Moroccan cuisine

Moroccan cooking puts sweet next to salt without embarrassment: dried fruit in meat, cinnamon in soup, honey over lamb.

Moroccan cooking rests on preserves: salted lemons, aged smen butter, dried khlii meat. All of it was devised for a climate without refrigeration and stayed because it gives a flavour fresh ingredients cannot.

Spices are blended in advance and by the dozen. Ras el hanout — head of the shop — runs to twenty components or more, and every trader has his own.