The ingredients: to make chicken, lemon and olive tagine, you’ll need onions, garlic, saffron, cumin, paprika, fresh ginger, fresh coriander, tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper, green olives, chicken pieces and preserved lemons.

And a tagine dish. Don’t buy the colourful painted ones — they’re only for decoration; you need a plain clay one from the souk (these are cheaper, too).

Then the chicken. Buy this one ingredient at the supermarket. Get your spices from the Berber-owned stalls on the outside left-hand corner of the souk and, for the best fruit and vegetables, including the preserved lemons, visit the open market on Houman El Fetouaki.

If you make a tagine containing honey (the majority do), Rettali has a little test: “Take a spoonful of the honey and let it drip down to the sandy floor. If it stays as one mass, it’s a pure honey; if it spreads out into the sand, it’s bad.” Smelling, tasting and handling produce is normal in Morocco, so don’t be shy.

How to do it: the night before your feast, marinate the chicken in olive oil, saffron, ginger, coriander, paprika, cumin and pepper. The next day, about an hour before you want to eat, set the tagine dish on the stove. Fry the onions, garlic and residue marinade for a couple of minutes.

Turn down the heat and add the chicken, constantly pouring the juices over it for 45-50 minutes (beef and lamb tagines take up to two hours). Five minutes before time’s up, add the preserved lemons and olives. Place the domed lid over the tagine and serve to your friends with a platter of couscous and green salad.

MAGNATUM PICO
ITALY
You are going to spend only 30 minutes or so cooking this meal, but you will remember it all your life. It requires no great culinary expertise, for the essence of eating truffles is that their unique, astonishing taste — a mixture of dark caves, sweaty socks, garlic, Marmite, mushrooms and a powerful, pheromone-laden waft of sex — is best appreciated with the simplest of accompaniments. Oh, and a very great wine.

The venue: you can eat black truffles all over Europe, but only one or two places are home to magnatum pico, the white variety. More aromatic than its black cousin, it is said to absorb the flavour of the tree whose roots it grows in, like wine ageing in wood.

The centre of the Italian white-truffle trade is Alba, in Le Langhe. It’s a laid-back place: the Slow Food movement is based nearby, and the palio takes place on donkeys rather than horses. It’s at its best in autumn, when the endless vineyards turn into a riot of reds and golds. By a happy coincidence, that’s white-truffle season. Find a villa and fill it with friends — Piedmont Properties (www.smithgcb.demon.co.uk) has Cascina Lamberetto, an old farmhouse that sleeps six, in the village of San Marzano Oliveto, from £750 a week. Fly to Turin with British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com), EasyJet (www.easy jet.com) or Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com).

The ingredients: the truffle market in Alba is open to the public on Saturdays. There’s even an inspector to ensure your purchase isn’t actually scented mud (it has been known). If it isn’t Saturday, try Tartufi Ponzio, at Via Vittorio Emanuele 26. For six people, buy something the size of a ping-pong ball — about 70g — and expect to pay about £140.

Locals eat their truffles with fresh tajarin pasta, simply tossed in butter, but as we’re planning a feast, we’re going to aim a bit higher and do risotto. You’ll need 600g of local carnaroli, “the caviar of rice”, an onion, vegetables for stock, parsley and parmesan, all from Aldo Martino at Corso Cortemilia 43. If he still has white peaches, buy them — some will make presupper bellinis and some will finish the meal.

Speaking of drink, your next stop is Enoteca Albese Il Crutin on Via Cuneo. Few wines can match the local Barolo for mystique, and a couple of bottles of 1998 Roberto Voerzio is a good bet. After what you’ve just shelled out for a mushroom, £70 or £80 on wine will seem a bargain, so chuck in a couple of bottles of sweet moscato for the end of the meal. It may say Asti Spumante on the label, but, trust me, it won’t taste anything like the bottle you had at the office party. While you’re at it, choose dessert. Pasticceria Cheinasso (Corso Langhe 88) is famous for its moist torta di nocciole.

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