How to cook a Tajine?

There are few countries in the world with a cuisine as colourful as Morocco’s. The vibrant fusion of bright yellow saffron, lush green parsley, juicy red tomatoes, terracotta earthenware and cooking vessels painted in every shade of azure and aquamarine make any Moroccan dish a feast for the eyes before you have even tasted a mouthful.

But despite its visual complexity, Moroccan food is also surprisingly easy to cook. And where better to learn to do so than in Morocco’s colourfully-named cultural capital, the ‘Red City’ of Marrakech.

The Maison Arabe hotel runs cookery courses on the outskirts of the city so, as a long-time fan of Moroccan food but a hopeless cook, I eagerly signed up for an afternoon's group lesson in the hope of learning to recreate some of my favourite dishes and convince my friends that I’m not a lost cause in the kitchen after all. A variety of courses are on offer for both amateurs and professionals, and guests are tutored in the preparation of traditional Moroccan dishes either on their own or in groups of up to eight people.

Our mentor was a short, stout, local woman called Aziza. It was impossible to determine precisely how old she was – anything between 60 and 80, at a guess - but she had a distinct matriarchal air about her. Her cookery skills have been handed down from mother to daughter over generations and perfected while preparing for countless weddings, baby naming ceremonies, circumcision parties and other family celebrations. In short, Aziza is the real deal. In fact, she’s so authentic that she doesn’t speak any English or even French, which is spoken by over half the country’s population, only Arabic. Thankfully a translator by the name of Mohammed was on hand to interpret her wisdom for the rest of us. Mohammed is a part-time professor of English and, it turns out, a dab hand at chopping coriander as well.

After a brief introduction to some of the basic principles and ingredients of Moroccan cookery (including the fact that, in Morocco, rosemary is used as shrubbery rather than seasoning) each member of the group was given a fetching striped apron to wear, and set to work in their own little preparation area.

The dish du jour was chicken tagine which, I quickly realised, would force me to confront my phobia of handling raw meat. As a recent convert from vegetarianism to carnivorism, I am an avid supporter of meat once it’s tenderised, char-grilled and on my plate, but the slimy viscerality of dead animal is still too much for my delicate constitution to take.

After some rather cack-handed herb and vegetable chopping on my part (I blame the knives) followed by some slightly more successful mixing of olive oil, spices and ghee (the clarified butter used in lots of Indian cooking), it was time to marinate the chicken. Aziza and the boldest of my fellow students picked up the bits of bird on the bone and coated them in the sauce that we had just prepared. I stood and stared at the bowl of pink flesh.

I think Mohammed must have spotted the desperation on my face, as he kindly stepped in and suggested that I use two spoons to manoeuvre the chicken, thus avoiding any contact with my hands. This proved to be easier said than done, but after a few mishaps on the counter, the chicken was marinated, my hands were meat-free and my tagine was in its special cone-lidded pot and ready for cooking.

Ideally a tagine should be stewed very slowly over a charcoal fire for several hours. This preserves more of the flavour, as less water needs to be added into the mix. However, as we didn’t have several hours to spare, we instead opted to cook over the hobs at the back of the kitchen, inserting a small, metal diffuser plate between the heat and the pot to prevent it from cracking.

Few people in the western world are likely to keep a tagine pot alongside their pressure cooker and Tupperware, but you could easily prepare this dish in a conventional pot, or even a saucepan, as long as it has a lid. The conical lid of the Moroccan pot is designed to aid condensation, but unless you’re a tagine connoisseur (or Aziza), you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference. And if you’re a stickler for tradition, you can even cook it over a low heat on a barbecue in the back garden.

After just over an hour of simmering with occasional stirring and adding of water, the tagine was ready and we had reached my favourite part of the cooking process: the eating. The course is held in an upstairs room overlooking a beautiful leafy courtyard full of exotic birds and flowers. A large dining table was set by the window at one end of the room, and our tagines were served up with Moroccan flat bread for dipping. The results? Delicious, if slightly artery-clogging on account of all the melted butter.

The most heartening thing about the whole experience was that, dead bird aside, it really wasn’t that difficult. After the first 10 minutes, most of the preparation time involved simply waiting for the tagine to cook. Yet it still looks very impressive, especially if you do happen to own some attractive Moroccan crockery to serve it in. And you could easily vary the dish by substituting the chicken with lamb, beef or even fish. I know what I’ll be cooking for my next four dinner parties…

AZIZA’S CHICKEN TAGINE RECIPE

(serves two)

½ a preserved lemon (lemon soaked in a jar in 1 part salt to 3 parts water for two months)

4 pieces of chicken of the bone

1 small red onion

1 clove of garlic

1 tbsp fresh coriander and parsley

1 tsp black pepper

1¼ tsp ginger

1 heaped tsp turmeric

Pinch of saffron

1tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp ghee (clarified butter)

8-10 olives

Cut the preserved lemon in half and scoop out and chop the flesh and add it to the tagine pot. Set the peel aside for later.

Chop and crush the garlic and add it to the lemon. Add all the spices, the olive oil and the ghee, and mix.

Coat the chicken in the mixture and leave to marinade, preferably overnight.

Chop and add the onion and cook on a medium heat for 20 minutes, turning twice during this time.

Add 250ml water to the sauce and leave to simmer on a low heat for another 45 minutes.

Chop the lemon skin into ‘hand-shaped’ fans (representing 'the hand of Fatima', a superstitious symbol that is believed to ward off evil) and use them to decorate the dish along with the olives.

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