This recipe is adapted from Claudia Roden. This cake has north African and Spanish roots. According to Claudia, citrus cultivation and trade was particularly associated with Sephardi Jews around the Mediterranean, and there are any number of orange cake recipes in Sephardi culture.
This cake is remarkable for its total lack of both butter and flour. You could use five or so clementines or tangerines instead of the oranges.
Don’t worry if the cake sinks as it cools, or in fact turns out looking rather boring. Trust me it is delicious, especially if served as a pudding with freshly sliced blood oranges and whipped cream.
This is a Moroccan recipe, which I first learnt while working as an intern at Alice Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse, in California. ‘Herb jam’ is Paula Wolfert’s name for this delicious, savoury salad-cum-relish. The recipe here is based on one of hers.
The key to success is patience. You must wash vast quantities of greens and herbs, steam the greens, pound together the herbs and garlic, fry the olives and spices and then cook everything down together slowly in a wide pan until it resembles jam. It’s a bit of a hassle, so I advise making a double batch (buy way more greens than you think it’s possible to cook) and freezing some.
But when you taste it, perhaps on crostini or with warm Moroccan bread, you’ll realise why this is such a special recipe. If you love greens, olives and lemony flavours, you’ll adore this. Everyone I have cooked it for has found it a revelation.
For the greens, use a mix of whatever you can find – spinach, chard, rocket, kale, sorrel, watercress, mustard greens, celery leaves, purslane…
This is a Moroccan recipe, and the perfect accompaniment to mint tea to round off a lavish Moroccan feast. Dates are one of Morocco’s finest exports. While travelling around Morocco we drove all the way to Erfoud on the edge of the Sahara for its October date festival, only to find that the unusually wet weather had flooded most of the date palm groves and raging torrents had destroyed several key roads and bridges. Not what we expected to find in the desert!
Further West, in the foothills of the High Atlas mountains, we caught up with the date harvest (see pic). And just beyond we found the beautiful Valley of the Roses. In spring this valley is carpeted with roses, whose petals are harvested to make fragrant rose water, used as both a culinary and cosmetic ingredient. Rose water is also used in Iranian and Indian cuisine, and throughout the Arabic world. It was much more popular, along with orange flower water, in European cuisine in the past than it is today. Try it in cakes instead of vanilla.
But pistachios will always make me think of Turkey, and in particular Gaziantep (formerly Antep), renowned throughout Turkey and beyond for the fine pistachios which thrive in the surrounding dry, low hills. Here we ate our fill of baklava stuffed with naturally bright green pistachio paste, and marvelled at the women who sort the nuts one-by-one by hand, to ensure only the best are used. As in Morocco, Turkish cuisine combines nuts and sugar to great effect.
In London I buy my ‘Antep fıstığı’ (Antep nuts) from a brilliant little shop called Hot Nuts on Green Lanes, a few minutes walk from Manor House tube station. Green Lanes and nearby Blackstock Road are also a sure bet for good dates and rose water.
This recipe is based on one given by Clifford Wright, an expert on Mediterranean cuisines and their histories. I have made some changes to reflect my own culinary experiences in Morocco and personal taste. This is not a quick or easy dish, but fantastic for feeding a crowd. The chicken, vegetables and relish look magnificent piled on top of a vast mound of steaming couscous in the centre of the table. Serve it with rose harissa sauce, for a fragrant chilli kick.
Clifford tells us that couscous might have a sub-Saharan origin, and that the origin of the word may be Berber. Having seen couscous cookery in Senegal and Mali, I can believe this. One of its benefits is that it can be steamed over your pot of stew, so you only need one fire, which need not be a roaring hot one. So it is practical and economical, not to mention delicious.
Amlou is served in Morocco with good fresh bread to dip in. It’s eaten as a snack or appetizer, for example to welcome a guest into your house. It is delicious, especially with a glass of mint tea. The three key ingredients are all Moroccan specialities: almonds, honey and argan oil. Real argan oil, extracted from the kernels of the nuts of the argan tree, is expensive and hard to find outside Morocco, but is worth the effort. Try to find one with a delicate nutty flavour, and check it has not gone rancid.
If you possess a quince tree, or know someone who does, you are a lucky person. This year I joined that group of blessed souls when I discovered a man with a large fruit-laden specimen, or maybe he discovered me.
My wooden crate of beautiful yellow, fuzzy fruit, looking a bit like misshapen fat pears, is rapidly emptying as I work my way through the quince wish list I’ve been compiling for several years…
Bread is big in Morocco. A meal is not complete without bread, and it is always fresh and always good. You wouldn’t catch anyone mopping up their tagine with white sliced ‘plastic’ bread. It has to be the real deal.
Many of my memories from Morocco involve bread: women at home kneeling on the floor kneading dough in a gsar (wide earthenware dish); rounds of dough rising underneath warm sheepskins; children in the street ferrying loaves on planks of wood on their heads to and from the neighbourhood bakery; men baking thousands of loaves each day in huge wood-fired ovens, the smell wafting out onto the street; or women in mountain villages baking one at a time in tiny home-made mud ovens at home; people arriving home with their freshly baked loaves for dinner, each marked with the family’s own signature gashes; the delicious combination of fresh bread and olive oil, enjoyed on arrival in many homes; the mother of the household tearing the warm disks into rough wedges and plonking them in front of each diner, shouting “eat, eat!”
‘Kemia’ – various salads, often made with cooked vegetables – are served at the start of a Moroccan meal, a bit like tapas in Spain or meze in Turkey. They are always beautifully presented, to stimulate the appetite, and subtly spiced with classic Moroccan flavours such as mint, parsley, pepper, cumin, cinnamon and citrus. The beauty for the cook is that you can prepare them all in advance and serve them at room temperature.
Of course, if you prefer you can roast the beetroots rather than boil them: Place them, whole and unpeeled, in a roasting tin with a splash of olive oil and water. Sprinkle with salt, cover tightly with foil and roast in a hot oven until tender throughout. I feel this method works better with summer beetroot, and those at the start of the winter season. These days boiling seems preferable.
This would probably never happen in Morocco, but I like to serve this salad over a bed of full-fat plain yoghurt. The flavours go so well together, and the beetroot juices bleed into the yoghurt creating bright pink streaks and swirls.
‘Kemia’ – various salads, often made with cooked vegetables – are served at the start of a Moroccan meal, a bit like tapas in Spain or meze in Turkey. They are always beautifully presented, to stimulate the appetite, and subtly spiced with classic Moroccan flavours such as mint, parsley, pepper, cumin, cinnamon and citrus. The beauty for the cook is that you can prepare them all in advance and serve them at room temperature.
In Morocco I noticed that cooks almost always scraped the cores out of the carrots once they were boiled. It’s true that the core may be tougher and less tasty, but normally I don’t bother. You might think the icing sugar is weird, but this is commonly used in Moroccan salads and the touch of sweetness works really well. But you can of course leave it out if you wish.
This is such a great dish – you must try it! In Morocco we probably had it at least five times. My first tagine instructor was the lovely Fatna, who helps our friend Maggie in Tangiers. Fatna likes to keep the olives separate and use them as a garnish, having cooked them with minced garlic, preserved lemon, parsley and coriander (cilantro). I have simplified; one of the wonderful things about most tagines is that you can put everything in together at the start and then leave it to work its magic largely undisturbed. It couldn’t be easier.
This cake is remarkable for its total lack of both butter and flour. You could use five or so clementines or tangerines instead of the oranges.
