Domenica Marchetti is a food writer, recipe developer and cooking teacher who specializes in seasonal Italian home cooking and the author of The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy. Visit her website at www.domenicacooks.com. You can find more of her recipes here.

I have only been to Morocco by way of the movie Casablanca and through the words of my former cleaning woman, Fatima.

Like me, Fatima is an avid home cook and every other Tuesday when she would arrive, we would spend a good amount of time talking about food we had cooked for our families. She described in vivid detail delicious-sounding tagines of lamb or chicken, the proper way to make couscous, and soups featuring lentils and other legumes, assorted fresh vegetables, and spices.

When she traveled home to Morocco to visit her mother, she would always return with a supply of spices for me — cinnamon, cumin, ground pepper and paprika. She brought homemade semolina pancakes for my children, which we warmed in the oven and enjoyed with honey drizzled over them.

At first, it seemed to me that our two cuisines, Moroccan and Italian, couldn’t be more different, with Moroccan being much more spice-laden and, I thought, discordant, with its tendency to mix sweet and savory. But, in fact, this culinary habit also persists in parts of Italy, particularly in the South where it is common to see ingredients such as raisins and sugar added to savory dishes of fish or vegetables that have also been seasoned with lemon or vinegar.

Couscous, meanwhile, is North Africa’s answer to pasta. And both cuisines rely, for the most part, on simple cooking techniques, the use of fresh ingredients and the ability to elevate vegetables to star status. The closer I looked, the more similarities I found.

The tanking economy demanded I give up some of my middle-class luxuries, including Fatima. More than her house-cleaning skills (which, if truth be told, were somewhat lacking) I miss listening to her talk about what she was cooking, whether it was a chicken and eggplant tagine spiked with preserved lemon, or a meal-in-one vegetable soup brightened by a mix of hot and sweet spices.

Recently I thought about Fatima when I purchased a tagine. I had wanted to buy one for a long time, and the one I found was oven-proof ceramic with a beautiful green glaze on its conical cover. I confess that I have yet to cook with it, but the purchase has spurred my interest in Moroccan cooking. I decided to get my feet wet by making a vegetable soup that Fatima had once described to me and that strikes me as very similar to Italian minestrone, only with more spices.

I cobbled together this recipe from various sources, including a version in Cooking at the Kasbah by Kitty Morse, Fatima’s descriptions and my own (hopefully not too misguided) intuition. I can’t claim that it is in any way authentic, but I can tell you that it good.

Recipe: Moroccan Minestrone (Domenica Marchetti)

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