Salads and other Moroccan Vegetable Dishes

Salads are a way of life in Morocco, where the city and the country markets are filled with wonderfully inexpensive vegetables and fruits brought in daily from the neighbouring country-side. A selection of vegetable salads is often served as a first course and then left on the table throughout the meal to serve as refreshing accompaniments to the richly flavoured tagines of meat, poultry and fish that make up the Moroccan menu.

Moroccan salads are not salads as we know them, but seem instead to be direct imports from the Middle Ages or some fabled twelfth-century Andaluz. Colourful combinations of simple vegetables – tomatoes, cucumber, sweet onion and green pepper – are often combined with black olives, cooked artichoke hearts or preserved lemons, always moistened with an olive oil dressing rich with the spiky flavours of chopped Moroccan garlic and the pungent leaves of fresh green coriander and flat-leafed (Italian) parsley. The dressing is sharpened by the addition of a little vinegar, or, better still, lemon juice from the tart little green and yellow lemons native to Marrakech that the Marrakshi call limouns. Add to this a sprinkling of coarse salt and both fiery hot and sweet red peppers and you have a passionate mix which leaves my European and American friends literally gasping with pleasure.