I’ve had a lot of memorable experiences during the past three weeks I’ve spent in Morocco. Although my primary reason for traveling here this summer was to study Arabic and learn Darija, the regional dialect spoken across the country, I also arrived with an interest in exploring the local cuisine, because, as is often emphasized in language classes, language and culture are closely bound together.
One of my favorite experiences was participating in a cooking workshop where I learned how to make tajine, a traditional slow-cooked dish made with various combinations of vegetables, meat, dried fruits, and spices. My class spent several hours at the home of a local family, who welcomed us into their kitchen and shared the process of preparing tajine with us. 
We got to witness the dish develop through each stage of preparation, from the fresh vegetables that we chopped and carefully stacked in the large clay tajine dish, to the many spices that were sprinkled on top, and finally, the finished product bubbling with juices.
Also, we discover how to bake the traditional round bread that is sold on nearly every street in Rabat and across Morocco, putting together simple but foundational ingredients like flour and water to create the perfect accompaniment for our tajne as it cooked over hot coals from the fire. We learned how to shape the dough before throwing it into a pan that sat above the heat of a wood-burning oven. But whether it bakes over a live fire or in a gas range oven, this simple bread is an underpinning of Moroccan culture, lending itself to the dozens of dishes it can accompany.
Central to my orientation to Moroccan food culture has been geting to see the ways that different people prepare the same dishes, whether by using different ratios of spices or extra ingredients for a bit of extra flavorful flair. My host mother in Rabat, for example, loves to add simsim (sesame seeds) to her dishes, and in her bread, it adds the little bit of crunch and flavor needed to take it to the next level.
However, food isn’t just cultural- it’s intricately tied to language, and ultimately, making connections. Despite having taken three years of Arabic classes during my university studies, I found myself lacking a lot of food vocabulary that had never come up during classroom discussions. While I knew a lot of the basics (like the words for eggs, meat, or apricots) Morocco continually presents me with new vocabulary words in the kitchen and at the table. Asking the name of a dish or ingredient is a simple conversation starter, which often reveals cultural intricacies. Since I arrived in Morocco, I quickly learned about some of the differences between Moroccan and Standard Arabic. For example, the Morocan Arabic word limun might initially deceive speakers of English, French, or Spanish, like me, into thinking that it refers to a lemon, instead of the word’s actual meaning, which is an orange!
Learning through cooking and food is one of my favorite parts of studying abroad because I have the opportunity to learn culture and language simultaneously, just by immersing myself in daily life. Food offers a simple way to learn new vocabulary, giving me the skills to talk about the world around me, but in Arabic!
