Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemon
The most famous dish in the Moroccan repertoire, and one of the great things you can do with an olive: chicken slow-braised with preserved lemon, olives and warm spices until it falls off the bone.
If there is one dish that shows what olives can do in cooking — not as a garnish but as a backbone of flavour — it is this. The olives and preserved lemon season the whole pot from within.
What you need
Chicken (thighs and legs, bone-in); a big handful of green olives (the Moroccan Picholine Marocaine is authentic; a Picholine or other firm green olive works); preserved lemon (skin only, chopped); onion, garlic, fresh ginger; and the spice base — saffron, cumin, ground coriander, a little turmeric and black pepper; coriander and parsley; good olive oil.
Method
Brown the chicken in oil; soften the onion, garlic and ginger; stir in the spices, return the chicken, add a little water, cover and braise gently for ~45 minutes until tender and the sauce is rich. Add the olives and preserved lemon in the last 10–15 minutes, scatter with herbs, and serve with bread or couscous to soak up the sauce.
The two rules that make or break a tagine. Add the olives and preserved lemon near the end — boiled for an hour they turn bitter and mushy and give up all their flavour to the pot; added late, they stay bright and perfume the dish. And taste before you add any salt: between the olives and the preserved lemon (which is essentially salt-cured lemon), the seasoning is largely done for you. Use a green Moroccan-style olive if you can — the dish was built around it.