Tagine, bastilla but so much more in Moroccan cookery book

La Maison Arabe

This cookbook might be hard to find. I have a copy because a friend who visited Morocco gave it to me. It was published by the current owner of La Maison Arabe - a riad-hotel (a riad is a traditional Moroccan villa) that opened in 1946 and closed in the early 1980s. After Prince Fabrizio Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa purchased it in 1994, he reopened and expanded the place and it now has two restaurants and a cooking school, as well as a swimming pool and an organic garden.

This slim volume is as much a brochure for La Maison Arabe's amenities (such as the hammam and gardens) as it is a cookbook of recipes by the establishment's dadas (traditional Moroccan cooks). Anyone who is slightly interested in Moroccan cuisine knows tagine and bastilla are two of the country's famous dishes. I knew there were varieties of tagine, but until I read this book, didn't realise it was the same for bastilla. There is a recipe for the chicken and almonds variety, the one people are most familiar with (and the first one I plan to try), but also for seafood, vegetables and even dessert interpretations.

Other recipes sound just as tempting. There's briwat (pastry parcels) filled with cheese or ground meat; eggplant salad; saffron pumpkin soup; couscous with seven vegetables; roasted lamb shoulder; chicken tagine with apricots and argan oil; mhencha (sheets of dough filled with nuts, butter and sugar, and flavoured with orange blossom water and cinnamon); saffron tea; and Moroccan almond milkshake.