Salade Mechouia

Name: Salade Mechouia
Cuisine: Tunisia
Ingredients: powdered coriander and caraway; ras el hanout; 1kg green peppers (the muddy colour is more pleasing than a mix with red would be. Hence, too, the small proportion of tomatoes); 250g tomatoes, halved; 8 unpeeled garlic cloves; olive oil; chilli oil

Preparation info

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

The Plagiarist in the Kitchen

By Jonathan Meades

Published 2017

About

One of the emblematic dishes of the Jewish pieds noirs, first encountered in a gloomy first-floor restaurant overlooking the Canal St Martin many years before that part of Paris had been socially cleansed to make way for dance studios and very important conceptual art spaces.

Ingredients

1kg green peppers (the muddy colour is more pleasing than a mix with red would be. Hence, too, the small proportion of tomatoes)
250g tomatoes, halved

Africa
Tunisia
Starter
Gluten-free
Vegan
Spicy
Mediterranean

Method

Grill the peppers till the skins are black. Packing them in a plastic bag to remove the skins is not enough. The plastic bag must go into the freezer. Leave it there for 15 minutes. They will then yield easily. Grill the tomatoes and garlic. Peel them. Get rid of pips, skins, germs. Heat a mix of chilli-infused oil and regular olive oil and add ras el hanout, coriander, caraway. Turn down heat,