Food with that Moroccan zing

Sunny dishes, cheerful flavours, food with a zing are perfect for spring, especially for entertaining at the weekend, and you can take a little time over it.

And it is often to Morocco that I turn for inspiration when I want to cook this sort of food and the fabulous dishes I watched being prepared in La Mamounia’s kitchens in Marrakesh, the tagines and the pastillas especially.

The salmon stuffed with dates is my own creation, but was inspired by both the sea bass cooked with dates, which is one of Boujemaa Mars’ specialties, the then chef at the Mamounia, and the recipe for shad stuffed with dates described by Madame Guinaudeau in Fez – Traditional Moroccan Cooking, first published in 1957.

Mine takes rather less than the 4½ hours required for the Fassi recipe, for salmon does not have the same bone structure as shad, which needs long slow cooking to ‘dissolve’ the bones. This recipe can be most successfully adapted to a good-size lampuka, if you can get it. I felt very fortunate in even being able to get hold of one large fish this past season.

The chef passed on some extraordinary recipes to me, including one for a pastilla of foie gras, which he developed with Alain Senderens, but I have preferred to concentrate on the more traditional form of this delicate sweet and savoury pie, made for wedding feasts and banquets.

It is made with squab, (unfledged pigeons) and over a hundred layers of tissue-fine ouarka, or pâte de brik, for which you can substitute filo pastry; and free-range chicken makes a good substitute for squab. I have also made pastilla with rabbit which was very good indeed.

It is not an entirely easy dish with wine, for the meat filling is combined with spices, sugar, almonds, dried fruit and a layer of eggs, scrambled. In a Moroccan meal the pastilla is served before a tagine or couscous. There we have drunk dry Moroccan rosé wine with it, or fresh mint tea. I recommend you seek out the Giulio Cocchi Spumante Brut.

The meal might begin with a colourful selection of easy and inexpensive salads vegetable salads, carrots with cumin; tomatoes with peeled red peppers and chick peas, grilled courgettes with coriander, roasted aubergine dip, broad bean purée, all accompanied by warm bread and plenty of extra virgin olive oil, lemons and olives.