This is a chapter of stories, fragments, tastes, scents and interruptions. Ostensibly, it is a tale of ras el hanout, a Moroccan spice paste of varying complexity (literally meaning ‘head of the shop’ or ‘top of the shop’, implying the best mix the spice merchant has to offer). As well, it is a tale with occasional minor notes provided by preserved lemons, as these permeate the cooking, cookbooks and restaurants of North African/Middle Eastern cities such as Fez, Marrakech, Tunis and Cairo (Guinaudeau, 2003, 43–45; Roden, 1985, 63, 65). These are the tastes of my tale.

However, this tale is not a linear one in the tradition of many food histories, even the most imaginative ones. Instead, I am more interested in bringing together a mosaic of fragments, loosely connected in time and space, to address intersecting meanings of heritage, hybridity and locality. My inspiration here is Iain Chambers’ approach to undoing dominant myths of modernity, particularly their Eurocentric framings – ‘cartographies of power and knowledge that charted a European expansion on a planetary scale’ from the early sixteenth century onwards (2008, 2). Instead, through attention to ‘sounds, smells and silences’, to ‘deceptively marginal details – drawn from a dish, a mosaic, a voice’, as Chambers suggests, we might trouble taken-for granted outlines of culinary and cultural histories (2008, 131).