. People were curious about me and they would ask: Where is your husband? Where are your children? Why are you here?
I’d explain that I was on a mission to find out about Moroccan home cooking. They would then want to look after me, inviting me into their homes. I found I could accost women buying ingredients at the market and ask them what they were going to cook. I would go and sit next to a woman on a train and engage her in conversation. I took trains all over Morocco. The whole experience gave me a fresh confidence that I could be free and joyful on my own after years of being a single mother bringing up three children.
Morocco enthralled me. Its cooking is the most exquisite and refined in North Africa, with its marriages of meat and fruit, delicately flavoured tagines, crisp multilayered pies and combinations of spicy, savoury and sweet. It has echoes of Egypt, where I’d spent a very happy childhood in Cairo. I missed the sound of Arabic being spoken and the muezzin calling people to prayer, and the aromas of spice mingled with lamb kebabs cooking over charcoal in the street.
I knew, too, that in Morocco cooking is a woman’s art. Women were in charge of the kitchen at home, in restaurants and at banquets. Recipes were passed orally from mother to daughter and from private cooks to their assistants.
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Years before, I had become friends with a Moroccan doctor, Henri, and his family who rented a house in the square where I lived in Hampstead, London. Our children played together and we kept in touch once they went back to Morocco. When I told them I was planning a trip there, they invited me to stay.
Henri’s clinic was on the Jemaa el-Fna square, the buzzing heart of Marrakech. During the day there were musicians, dancers, snake charmers, fire eaters and storytellers filling the square. Come the evening, hundreds of cooks would set up charcoal burners and the air was filled with the aroma of charred meat, the smoke of fish frying and the heady scents of cumin and turmeric from harira (soup with meat, lentils or chickpeas), tiny spicy snails and baghrir (spongy pancakes).
The doctor took me into the heart of the medina (souk) to meet the white-magic man. Many of his patients said they couldn’t get better without receiving an amulet from this man to protect them from the evil eye. We stopped at a door in a windowless, mud-coloured building and went inside – into paradise. I was expecting something modest, but it was beautiful: a courtyard decorated with bright and intricate tiles and mosaics, filled with jasmine, vines and roses, shared by several families who each had a couple of rooms in the old riad.
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The courtyard was where they did their cooking: each family set up their brazier in a different corner. I ate so well. The white-magic man’s wife made fish balls with cumin in a spicy tomato sauce, aubergine steamed on top of a couscousiere with honey and vinegar (which inspired a recipe in my cookbook, Med) and chicken tagine with lemon and olives. We ate at tables made from large brass trays on low folding legs. I felt privileged to be tasting dishes from an ancient civilisation.
I loved exploring the souks, meandering down winding, narrow streets and brushing up against donkeys with great baskets of fat, knobbly tomatoes and bunches of wild violet artichokes. There would be vendors selling food everywhere, even just from an upturned box with a bowl resting on top of it. I adored the spice market, Souk Ableuh: the mounds of gold, red and brown spices in vast copper pots; the curious-looking roots; bits of bark; shrivelled pods; seeds, bulbs and berries; and rosebuds to make rosewater. Buying spices is my favourite kind of shopping.
It was on this first trip to Morocco that I first truly understood the bonds that form in the kitchen. Women would pour out their hearts to me and I would confide in them, too. Travelling alone, getting to know people, became the way I researched all my books.
I would like to take all my children and grandchildren to Essaouira, to rent a lovely house by the sea and shop, cook and eat together. That would complete the circle – and I’m sure my grandchildren would be bewitched by it all. It would be so joyful.
Interview by Sudi Pigott
Med by Claudia Roden is published by Ebury Press at £28