Mourad Lahlou and Paula Wolfert would not seem to have much in common.

He is 43 and the chef of Aziza in San Francisco, his arms decorated with tattoos that signify "strength" in Arabic, a son of Casablanca, Morocco, who works wonders with spices and preserved lemons, sous vide and meat glue.

She is 73, a daughter of Brooklyn, an industrious ex-hippie and renowned culinary anthropologist in Sonoma, Calif., whose favorite kitchen tool is an unglazed clay pot.

But for more than 40 years, both have been immersed in the flavors, aromas and techniques of the Moroccan kitchen. And now each has just written an authoritative and enticing cookbook — from diametrically opposed perspectives.

Wolfert, the outsider, is the stickler for authenticity and tradition.

"He has made this incredible jump," Wolfert said of the food at Aziza. "But his food is not the Moroccan cooking I know. He took steps that only he could take."

Lahlou, the native son, is the activist for change and modernity.

"We started from the same point in time in Morocco, but she looks backward, and I look forward," he said.

As much as he respects Wolfert's work, Lahlou said that her depiction of Morocco may have kept Americans — and even Moroccans themselves — from tasting its true potential.

Wolfert's new book, "The Food of Morocco" (Ecco), is a magisterial rework of the book that put her on the map in 1973, "Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco." After its publication, she lived in Morocco for several more years, then moved on to study other Mediterranean cuisines.

"I didn't think there was any 'Son of Couscous' to be done," she said.

Lahlou's book, "Mourad: New Moroccan" (Artisan), is a more personal, idiosyncratic work that flows mostly from two small rooms: his family's kitchen in Marrakesh, and his own in San Francisco. It perfectly illustrates his mission: to use the tools of the modern chef to rethink Moroccan food from the ground up.

"Why are we still cooking the vegetables so much? Why does the meat have to be so dry?" he said, referring to the traditional slow-cooking methods that make the most of less-than-sparkling ingredients. "Why can't we enjoy the flavor of the meat and use less spices? Everything starts to taste the same."

The native food culture of Morocco was that of the Berbers and Bedouins who lived there, on the northwest edge of the Sahara; later, successive bastings in Arab, Persian, Spanish, Turkish and French influence made the cuisine rich and complex.

"Lamb with honey and prunes, chicken with olives, couscous," said Lahlou, who came to the United States as a college student in 1986. "The first time I went back, I was stoked to eat," he said. "It was amazing the first day, but then it became apparent to me that there was not going to be anything else."

The food of Morocco, Lahlou said, is extraordinary but has become stuck in a few narrow ruts.

"Changing the herb garnish on a tagine is still considered daring," he said. "Cooks are afraid to change the way things have always been done."

And, he said, the old-school dishes do not reflect modern Moroccan reality; now there are high-quality ingredients, ample refrigeration and skilled cooks with access to food media, the Internet and foreign travel.

"The Morocco I was born into was very poor, and very rural," he said. At that time, Wolfert said, about 80 percent of the population lived outside the major cities; electricity, running water and cooking stoves were rare. Today, that proportion has been reversed, and Moroccans, many of whom speak French and English fluently along with Arabic, have become sophisticated food consumers.

Lahlou's book is a persuasive attempt to engage cooks with this modern Morocco. The first seven chapters are devoted to tradition (one is called "Dude, Preserved Lemons"); the rest, to the recipes that he has served at Aziza, like artichokes and saffron-braised onions in cumin broth, or beef cheeks with carrot jam and harissa emulsion.

(Wolfert, the purist, does not even consider harissa Moroccan — it is Tunisian, she said — although it is now ubiquitous on Moroccan tables, like ketchup.)

The sweet, earthy spices, velvety textures, complex braises and tangy flavor sparks of Morocco are only the starting point for Lahlou's cuisine.

"I came from that culture, so what is intriguing to me is what else is out there," he said.

That is just what Wolfert was looking for in the late 1950s, when she left the United States at 19 to live abroad as a literary-feminist beatnik.

"I was young, and excited about words, and Jack Kerouac told me I had great legs," she said. She was drawn to Morocco, along with many young Europeans and Americans, by the country's enlightened reputation and cheap cost of living after it won independence from France in 1956.

In 1968, when Lahlou was born in Casablanca, Wolfert was living outside Tangiers, around the corner from the American writer Paul Bowles, and the suddenly single mother of two small children (her husband having left her for a Swedish painter he met during the student strikes in Paris). She sated her restlessness in the kitchen, where the cook, Fatima, taught her to grind spices, preserve lemons in salt and strip the stalks of freshly cut wheat to prepare the berries for the mill.

"The work of feeding one family was all-consuming," she said.

Eventually, her interest led to the childhood home of the Moroccan consul general to the United States, where she was tutored by his mother and her brigade of cooks, and where she began the revolutionary act of writing down how the traditional dishes were made.

"There was no tradition of sharing recipes in Morocco," said Lahlou, describing the significance of Wolfert's work. "Cooking jobs were very valuable, literally handed down from generation to generation, and they were not about to give their secrets away."

In 1973, she published the book that introduced a generation of food-loving bohemians to Moroccan cuisine. The fragrant recipes and evocative photograph of Wolfert, in a soft green caftan, with vendors in a dusty marketplace, put a thousand tagines onto American tables.

At the time, Lahlou was 5, the constant companion of his family's chief food supplier: his grandfather, who did the daily shopping. (Lahlou's father had also left his wife and children, a situation that was considered so tragic that others spoiled him with food and attention to make up for it, he said.) He, his brother, and his mother, Aziza, lived with her extended family in a compound that encompassed grandparents, cousins and aunts — but only one kitchen.

Like most Moroccan boys, he was never taught to cook. But, he said, he was immersed in food as the family spent an hour at breakfast debating what to have for lunch, and another hour at lunch debating the relative merits of eggplant, okra and peppers with dinner.

As a college student in San Francisco, he began cooking as a way to manage homesickness, and followed his older brother into a job as a waiter at Mamounia in the Richmond district, one of the first upscale Moroccan restaurants in the United States.

When the brothers decided to open a restaurant instead of proceeding to graduate school, he said, backers assumed that belly dancers and waiters with pointy-toed slippers would be prominently featured. He refused.

"I wasn't going to open a Moroccan Disneyland, and I wasn't going to make Moroccan '70s hotel food," he said.

From there, he said, he developed a style on his own that, in the book, reads like a very hyphenated, modern cuisine, as much American as Moroccan.

In their new books, both authors push beyond what Americans think they know about Moroccan food. For example, bread, not couscous, is the everyday and much-loved staple of Moroccan tables (Lahlou said that his family went through eight loaves a day). Tagines are never spooned over couscous, but scooped up with bread: in cities, with bits pulled from yeast-risen loaves, but among the Berbers, with round flatbreads baked on griddles.

The Berbers use an unusual leavening method that gives a warm, earthy aroma to the loaves: a mix of semolina flour, water and garlic cloves that quickly ferments into a pungent starter. The recipe provided by Wolfert requires three kinds of flour and takes two days to produce but is richly rewarding in flavor.

Lahlou, on the other hand, has invented entirely new breads like harissa-spiked rolls, grilled semolina flatbreads and delicate, lacy pancakes (beghrir) made with almond flour. In Lahlou's family, only his mother is considered expert at making beghrir — and, as a traditional Moroccan cook, she did not share her recipe even with her son. So he worked for years to develop a foolproof method for Aziza's pastry chef, the pancakes dripping with melted butter and honey.

Many of the skills of the traditional kitchen — how to roll couscous, how to slow-preserve meat in the desert, how to make the paper-thin pastry dough called warqa — are disappearing fast, the authors agree.

They also agree that the daily lives of Moroccan cooks are better without such labor-intensive practices. But there is a fundamental conflict between them: The traditions that Wolfert has gone to such pains to record are the very ones that Lahlou is trying to change.

"Moroccan women now are the equivalent of American housewives in the 1950s: They want to use the pressure cooker to make tagines, they want to go to the supermarket," Wolfert said. "I don't want to tell them they have to go back into the kitchen, but something is being lost. I'm out to preserve what I can still find."

MOROCCAN PANCAKES (BEGHRIR)

Adapted from "Mourad: New Moroccan" by Mourad Lahlou (Artisan)

Time: 30 minutes, plus at least 1 ½ hours' rising

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

2 teaspoons (6 grams) dry yeast

½ teaspoon (2 grams) sugar

1 cup (113 grams) all-purpose flour

½ cup (70 grams) semolina flour

½ cup (100 grams) almond flour

1 teaspoon (3 grams) kosher salt

1/8 teaspoon ground turmeric (optional; for color)

2 teaspoons (9 grams) baking powder

1 cup whole milk, warmed

Honey

Unsalted butter

1. In a bowl, combine yeast and sugar. Stir in ¼ cup warm water and let it rest about 10 minutes, until bubbling. In another bowl, combine the three flours, salt and turmeric (if using) and set aside.

2. In a small bowl, combine baking powder and 3 tablespoons warm water, stirring to dissolve. Pour into a blender and add 1 ½ cups warm water, the milk and the yeast mixture. Blend on low speed just to combine. With the blender running, gradually add the dry ingredients.

3. Pour batter into a bowl, cover with a towel and set aside at least 1 ½ hours, until doubled in size and very bubbly. Batter can be used immediately or refrigerated overnight.

4. When ready to cook, stir to deflate. Batter should be a little thicker than heavy cream; thin with warm water if necessary. Heat a heavy nonstick (or very well seasoned cast-iron) skillet over medium heat. (If you have a nonstick pan for silver dollar pancakes, use that.)

Pour ¼ cup batter into the pan (or, for silver-dollar size, a heaping tablespoon). Cook at a very gentle sizzle for about 3 minutes, until the top is covered with holes and completely set; the bottom should be golden and lacy.

Repeat with remaining batter.

5. Meanwhile, combine equal amounts of honey and butter in a small microwaveable pitcher or bowl. Heat until hot, smooth and pourable; thin with warm water if necessary.

6. Serve pancakes immediately, with hot honey-butter mixture. Or slide onto a baking sheet covered with a kitchen towel and top with another towel to keep warm. Cooled pancakes can be briefly reheated in microwave.

BERBER SKILLET BREAD

Adapted from "The Food of Morocco" by Paula Wolfert (Ecco)

Time: 1 hour, plus 2 days to develop the starter and 1 hour's rising

Yield: 4 8-inch bread rounds

For the garlic starter:

2/3 cup (104 grams) plus ½ cup (70 grams) regular semolina flour (pasta flour)

¾ cup (85 grams) all-purpose flour

2 garlic cloves, peeled

For the bread:

2 2/3 cups (400 grams) extra-fine semolina flour

½ teaspoon (1 ½ grams) dry yeast

2 ½ teaspoons (15 grams) fine salt

1/3 cup (52 grams) regular semolina flour or all-purpose flour, for handling the dough

Moroccan Almond-Argan Butter, for serving (see recipe).

1. Make the starter: In a glass or ceramic bowl, combine 2/3 cup semolina flour with the all-purpose flour. Gradually stir in ¾ cup water to make a wet dough. Mix in garlic, cover, wrap in a towel and leave in a warm place, like an unheated oven, for a day.

2. Uncover the starter, add ¼ cup water and the remaining ½ cup semolina flour, and mix. Cover, wrap in a towel, and leave for 12 to 24 hours. The starter will get a crusty top and blossom underneath. Scoop out ½ cup starter and discard the rest, including garlic cloves (otherwise, as it continues to ferment, the smell would drive you out of your home).

3. Make the bread: In a food processor fitted with the metal blade, combine extra-fine semolina flour, the ½ cup of starter, the yeast and salt. Pulse once or twice. Add 1 cup warm water and process for 15 to 20 seconds to knead. Let rest 10 minutes. Pulsing food processor, trickle in another ¼ cup water. Sprinkle a work surface with flour and turn dough onto it. Cover with an upside-down bowl for 10 minutes. Cut 4 1-foot squares of waxed or parchment paper and sprinkle with flour. Divide dough in four and put each piece on a piece of a floured paper, turning to coat. Press each into an 8-inch circle. Cover with kitchen towels and let rise 1 hour.

4. When ready to cook, gently flatten each disk, then prick the tops all over with a fork. Heat an 8- or 10-inch nonstick skillet or griddle (or two, if you have them) over medium-high heat. Sprinkle the pan's surface with flour, then pick up a dough round and flip it into the pan, paper side up. Peel off the paper and adjust the heat so that the bread sizzles gently. When it is browned and blistered on the bottom, about 5 minutes, flip the bread out onto a plate, then slide it back into the pan to cook the other side. Cook about 2 minutes, shaking the skillet often to prevent sticking. When browned, firm and fragrant, slide onto a platter and serve immediately, or cover with a towel to keep warm while you cook the remaining breads. Serve with Moroccan almond-argan butter.

MOROCCAN ALMOND-ARGAN BUTTER

Adapted from "The Food of Morocco" by Paula Wolfert (Ecco)

Time: 20 minutes

Yield: About 1 cup

8 ounces whole blanched, peeled almonds

1 teaspoon coarse sea or kosher salt

½ cup culinary (not cosmetic) argan oil, preferably Argand'Or or Mustapha's, available at Middle Eastern markets and at Amazon.com

¼ cup honey

1. Heat oven to 300 degrees. Spread the almonds on a baking sheet and toast until brown, about 10 minutes. Check and stir often after the first 8 minutes, to prevent overbrowning.

2. Using a heavy mortar and pestle, and working in batches if necessary, grind warm almonds with salt into a smooth paste. (This can be done in a food processor, although the texture of the finished dip would not be as light.)

3. About a tablespoon at a time, work in the oil, then mix until smooth and creamy. Add the honey in the same way. Taste for salt. Scrape into a serving bowl.