Ras el-hanout

One of the traditional two dozen; it supplies the cooling bitter edge.

Tagine: the rose note is what stops the fat tasting like a roast dinner.

Steamed over the pot so the grain takes perfume instead of just liquid.

Dried stone fruit and warm spice, stewed until neither is separable.

Pale meat is a canvas; the blend supplies floral, warm and hot at once.

Root sugars against rose; roasted, the two stop being distinguishable.

Salt-fermented peel against floral warmth. The two poles of a Moroccan pot.

Toasted nut under perfume; the fat is what keeps the rose from soaping.

Flat starch takes a loud blend without flattening any single part of it.

Rose, mace and pepper together give the sugar twenty things to argue with.

Rose and warm spice make the sugar read as perfume, not dessert.

Spongy flesh drinks spiced oil whole; nothing sits on the surface at all.

Floral on floral, and the pepper in the blend keeps it from reading as jam.

Roast brassica sulfur under rose; strange on paper, obvious on the plate.

Fat bird takes floral spice better than lamb, and nobody in Fez tries it.

Rose and cocoa; the pepper is what keeps it from turning into a candle.

Both floral and resinous. The paste becomes something you eat with cheese.