Tfaya

Above is Tfaya baked chicken from Nargisse Benkabbou - now British, but born in Brussels to Moroccan born parents - chef and food writer, who spent many of her childhood holidays in Morocco. The recipe appeared two days ago on my New York Times desk calendar. You may not be able to access that recipe because New York Times has a pay wall.

However, you can find that lady's recipe elsewhere - on the Serious Eats website and also on the Great British Chefs website - both of which added couscous to the mix. And now that I have checked out all three again, I see that they are actually all slightly different versions of the same concept. The concept being the sauce of caramelised onions and raisins - the tfaya part. The Serious Eats recipe probably has the lengthiest introduction.

Anyway, I'm always intrigued by yet another sauce, spice mix or dish that someone has dragged out of an archive somewhere and decided to investigate. And this is where I first became confused, and then found, yet again, that sometimes you have to trawl through several Google pages before you find the answer to your confusion.

The confusion began when I started my investigations by checking out Robert Carrier's classic book A Taste of Morocco, because I wondered whether this was indeed a classic Moroccan dish, or something that had been 'discovered' recently, maybe even invented recently. So I looked up Tfaya, and found Tfaia - well it's just a different spelling isn't it? It had to be the same thing. But look at it. Boiled eggs - no caramelised onions or raisins in sight. It's a fairly simple tagine of lamb flavoured with onions, saffron, ginger, black pepper and coriander. Then you just boil down the sauce, pour it over and garnish with those hard-boiled eggs, and some fried almonds.

So I tried to find out more. Along the way I found a couple more versions of the onions and raisins kind - from Alice Storey on the SBS website, who presented Tfaya with lamb tagine and couscous and Tfaya from La Cuisine de Bernard whose recipe was just for the caramelised onion sauce.

At which point I began to understand that tfaya refers to the sauce, not the dish. It's an 'extra good thing' in the sense of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen's book. Things you add to a dish to make it special, but which can be used elsewhere as well. But where did Robert Carrier's boiled eggs come in?

Well I trawled some more through a few more pages, and eventually found Taste of Maroc and an article by Nada Kiffa in which she tells us much more about origins):

"It dates quite far back and its origin might be a mix of Persian-Baghdadi and Amazigh practices, perhaps connecting in Andalusia in the Middle Ages. During the period when the Almoravid dynasty controlled Andalusia, t’faya was referred to as tafaya. Ibn Rushd described it as the most balanced way of cooking all kinds of meat, and it was made by simmering meat in water with salt, onion and a touch of oil."

Still not quite what I had so far found - either onions or boiled eggs. But then she went on to explain that today there are actually three different types of tfaya, although the onion and raisin garnish is the most well-known.

The first is nearer to Robert Carrier's boiled eggs, although his tagine was rather simpler. Nada Kiffa says of this:

"Whenever I mention the traditional savory t’faya dish from Fez, I have to explain it in detail and sometimes convince others that there is a world aside from the onion and raisin garnish, and that t’faya as a word is not monochrome. ... T’faya as a tagine is slow-cooked dish of stewed meat and onions, seasoned with pepper, ginger, saffron, cinnamon and coriander. It’s usually associated with almonds, which are either be simmered with the meat or fried in butter or oil and and then added at serving. Sometimes we include chickpeas, with or without raisins, and we might add hard-boiled eggs as a garnish." Nada Kiffa / Taste of Maroc

The sauce of this dish is 'light and clear'.

The second - and the most well-known is that sweet caramelised onion sauce, or confit. At this point I reinvestigated Claudia Roden because I remembered her book Arabesque, (A Book of Middle-Eastern Food, and Med had nothing). And there was a recipe for the Keksou Tfaya, the caramelised onion version on top of couscous and a lamb tagine. No picture though.

So I went searching to see if anyone had had a go at it, and found Lamb, prune and almond tagine with honeyed caramelised onions - which was an amalgam of two Claudia Roden recipes - a lamb tagine with prunes, and her Keksou tfya onion sauce, on a website called Confessions of a Cardamom Addict, which goes to prove the notion of the Taste of Maroc writer Nada Kiffa's explanation that the onion and raisin sauce can be used on top of many things. Indeed at its simplest it is often found on its own on top of plain couscous. I also found another Moroccan blog writer who also said that you could use any other kind of dried fruit. Though I must say this was not a common comment.

I almost forgot to mention the the third form of Tfaya - quite different again, being a custard, sabayon or soup and it's a Jewish dish served at Yom Kippur or to a couple on their wedding night, which sounds completely different.

As a kind of footnote to all of that I finally found another, more fanciful origin story that involves the onions and raisins from a website called Soups and Souks:

"According to legend, the dish was created by a wealthy merchant who wanted to impress his guests with an extravagant and flavorful meal. He combined the best ingredients he could find, such as slow-cooked meat, caramelized onions, and golden raisins, and thus Tfaya was born."

Caramelised onions are very 'in' these days. I'm not sure whether it would be just too sweet as a sauce - maybe it would be better with lamb than with chicken. I should try it someday. All the non Moroccans who had tried it seemed to think it was surprisingly delicious.

YEARS GONE BY

June 20 - it's my birthday - just another - but lovely - day really

2024 - Date night

2023 - Special birthdays - I love the header quote I chose - "There was a star danced, and under that star was I born." William Shakespeare Relevant to today's beautiful day.

2022 - Affogato in the Yarra Valley

2021 - Birthday fine dining

2020 - Deleted

2019 - A first recipe (part 2) - Thai curry pastes

2018 - Birthday celebrations

2017 - Nothing