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MAISON MNABHA FOOD Lonely Planet rates Maison Mnabha as one of the top five riads in Marrakech for food 'Marrakech Encounter' (Lonely Planet Best of Series) 2008
'Bissara', a Berber purée or soup made from dried broad beans. Just before eating the bissara the best olive oil is dribbled on to it and it is sprinkled with cumin.
Morocco is renowned for its food. Ingredients and methods imported from all over the western and eastern Mediterranean, from Africa and the Middle East have been absorbed into Moroccan cooking. With distinctive variations in regional dishes it is however difficult to speak of a single style of Moroccan cuisine. Cooking at Maison Mnabha centres on the freshness and quality of the local ingredients, a respect for the cooking traditions of our region both in the city itself and in the outlying countryside and an appreciation that in Marrakech food is essentially a Mediterranean diet that is now recognized as the healthiest in the world.
Home made preserved lemons give a distinctive accent to many of the dishes served at Maison Mnabha. Small, round and thin skinned lemons (a regional variety that is known as 'limoun doqq') are used by us to make the salted lemons. From the roof terraces of Maison Mnabha the ancient olive groves of the Royal Agdal Gardens can be seen. Fine local olives and fruity Moroccan olive oil are used extensively in the food prepared at the house. In the foreground of the photograph preserved hot peppers accompany sun dried strips of meat [khlii].
Marrakech has always been a city of farmers and most families retain close links with the countryside. The fruit, vegetables, meat, poultry and herbs that we buy in the local market are brought in daily from the farms in the vicinity and the food that is served at Maison Mnabha is made from produce that is imported from less than a fifty miles radius from the city.
Figs (left) are a summer treat that are served at the house either fresh or lightly sprinkled with caster sugar from the vanilla pod jar and then baked. 'Barbary figs' or prickly pears (right) are of course neither figs nor pears. They are the fruit of a cactus that grows wild in the countryside. Barbary figs are sold on the streets of Marrakech in the summer and can be eaten on the spot or made into a delicate jam to savour later.
The local fruit and vegetables are seasonal so we cook and serve food accordingly.
For an all too brief period the much anticipated cherry season in the High Atlas gives us the opportunity to cook Atlas quails with cherries.
Regional cooking methods and ingredients are featured at Maison Mnabha. A Tangia is taken to a neighbourhood hammam [traditional public bathhouse] to be cooked. This method of cooking is found only in the cities of Marrakech and Fes. For thousand of years local Berbers have extracted Argan oil from the nut of a tree that grows in a small area of southern Morocco between the Atlantic and High Atlas. It is one of the rarest and most highly prized edible oils in the world.
A Marrakech tangia (left) is the name both of the dish when it is served on the table and of the classically shaped rustic pot in which it is cooked. The tangia is prepared at Maison Mnabha and the pot is taken to the neighbourhood hammam [public bathhouse] where it cooks slowly for at least six hours in the glowing embers from the hammam's wood burning furnace. Argan oil (right), the kernels from which the oil is extracted and toasted home made olive bread.
A 'tagine slaoui' with its distinctive conical top is a cooking pot in which a tagine can be cooked and served. Tagines are invariably cooked on top of the fire and not in an oven.
Traditional Moroccan salads often consist of lightly cooked vegetables flavoured with spices and served at room temperature. The salad on the left combines tomatoes and sweet peppers fried in olive oil and mixed with roughly cut raw tomatoes and peppers. The salad on the right is a mixture of green peppers, tomatoes and the diced skins of preserved lemons.
Chicken with olives is a classic Moroccan combination. The warm, rich flavour of the chicken is balanced by the fresh taste of the chopped parsley and lemon salad that accompanies it.
Lamb shanks cooked with rosemary. The lamb is supplied by Mostapha our excellent butcher in the Kasbah and the rosemary is grown at the house.
Fruit salads and home made ice cream
Moroccan Apple Cake
Gâteau Maison and Caramel Mousse
HOME COOKING
Antique copper water jars and cooking pots
In Marrakech cooking is an art that has evolved not in famous restaurants but within the grand private kitchens of palaces, domestically in the houses of its ordinary citizens and in the rural areas of the surrounding countryside. Although vendors of cooked food are to be seen everywhere in the streets of Marrakech they cater mainly for casual eating and home cooking has always been at the heart of the life of the city. As the preference is to eat at home for entertaining for both pleasure and business, the local inhabitants of Marrakech are seldom to be seen eating in the old city in the well known restaurants that are recommended by guidebooks and magazines. At Maison Mnabha we don't have a restaurant but cook to order, buying the ingredients in the market in the morning in order to prepare our house dishes for the evening.
DINNER Dinner can be ordered in the morning by house guests and is served by candlelight in one of the salons or outdoors on the patio or roof terrace
Dinner for non residents at Maison Mnabha is by appointment only (at least 24 hours in advance).
Meals on arrival A meal can be pre-ordered for the day of arrival at Maison Mnabha
Snacks From 12.30 p.m. to 3.00 p.m. a variety of light lunchtime snacks are available
Mediterranean snacks, salads and regional specialities such as argan oil, Moroccan favourites like merguez (small sausages) and kefta (meatballs in tomato sauce) are served at lunchtime.
Merguez
Kefta and spices. Saffron is grown in the foothills of the High Atlas Mountains
We recognize that some of our guests have particular dietary needs and we are able on request to cater for vegetarian and special diets.
All the photographs in this section (with the exception of the tangia photographed in the neighbourhood hammam) were taken at Maison Mnabha and all the food in the photographs was prepared at Maison Mnabha.
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