Nowadays, saying that you are Moroccan-Jewish, or grew up eating Moroccan foods, can be somewhat generic. After all, who hasn't found themselves eagerly waiting for the waiter to come around again with those delicious, crispy Moroccan cigars (spicy beef filled phyllo dough cylinders, deep-fried and shaped to look like, well, cigars) at their cousin's wedding during the cocktail hour?
However, just like there's more to "Jewish soup" than matzo balls, there's also more to Moroccan cooking than deep-fried, carb-heavy hors d'oeuvres. The Jewish repertoire of gourmet foods, goes way beyond what your grandmother made you after catching a cold. Specifically, Sephardic foods, and even more specifically, Moroccan-Jewish foods are vast in flavor and variety.
When's the last time you ordered a "cooked" salad at a restaurant? Or decided to pickle or preserve lemons? What about eating chicken, but mixed with nuts, cinnamon and topped with powdered sugar?
The Arab and Iberian-peninsula influences on Moroccan-Jewish cooking are cherished among Jews from Tangier to Agadir. Salade cuite (or cooked salad, as referenced earlier), for example, is one of many staples served at the Friday night dinner table for most with roots from this North African country. It consists of simmering peeled, crushed Roma tomatoes, red bell peppers, chopped garlic and extra virgin olive oil. This mélange slow cooks for over 2 hours on the stove until it's reduced to a stew-like consistency - think of the best chunky tomato sauce you've ever had, and triple the flavor. It is then served in a small bowl and offered as a first course along with several other traditional salads, almost all of which are vegan, gluten-free and of course made with the very main ingredient: EVOO.
Fried eggplant with preserved (or pickled) lemons, carrots with cumin, red beet and lemon juice, fire-roasted bell peppers with olive oil (of course) and the above mentioned salade cuite are commonplace salads for most Moroccan Jews at the Shabbat dinner table. The beauty is that these traditional flavor combinations, among Moroccans and most Sephardic Jews, are brought down from generation to generation and chances are you'll find the recipes don't differ that much from one Shabbat table to the next.
If you're looking for a new flavor to serve at your next Shabbat table, that everyone with taste buds can enjoy, look no further than traditional Moroccan salads.
More to come on Moroccan-Jewish foods... Next time we'll discover petit fours marocaines (French for Moroccan petit fours ;)
Got Kosher? Visit thekosherkitchen.com for ways to order.
