I loved Leila. She was half Iranian, from Tabriz, and half French, from Troyes. Her father had been an Iranian physician trained in France, where he met her mother. She grew up in Iran, vacationing at her mother's ancestral home during the summers.

Leila and her American husband were my landlords and good friends when I lived in Rabat, Morocco's capital, for a year. They lived in a French villa and I rented out the lower floor, which was once the servants' quarters, but in my time it was a grand spacious marble-floored apartment that led out to the overgrown high-walled garden of the property.

We hit it off so well that we often shared lunch or dinner with each other each day. Prior to meals, I would join Leila and Zuhur in the upstairs kitchen to chop and chat about the day. Zuhur was a local woman from nearby Saló who helped Leila with the cooking and cleaning. She had every French, Moroccan, and Iranian recipe she had ever cooked--for the many expats in the city who competed to get her to cook for them--tucked away in her head, right down to the most to miniscule and succulent details.

One day, Zuhur was making a salad Leila taught her, one Leila had most during those summers of growing up in Troyes. I sat on a high stool in the kitchen and watched Zuhur mix the dressing and began to jot it down in my notebook. Zuhur stopped emulsifying the olive oil with the lemon juice, crushed capers, and Dijon mustard, and looked at me with scrutiny and then smiled. "You literate people are stupid," she said. "You have to write everything down once you learn to read and write."

Zuhur was typically Moroccan. She was direct and told me what she thought while still reserving enough guile for use later on: Don't reveal all your cards, but reveal the ones you do with panache. (The French doubtless learned a thing or two about panache from the Moroccans, and vice versa.)

Zuhur then confessed she had never learned to read and write. She explained that it was just a different way of navigating the world. She added that she noticed more than literate folks.

"You miss a lot of details," she explained, "when you think you can preserve it on paper. But you use your mind less. Isn't it like the rest of your body? What happens when you exercise it less? What happens when a fire burns your notes?"

How could I argue? I conceded to potential stupidity but kept my notebook out. If I was stupid, I needed to write down what she was doing. That dressing was the best I've ever tasted, then or since.

Leila would often come and go from the kitchen, look in on Zuhur's progress, rinse the butter leaf lettuce we'd bought at the market that morning and leave it to dry, and then go off and set the table and uncork a bottle of Amazir red, a good Moroccan-grown vintage from the Meknes valley near Fez. The cuisine was often a mix of Iranian, French, Moroccan, and American, as were the languages we spoke during the meal.

A few short years after that year in Morocco, Leila died. She was my mother's age, in her sixties at the time, and far too young in our modern reckoning to leave. Though she took that final and ultimate pilgrimage, Leila left so much of herself in me and she is still here in so many ways, especially when I step into the kitchen. And like Zuhur, I've become smarter, whipping up dishes without looking at a book. But I still jot things down. I'll never be able to retain details like Zuhur.

(Serves 4)
2 heads butter leaf lettuce, rinsed and spread on a clean cotton cloth to dry
2 finely minced shallots

The Caper Dressing:
1 teaspoon capers
1 small clove garlic
Juice from half a lemon
Gray sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/8 cup olive oil

Place the 1 teaspoon of capers on a wooden chopping board and gently smash them with your knife and then roughly chop them. Place the minced capers in the bottom of a large salad bowl. Mince very finely the garlic clove and add it to the bowl. Next add the lemon juice, the freshly ground black pepper, the gray sea salt (from Normandy or Brittany, the better!), add the Dijon mustard and whisk together. Stream in the olive oil while continuing to whisk.

Set it aside the dressing until you are ready to eat. At that time, hand-tear the dry leaves of butter leaf lettuce and add them and the shallots to the bowl. Toss well, and serve.

Chewy, crusty bread is always a nice addition, along with a soft or semisoft cheese, such as Camembert, Bethmale, Cantal, or Reblochon, and a couple bowls of olives, such as cracked green herb olives and little black nicoise olives. More decadent, if you can get your hands on those delectable, fresh white anchovy filets--the real thing, not the pungent version most Americans associate with anchovies--that also is a welcome addition to this meal.

Though I met Leila in Morocco, her cooking reflected a lot of her mother's French background (as well as her father's Iranian), and this salad comes from her French lineage. Lucky for us, Troyes is in the Champagne region. Pick a champagne that is full-bodied and more mature (if you can find it and afford it, a Millósime is nice; it is allowed to mature for a longer time than most and goes well with food).

You can also hunt down the Moroccan Amazir red that was so much a part of our bread breaking in Morocco.