Casablanca Cuisine

Aline Benayoun

195 x 130 PB 155 PP 1897959338 $21.95 Food and Wine APN 9781897959336 Serif

Casablanca Cuisine recreates the lost world of the pieds noirs, French settlers in North Africa, and is a perfect example of food as the meeting point of cultures. Offering such delights as chicken with olives, tuna with red peppers and capers, and date and almond nougat, this is the first ever book on this healthy and sophisticated cuisine.

Borrowing ideas and ingredients from their Arab neighbours, the pieds noirs learned to cook meat with fruit and created delicacies such as lamb with pears, chicken with quinces and meatballs with lemon. Combining European vegetables with a North African spice, they made a beetroot and carrot salad with cumin, while in creating a mint soup they took the most typical of local herbs and made a refreshing soup in the classic French manner.

Like all North African cuisines, pied noir cooking places great importance on fresh ingredients, and Aline Benayoun presents a full range of tasty and nutritious vegetable, fish and meat dishes as well as salads and pied noir versions of couscous.