Nargisse Benkabbou is kick-starting Britain’s modern Moroccan food revolution, and it’s about far more than just tagines, the food blogger tells Ella Walker

YOU might think you know what couscous is, but Nargisse Benkabbou is about to change all that. "When I came to England and people were eating their couscous completely differently, I was like, 'This is really weird'," says the food writer.

"In Morocco, the stuff in the packet, we call it semolina," she explains. "We have a dish we normally eat on Friday and it's steamed grains of semolina topped with vegetable broth and meat - and that is couscous. If you order couscous in Morocco - unless you're somewhere really touristy in Marrakesh - they'll always bring you the whole dish."

This is just one of many snippets of information about Moroccan food Benkabbou is hoping to illuminate with her debut cookbook, Casablanca - because chances are, unless you're actually Moroccan, you won't really know all that much about it.

"People think it's something exotic, or they think hummus is Moroccan. They're excited about it, but they don't cook it at home because they think it's very complicated, and it's not," says Benkabbou, who shared her recipes and food writing through her blog, MyMoroccanFood.com, before penning her book. "My mission is to bring Moroccan flavours into peoples' homes."

Although her food is informed by the dishes her mother and aunts fed the London-based chef, Casablanca is not a tome dedicated to traditional Moroccan cooking. Although the pages may be scattered liberally with traditional Moroccan ingredients and dishes - from ras el hanout and harissa, to tagines and (proper) couscous, and woven through with what gives Moroccan food its essence (vibrance, aromatics, spiciness, sourness and the "influences of so many civilisations - Persian, Arab, French, Ottoman, Turkish") - Benkabbou takes her food heritage and gives it a twist.

"What I aim to do is share traditional dishes and make them more accessible," explains Benkabbou. "I've been eating this food all of my life, and I know how far I can go when I want to tweak a recipe to make it accessible for someone who doesn't know about Moroccan food, so that's what I do."

"Every time I share a traditional recipe, there's part of my mum in the recipes and my grandfather - for me it's a wonderful way to give an homage - it makes me really happy."

  • Casablanca: My Moroccan Food by Nargisse Benkabbou, photography by Matt Russell (Mitchell Beazley, £20). Available now from octopusbooks.co.uk.

Harissa and lemon chicken tray bake with sweet potatoes

(Serves 4)

2 onions, sliced

8 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole

4 large chicken legs

1 large sweet potato, cut into large chunks

300g cauliflower florets

2 lemons, sliced

For the marinade

200ml vegetable stock

Finely grated zest of 3 lemons

3tbsp lemon juice

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

3tbsp harissa, plus extra to serve

2tbsp olive oil

2tbsp finely chopped fresh coriander

¼tsp salt, or more to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan), Gas Mark 6.

2. Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a bowl.

3. Spread the onions out in a deep roasting tin and scatter the garlic cloves all over. Place the chicken legs, skin-side up, on top with the sweet potato chunks and cauliflower florets. Pour over the marinade and turn the chicken legs several times to ensure that they are fully coated with the marinade. Top the whole dish with the lemon slices.

4. Bake for about one hour or until the chicken is golden and cooked through. Serve the chicken and vegetables immediately with extra harissa.

Pistachio, orange and olive oil flourless loaf cake

(Serves 8)

250g unsalted shelled pistachio nuts

4 large eggs, separated

100ml olive oil, plus extra for oiling

3tbsp orange juice

1tbsp vanilla extract

150g caster sugar

100g ground almonds

Finely grated zest of 1 large orange

½ tsp (heaped) salt

1tsp baking powder

1. Preheat the oven to 190°C (170°C fan), Gas Mark 5. Lightly oil a 900g loaf tin and line the base with baking paper.

2. Tip the pistachios into a food processor and pulse until ground to a flour consistency, but take care not to overgrind them, otherwise they could turn into pistachio butter. Transfer the ground pistachios to a bowl.

3. Mix the egg yolks, olive oil, orange juice and vanilla extract together in a large bowl until smooth. Add the remaining ingredients, except the egg whites, to the ground pistachios and mix together, then tip into the wet mixture and stir to combine, making sure that all the dry ingredients are moist.

4. Using a hand-held electric whisk, whisk the egg whites in a separate large bowl until stiff. Gently fold into the cake mixture with a large metal spoon.

5. Spread the cake mixture in the prepared tin and bake for 35-40 minutes or until the cake is golden and feels spongy to the touch, and a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out a little moist and sticky. Remove from the oven and leave the cake to cool in the tin for 10 minutes, then turn out, slice and serve.