Ras el Hanout Redux

A few week ago, now, I once again received some very nice, thoughtful presents for my birthday, but among my favorite were a couple of gifts that focused on Moroccan cuisine: my very own earthenware tagine and Paula Wolfert’s Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco. (I won’t name the culprit who gave me these gifts, but I’d like to thank her once again.) I’d been wanting a tagine for a few years, but I became quite serious about getting one after Michelle and I went to a Moroccan restaurant named Le Souk in Paris last summer (see "Highlights: Paris"). I had had tagine dishes before, but I had never had a tagine dish like the duck tagine with fresh figs, dried fruit, honey, and almonds that Michelle ordered that evening. As for Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco, I spent years admiring Paula Wolfert’s 1973 classic back in the days when I was a bookseller, but for some reason I’d never actually acquired it.

This weekend I’m finally going to christen both the tagine and the cookbook, after weeks of contemplating when and how to first put them to use. I think I’m going to start off with one of Wolfert’s chicken tagine recipes, but there’ll be more on this later.

Like all truly great cookbooks, Wolfert’s book not only contains brilliant recipes, it also reads beautifully, situating its passion for food within a broader understanding of cuisine’s place within culture. The opening chapters of her book not only whet the appetite for a whole array of Moroccan delicacies, they also detail the epiphany Wolfert experienced from “[the] moment the Yugoslav freighter touched at Casablanca in 1959.” Wolfert spent the next two years immersing herself in Moroccan culture and developing a deep understanding of Moroccan cuisine and its various traditions. She then spent eight years in Paris obsessing over Morocco, and trying to find ways to get back, before she finally decided to write a cookbook about Moroccan cuisine, taking on the in-depth research that finally led to the publication of her book in 1973.

The opening chapter is a fascinating look into the history and development of Moroccan cuisine, as well as the philosophies that form its foundation. There she discusses everything from “the philosophy of abundance” and the striking similarities between Moroccan and Chinese banquets, to the notion of kimia, the magical power to “multiply food,” to make the most out of very little. In the second chapter, Wolfert takes up the topic of Morocco’s souks and their place within Moroccan culture. It is there that she discusses spices and spice merchants, including “the ten important spices” (cinnamon, cumin, saffron, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, cayenne, paprika, aniseed, and sesame seeds) as well as the “nine secondary aromatics” (allspice, caraway, cloves, coriander seeds, gum Arabic, fenugreek, licorice, honey dates, and orrisroot). It is also there where she launches into a lengthy discussion on the topic of our good friend, Ras el Hanout. Wolfert claims that in her travels across Morocco she came upon accounts of Ras el Hanout blends that consisted of “more than a hundred ingredients,” but the majority of the most lively blends consist of 24 to 28 different herbs, spices, and other aromatics. Her analysis (with the help of a spice merchant friend in New York) of one packet of a blend that she purchased in Fez turns up the following exotic list of ingredients:

Allspice
Ash berries
Belladonna leaves
Black cumin seeds
Black peppercorns
Cantharides
Cardamom pods
Cayenne
Cassia cinnamon
Ceylon cinnamon
Cloves
Coriander seed
Cubebe pepper
Earth almonds
Galingale [or Galangal root]
Ginger
Gouza el asnab
Grains of paradise
Long pepper
Lavender
Mace
Monk’s pepper
Nutmeg
Orrisroot
Turmeric

You’ll have to pick up Wolfert’s book to get the full details on any of the above ingredients that are unfamiliar to you. The point is: 1) Ras el Hanout is about as heady and complex as cuisine can ever be, and, once again, it provides an ample sense of just how sophisticated Moroccan cuisine can be (Wolfert makes a point of stressing how disappointing so much of the cuisine that passes itself off as “Moroccan” often is); 2) Wolfert displays her impressive talents as a sensualist even within the form of a simple list.

Like I said, this weekend I’m going to give the tagine and one of Wolfert’s recipes a shot. I’ll try and find one that involves Ras el Hanout, too.

aj

Philippe de Vienne's Ras el Hanout

Philippe de Vienne's Ras el Hanout
Originally uploaded by ajkinik.

Saturday, Michelle and I wound up back at Olives et Épices (see “Plus ça change…”) and who should be there presiding, but Philippe de Vienne himself. We got to talking and found M. de Vienne to both unbelievably friendly and unbelievably generous with his encyclopedic knowledge of herbs and spices. We learned about everything from Kemiri Nuts (a staple of Indonesian cuisine) to Colombo Spices (a blend developed by Indian emigrants who were brought to the Caribbean). But what was perhaps the most fascinating topic of discussion of the day, not to mention the most fascinating culinary discovery of the day, was Ras-el-Hanout. Actually, it was Ras-el-Hanout that got us talking in the first place. Michelle had come across this spice blend while at Les Chèvres and was eager to learn more about it. She brought it up with M. de Vienne and it immediately seemed as though he was warming up to a favorite subject—he’s clearly an amateur of Moroccan cuisine, not to mention a bit of a scholar on Moorish culture in general.

Ras-el-Hanout is a spice blend that was developed by the Moors some time ago. The name means something along the lines of “top of the shop” and it is used by each spice merchant and spice shop in Morocco to refer to the finest spice blend they offer. As M. de Vienne informed us, even the most mediocre versions of this blend bring together some 13 or 14 different spices and herbs, but the best blends can consist of upwards of 27 or 28 different ingredients. The standard ingredients include things like cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger, but better varieties can also include things like dried rose blossoms and lavender, and there was a time when the blends might also include hallucinogens and aphrodisiacs such as hashish, belladonna, and Spanish fly. The best versions of Ras-el-Hanout bring together both quantity and quality, and M. de Viennes’ blend includes between 23 and 24 ingredients (depending on what’s available at the time that he puts his batch together) all of which are of the best quality and are blended at peak freshness, and all of which are left whole. Ras-el-Hanout isn’t meant to be used as a base for any dishes, the way garam masala is used in Indian cuisine, for instance, it’s meant to be thrown in during the last stages of the preparation of a dish like a couscous or at tajine, where it serves as a kind of magical ‘secret ingredient’ that enlivens a dish, perks it up, puts a finishing touch on it. For those with imagination it can be used to add something mysterious to everything from a cheese hors d’oeuvre to ice cream.

By the end of our conversation with M. de Vienne, we could barely contain ourselves. We picked up a can and rushed it home to experiment with. He recommended that we grind the whole batch immediately, then keep it in its air-tight can in the freezer, and that’s exactly what we did. It looked a lot prettier when the spices were still whole (as they are in the photo above), but the aroma after we ground the blend was hard to describe and worth every penny. Later that evening I added just the tiniest touch to a “Moroccan” carrot soup I’ve been making recently, and, together with the crème fraîche we swirled into the soup at the last moment, it turned a very good soup into something rather phenomenal. I also added about 1/2 a teaspoon into my most recent batch of oignons confits and—it’s official—they’re now à point.

aj