Moroccan Cuisine

Food is an important aspect of culture: on the Morocco trip, eating provided the occasion for learning Arabic, partaking in new cultural practices (eating with our hands), as well as new aesthetic experiences.

Some highlights:
--Eating dinner in a Moroccan home, where Margaret and I ate our fabulous meal Moroccan style, using bread to eat from a common plate of cous-cous, vegetables and meat. We had already learned to say “chokran” (“thank you”) and “la chokran” (“No thank you”)—here we learned “couli!”) (“eat!”) and “sh’bet!” (“I’m full!”).
--The orange stands in Marrakech—huge stands with dozens of oranges piled up to entice passers-by to order a glass of orange juice squeezed on the spot. Not only was the orange juice the best ever, but in the saturated light of Marrakech, with its intensely blue sky and its trademark reddish buildings, the orange stands were especially beautiful to look at.

--The spice stores in the medinas (old cities), with their barrels of cumin, curries, and cinnamon sticks— stunning to look at and lovely to smell. Below is a photo of a stand that sells dried dates, figs, apricots and nuts

--The theater of dining—most Moroccan dishes are served “family style” in a tagine, an earthenware dish with a removable cone-shaped top (“tagine” also refers to the slow-cooked stews made in them). When servers brought the main dishes to our tables, much oohing and aahing ensued when they removed the tagine tops to show the carefully arranged main course of cous-cous, vegetables, and/or meat. I could write a whole section on the architecture of the Moroccan meal, as many of the cous-cous dishes were piled up in some gravity-defying arrangements. How did they get the cous-cous piled that high in such perfect cone shapes? We ate these meals with forks, by the way.

--The ubiquitous mint tea, a sugary mixture of green tea and fresh mint. Except in the desert, where it’s considered cheating to add mint—you might be trying to disguise the bad quality of your tea.

--Dinner with Nourredine’s family in Fes, where the entire Rollins group shared a wonderful meal with assorted Bennanis of all ages, including Nour’s lovely mother.


--Susan Libby, Department of Art and Art History