Here is the latest guest post by my lovely friend Charles Perry, this time on a Moroccan carrot soup together with a picture of gorgeous red carrots which I saw in the market in Ras el-Khaimah, a small emirate bordering Oman. I am not sure if the red carrots will work in this recipe but I can imagine the colour to be pretty spectacular.

Charles Perry: In 2001, I attended a food festival in Fes, Morocco. Ostensibly, we were there to hear talks about food history. From their titles, the lectures didn’t seem to be very deep, but I could scarcely tell because they were all in French. I sat there bored and puzzled for two days until it was time for me to deliver mine.

I took a mighty revenge. I constructed a tight 750-word essay about the medieval Arab condiments made by rotting barley, which are revolting to consider but actually come out tasting like soy sauce, in which I emphasized the description of what the barley should look like when it was properly rotten: covered with “that which resembles spider webs” (ma yushbih bait al-‘ankabut).

Read more >