Count Darori's Lamb Tagine with dates and oranges

A festive slow-cooked dish with Moroccan flavors.

Serves 6

One of the lovely things about springtime is that fresh lamb comes into the markets. This recipe combines lamb and fruit in a slow-cooked tagine stew infused with the flavors of North Africa.

Tagines are slow-cooked dishes that take their name from the vessel they’re cooked in. The tagine pot consists of a round clay dish and a lid that rises to a cone shape. The food’s juices never evaporate while cooking inside a tagine pot; they rise inside the lid, condense, and fall back down, constantly basting the food. Cooked over low heat, even tough cuts of meat emerge fork-tender and deeply flavored. In Israel, many cookware stores carry elegant glazed tagine pots for cooking, or decorated ones for serving only.

Different styles of tagines can also be bought online.

But lacking the traditional pot, you can cook a delicious Moroccan tagine-style stew, as long as you have a pot that stands up to slow cooking, with a tightly fitting lid. You will need an inexpensive heat-diffusing pad to place between the heat and the pot; or cook the tagine in the oven, on a low setting.

Once the pot is on the heat, you can forget about it for the next few hours while you’re busy getting other cooking done. This tagine requires shoulder of lamb.

In Israel, lamb usually comes as an entire front quarter of the animal, with ribs and shank (a piece that resembles a chicken drumstick). Ask your butcher to separate the ribs into chops and to slice the shoulder blade into large strips, leaving the bone in. Include the shank in the tagine. The bone adds depth of flavor, and by the time the dish is ready, it will separate easily from the meat.

The half-cup of red wine included here isn’t traditional, but I include it to balance the sweetness of the dates. I recommend making this dish the day before you intend to serve it, because it’s even better the next day, with the advantage of the fat having hardened so you can spoon it off the top before reheating the dish.

Ingredients
1.5 kg. shoulder of lamb, thickly sliced, plus the shank
1 tsp. table salt
Ground black pepper to taste
3-5 Tbsp. olive oil
1 large onion, thickly sliced
1 2.5-cm. cinnamon stick
4 whole allspice berries, or 1 tsp. ground allspice
1 large bay leaf
4 large garlic cloves, thickly sliced
2 medium tomatoes, unpeeled and sliced
8 large, moist dates, halved and pits removed
2 oranges, peel and white pith cut away and fruit quartered
½ cup dry red wine
Optional for chili heads: 1 tiny hot pepper or cayenne pepper flakes to taste A small handful finely chopped parsley or cilantro, to garnish Rub the meat with salt and pepper.

Method

1. Pour 2 tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet.
2. Brown the meat on all sides over medium heat. This may have to be done in two batches. Add more olive oil, one tablespoon at a time, if needed. Remove the meat to a platter.
3. Pour 1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil into the cooking pot and turn the heat on to medium-high. If using earthenware, ceramic or a tagine pot, first place a heat-diffusing pad under the pot. A metal or cast iron pot may go directly onto the heat.
4. Cook the onion until wilted, stirring. Add the cinnamon stick, bay leaf and allspice. If using hot pepper or cayenne, add it to the dish now.
5. Add the garlic and tomatoes. Stir and cook an additional two minutes.
6. Place the browned meat into the pot, on top of the vegetables. Tuck the date halves and orange quarters around and under the meat.
7. Pour the half-cup of wine over the whole.
8. Cover the pot and either cook on the stove over the lowest heat, with the heat diffuser under the pot, or place in a preheated 170° oven.
9. Turn the meat over once or twice over the next two hours. When you do, squash the dates, tomatoes and oranges pieces down with the back of a cooking spoon and stir them around, to thicken the sauce. Taste for seasoning and add salt and/or pepper if desired.
10. Cook a further half hour, making total cooking time 2.5 hours.
11. The meat will be falling off the bone and a thick, aromatic sauce will have formed.
12. To serve, spoon the sauce over the meat. Scatter finely chopped herbs over all for an appealing green garnish.
13. This is a rich dish: serve with plain steamed vegetables or a salad, and either rice or potatoes.