Surrounded by acres of date palms and a sprawling orchard, vegetable and herb garden, the 10-room guesthouse is an oasis of hushed courtyards, faded Berber rugs, candlelit lanterns, improbably perfumed flowers and unsurpassed hospitality. Minutes away the seductive chaos of the medina beckons with its tangle of souks selling everything from live chickens to spices brought up through the Sahara on camelback (or so they say). Who can fail to get a feel for Moroccan cookery in this setting?I’d eaten my share of the food over the years – great platters of couscous scattered with chickpeas, vegetables and lamb; elegant pastillas whose delicate filo crusts hid a mixture of pigeon and eggs laced with cinnamon, almonds and sugar; tagines of chicken and preserved lemons cooked in traditional conical covered earthenware dishes. I’d dutifully equipped my kitchen with bags of imported couscous; little packets of ras el-hanout (the mysterious spice mixture no Moroccan home is without); bright tubes of spicy harissa; and an embarrassing number of cookbooks What I was lacking was context. The Moroccan diet might spring from the same Mediterranean bounty as southern Europe’s, but its methods, flavours and traditions come from a rich and sensual world of their own.Our first day began with the staple of Moroccan cooking: couscous.

An outdoor kitchen had been set up in the late morning shade of a courtyard. Our teacher was a young woman named Bahija; her dark hair tied up in a white kerchief. She seemed shy, but melted into earnest expressiveness the moment she began to speak.She told us that couscous is both the name of Morocco’s most famous dish and the tiny semolina granules used to make it (just as a tagine is both the name for the earthenware vessel used to slow cook stews over a brazier and the stew itself).We learned that couscous is not, in fact, a grain, but coarse ground semolina flour (or less frequently barley) mixed with water and rolled into little balls, then passed through sieves and dried to form the tiny uniform specks. We also learned by what magic the tiny granules are steamed – three times – over a pot of simmering vegetables without falling through the holes into the spice-laced broth.”You have to work the couscous … make sure it doesn’t form lumps,” she explained, spreading the dry granules on to a round platter and moistening them with fistfuls of water and a splash of vegetable oil.

Her hands moved quickly over the plate, rubbing the granules lightly between flat palms as if as each one needed to be gently coaxed into action. In between tossing chunks of aubergine, pumpkin and courgette into the couscoussier, Bahija taught us how to make two of the traditional accompaniments: tfaya, a sweet onion and raisin confit spiced with pepper and ground ginger; and a brilliantly fiery harissa made with home-grown chillies, garlic, paprika, caraway and cumin. fAfter a morning’s cooking, our efforts became lunch, matched with several glasses of chilled local ros?hat, like most Moroccan wines, works well enough under the shade of a date palm but tastes a bit like it was made by someone who doesn’t actually drink the stuff.We became Bahija’s faithful acolytes, watching her every move in awe, and scribbling down notes But we found it difficult to achieve the same results Take the fiendishly complex pastilla. Layers of the papery round sheets of dough (similar to filo) were laid out on a huge platter like overlapping flower petals, painted with butter and then layered with meat, more filo, egg, cinnamon and almond, more filo and so on until the whole thing was a few inches high.

At this point Bahija folded over the “petals”, laid another filo sheet on top, painted the whole thing with egg yolk and smoothed the surface with her hands, pushing all the air out. By now the construction that had seemed so utterly delicate and fragile at the beginning was as sturdy as a well wrapped parcel.We learned to preserve lemons, prizing them open and sprinkling them with salt. And we chopped up boiled purslane for terjla, the agreeably tart salad which begins many Moroccan meals. The purslane is steamed with three cloves of garlic, mixed with fresh tomatoes (peeled, seeded and blended), cumin, paprika, olive oil, harissa, salt and pepper Other salads are simple and never green. Tomatoes were always dressed with oil – sometimes olive, sometimes not – and usually sprinkled with cumin powder. In restaurants some vegetable salads are dressed with orange blossom water.As for the tagines, their cooking all happens in the closed darkness of the terracotta vessel (though, alas, sometimes also in a regular soup pot and then transferred into a tagine). The best tagines can be found on roadside stands, the individual pots all lined up in a row, sitting on their little braziers.