For centuries, Zanzibar’s famed spices have lured visitors to the shores of the archipelago. Today, tourists can wander the spice market in ancient Stone Town or visit a local farm in the lush inland hills to learn how the island’s tropical climate makes it ideal for growing spices.

Located 40 kilometers (roughly 25 miles) off the coast of Tanzania, the island was formerly a trading hub for Europeans, Arabs and Indians, and the current culture reflects elements of all three. The food, from fish masala to pepper steak, takes as much from Swahili culture as it does from any of its influences.

On a recent trip to the island, I participated in a local cooking class, desiring to not only smell the surrounding spices and food but also experience them. Whether taking place in a hotel kitchen or a resident’s backyard, classes can easily be arranged through hotels or local travel agents.

And so I found myself joining sisters-in-law Mankiwa and Ester mid-morning as they began preparing lunch for a group of tourists. The women were surrounded by raw ingredients — onions, tomatoes, bananas and the like — in the small courtyard behind their house, but they started with my favorite: the coconut.

Ester broke open the small fruit with a few whacks from a stick, emptied the water into a bowl and passed half to Mankiwa, who brought over a special stool designed just for scraping coconut.

Called an mbuzi ya nazi, or just mbuzi, the seat has a serrated metal tool built into one end, which Mankiwa used to scrape the inside of the coconut. The women would later make coconut milk by blending the coconut flakes with water.

Mankiwa let me try my hand at scraping, which presented a fun challenge to not scrape too much or too little of the white flesh at a time, and to stop before getting to the brown outer shell.

Meanwhile, the women started a few small fires with coconut fibers and began cooking separate bowls of bananas and potatoes in coconut oil, adding turmeric, garlic, salt and grated tomato.

A kingfish, caught in the clear blue waters off the coast, had been cut into small pieces and was waiting in a bowl of water. Ester crushed ginger with garlic and salt, to tame some of the ginger’s hot flavor, before adding it to the fish about to be fried in sunflower oil.

Mankiwa’s quick brown fingers were soon flicking between bowls of star fruit, fresh tomato and coconut milk, creating separate dishes with delicate differences. She added garlic and onions to a bowl of smashed leaves from the cassava plant — a starchy staple of the Zanzibarian diet.

This traditional dish is known as sukuma wiki, which means “to push or stretch the week,” because the cassava leaves — or any leafy substitute — are an inexpensive addition often used to help fill out meals.

When it came time to cook the rice, Ester added packets of cumin and cardamom from Stone Town’s spice market to a huge pot, already simmering with a large cinnamon stick, garlic, onion, salt and pepper. The rice smoldered over the fire, releasing warm, earthy spice scents.

The women covered the pot and let it sit for about 20 minutes. “Pole, pole,” my translator explained — or, “Slowly, slowly” — is the way to cook in Zanzibar.

About two hours after we’d first begun scraping coconut, it finally came time to eat. We sat on plastic mats and dished up each of the flavorful entrées. I tried to single out specific spice flavors, but instead they had all blended to create an entirely new taste.

Maybe this meal was a little like Zanzibar itself: Through the years, the islands slowly, slowly have become a blend of cultures, and the foods of those cultures have likewise combined to create something new and delicious.

I ate until I was full and later bought spices from a nearby farm, ready to try out the recipes in my own kitchen. If only I had room for an mbuzi in my suitcase.