Morocco: Sugar and Spice

Is it still possible to love Moroccan cookery if you can’t stand fruit in savoury dishes? Yes, discovers Camilla Stoddart

I love Morocco. Everything about it is exotic and visually pleasing — the landscape, the interiors, the souks, the carpets, the slippers — but there is a major hurdle lying between me and full Moroccophile status. This hurdle is fruit. Or more specifically fruit combined with meat. I don’t have many personal food rules but not mixing fruit with meat is one of them. And Moroccans don’t just flout this rule, they beat it to a pulp with a tenderising hammer and then scatter prunes, dates, apricots and pomegranate seeds on top of it. Take harira, the gutsy lamb, lentil and chickpea soup traditionally eaten during Ramadan to break the fast; it’s absolutely delicious but in Morocco it’s served with dates or figs. And then there are the slow-cooked tagines of chicken with apricots and almonds or lamb with honeyed prunes and roast chickens stuffed with raisins, pistachio nuts and couscous. Sometimes it feels like an insurmountable hurdle ….

On closer inspection, it isn’t just the fondness for fruit I find difficult, it is also the blurring of the boundaries between sweet and savoury. A typical meal in Morocco might start with a refreshing salad of sliced oranges with olives and onions then move to a main course of grilled fish stuffed with dates and almonds and finish with candied aubergines for pudding. Collectively the Moroccans appear to have a very sweet tooth and it influences everything they cook.

But recently I read something that made me wonder whether I couldn’t overcome my aversion to sweet things in a savoury context. Apparently some supposedly ‘sweet’ spices such as cinnamon and vanilla aren’t actually sweet at all but because our brains associate them with sugary desserts, we register a sweetness that isn’t even there.