OP: Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco

$125 · Offered by Kitchen Arts & Letters · No longer available

Couscous—in a choice of brands and flavors—abounds on the shelves of your local supermarket. Spicy harissa is called for in magazine recipes for stews and kabobs. The foods and flavors of North Africa—of Morocco in particular—are notably present in our kitchens and on restaurant menus. If any one person is primarily responsible for Americans diversifying their pantries and dinner tables with the food and flavors of the southwestern Mediterranean, it is the highly respected cook and food writer Paula Wolfert (1938– ). She did so in no casual manner, introducing not only a cuisine little-known at the time but also a rich portion of the history and the cultures from which it sprung. Wolfert actually accomplished much more than that, going far beyond the normal practice of recipe collecting. Conscientiously, she devoted herself to experiencing the world, the kitchens, and the people—mainly women—who raised or purchased the ingredients, set the menus, determined what foods would be served and the times appropriate to serve them, prepared the dishes and fed their families or sometimes their customers. Her approach was based on putting herself in the middle of the many processes, being what anthropologists call a “participant observer.” Indeed, she lived in Morocco for a number of years, immersing herself as much as was possible for a foreigner. Justifiably, she has been frequently referred to as a food ethnologist. But Couscous is not a scholarly tome; it is a rich, deep, fully-rea

• Binding: Hardcover

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