Pouring Mint Tea in Fez

The pot goes up and the glass stays down, and the tea falls a foot through the air and lands with a head of foam on it. That is the point of the pour — the leaves turn over, the tea takes air, and the whole room hears it happen. Atay is gunpowder green, spearmint and sugar, made by the head of the household and handed to the guest. The glasses are small and there are three of them: the first as bitter as life, the second as strong as love, the third as gentle as death, as the saying goes, though tellers vary the words.

Tea came late, and it came through a palace. It reached Morocco at the start of the eighteenth century by way of the court of Sultan Moulay Ismail, and stayed inside that court for a hundred years; Ahmed ben al-Mubarak was the first man to hold the office of mul atay, master of tea. The story goes that British merchants, shut out of Baltic markets by the Crimean War, unloaded Chinese gunpowder green at Tangier and Mogador in 1854 — that part is told as story. What is documented is that imports quadrupled in the twenty years after the Anglo-Moroccan treaty of 1856. A national drink, a century and a half old.

In Fez the spice market is the Souk al-Attarine, and the madrasa Abu Sa'id Uthman II built beside its entrance between 1323 and 1325 takes its name from it. Ras el hanout means head of the shop — the best the seller has, made up on the spot, with no fixed recipe. A good mixture holds more than twenty spices and some are said to run to a hundred, among them grains of paradise, orris root, cubebs and dried rosebuds. At Eid al-Adha it goes into mrouzia, a sweet-and-salt tagine with honey, cinnamon and almonds.

Ras El Hanout here is our own reading of that idea, weighted to the warm sweet end: chiles, turmeric, allspice, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and cardamom, with no cumin or coriander in it — which is why Cumin Seed, Whole sits beside it rather than inside it. Toast the cumin and the Caraway Seed, Whole in a dry pan for the carrot salad and you will smell the souk.

Chermoula is the marinade the fish goes into — coriander, parsley, garlic, cumin, paprika and lemon — and an hour is enough. Gunpowder, Organic and Spearmint are the two halves of the glass, and they are worth buying together, because one without the other is only half the afternoon.

Six products. One table, and a pour you will practise.