A tradition of Moroccan cookery 2

Soaking lentils and chickpeas, chopping herbs, skinning onions, making stock, marinating meats, blanching almonds, pitting prunes, steaming couscous, stirring soups – there was always something for a curious child to watch, and most importantly for any boy, always something to eat, whenever I visited him. I was fascinated by his kitchen, by the billowing steam from the big couscousiers, by the bubbling pots on the charcoal burners which spat and sang in their own secret language, by the luscious smells of the spicy food and by the way he whizzed around the place, like a djinn in his robes and turban, sometimes moving so fast between one burner and another that he was just a blur.

I finished school each morning at 11.30am. Having started at 8.30, by then I was always starving. I would run to my father’s kitchen, knowing he would give me a little of whatever there was to spare. He was always generous with food and I would often find a gathering of ‘massakin’ there: homeless, wandering men crowded into the restaurant because of all the local cooks, they knew my father would not begrudge them a decent meal. (Massakin is actually a word from the local Moroccan Arabic dialect: for in my own language, Berber, there is no word for ‘homeless’.) I would have to press my way through these shabby, often strange, men to find my father in the kitchen, and there he would give me scraps of whatever he had at hand – little bits of spiced beef or chicken, almonds still hot from the pan, a prune or an apricot, or best of all a sweet almond pastry that might have sustained a knock and be too damaged to be served to a paying guest. Then I would want to run away with my little pot of sweet mint tea and play football with my friends until school was reconvened at 2 o’clock: but nothing ever came free. There were carrots, pumpkins and potatoes to be peeled, aubergines and courgettes to be washed, spice pots to be refilled. As soon as I was able to hold a knife, maybe at the age of 6, my father taught me how to chop an onion and put me to work!

I am Amazigh, known to the rest of the world as Berber, and my family comes from the south of Morocco, as far as the Great Desert, where my great-great grandfather was a salt trader who made perilous camel-caravan journeys to the mines of the deep Sahara and returned bearing cones of rock-salt to trade in the markets.

The Berbers are the original, indigenous people of North Africa. Crossing the whole of the north of the continent, taking in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Maritania, Niger, Mali, the north of Nigeria and Burkina Faso, the Berber territory was once an empire without borders, defined only by its language and customs. Famous Berbers include the Egptian pharaoh Shoshenq, the Roman emperor Setimius Severus, Hannibal, Saint Augustine, the founder of the Tuareg people, Tin Hinan; the warrior queen Kahina, Apuleius, who wrote The Golden Ass, Aesop of the Fables, Hanno the Navigator, the writer and explorer Ibn Batuta, the 15th century geographer and traveller Leo Africanus and the historian Ibn Khaldun. It was the Berbers who crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered the Ibernian Peninsula, establishing a Moorish kingdom that lasted 800 years.

We are a proud people, fiercely independent, guarding our traditions, but never closed to others' ways of life. We have our own language, our own customs, and our own cuisine. But it's a cuisine that has begged and borrowed from all the other cultures with whom we have come into contact. And those are many, for Morocco is the great meeting-place between the ancient and modern worlds, where cultures have collided over centuries and come together to trade and dance and eat -- especially to eat.