I don't think I've ever met a clay cooking pot I didn't like . . . or want to own.

And I have more than 100 clay pots of every size in my kitchen to prove it: Moroccan tagines, Provencal daubieres, Spanish cazuelas, Italian bean pots, Turkish guvecs, and even ceramic colanders, including one I use to steam couscous. I love the way these pots tie me to traditions, deep-rooted ways of cooking, and add flavor and finesse to my food.

I bought my first clay pot at age 19, just weeks after starting cooking lessons with legendary teacher Dione Lucas. She sent me to a French restaurant supply store in lower Manhattan where my eyes immediately fell upon an odd-looking low, pot-bellied earthenware vessel with a tiny covered opening. The sales clerk told me it was used to cook tripe. Back then I had no idea what tripe was, but the shape of the pot fascinated me, and so I bought it for its beauty.

Somehow it survived numerous moves, to Europe, Morocco, and the East and West Coasts, always beautiful and always producing soft and exceedingly rich beef stews.

Oddly, I've used it only once for tripe, until this last year, when San Francisco chef Loretta Keller, who collects clay tripieres, came to my house in Sonoma, Calif., to cook with me. The tripe cooked so slowly and evenly that when she uncovered the pot, it fell apart at the touch of a fork. The resulting dish was wonderful, rich, layered flavors and sensual melting textures, further proof, if I still needed it, that food, almost any food, always tastes better when cooked in clay.

Years later, I was living in Morocco, starting on my multiyear study of Moroccan cuisine. It was here that I first encountered the ubiquitous two-part cooking vessel called a tagine - low-rimmed concave platelike bottom and high cone-shaped top. The vessel is ingenious for the way the top cools steam from the stew (or tagine) simmering below, condenses it, then sends it back down into the cooking food.

My favorite tagine, and the one I use most, was acquired secondhand from a Berber family on a field trip to the Rif Mountains. Even when I bought it, this pot bore the scent of Moroccan spices and the patina of long use. To my eyes it is also very beautiful in that the clay top piece, the cone, has been deeply grooved by its potter with crisscrossing diagonal slashes in the Berber style.

And like all tagines, it makes a fine serving dish too, conjuring up the special, almost mystical quality of Moroccan tagines - fresh produce and succulent meat served in a rich, unctuous sauce.

Bean pots made of micaceous clay have been a revelation. My best one, a true beauty, was a gift from chef/owner Katharine Kagel of Cafe Pasqual's in Santa Fe, N.M. Made by master potter Felipe Ortega, it is incredibly light and thin, yet easily holds four quarts. "It will give a sweet, hearty, and slightly salty flavor to whatever you cook in it," Kagel told me, and she was right: It cooks beans like a dream.

In fact, all clay bean pots, whether tall or wide, will, with slow cooking, produce delicious aromatic bean dishes, keeping the beans moist and protecting them from burning.

I could go on: There's my huge yellow, vase-shaped cassoule used to cook cassoulets over a wood fire. A set of gargoulettes from Tunisia, in which meat is sealed, then set in the embers of a fire, and which then must be broken open to access the cooked food. A small meqlah from Lebanon in which I make particularly wonderful fried eggs. And a green glazed daubiere, made by master potter Philippe Beltrando, which produces delicious Provencal daubes.

I asked Beltrando, a tall, lanky, gracious man with flowing hair and beautiful tender eyes, the same question I've asked nearly everyone I've encountered since I started working on this kind of cooking: "Why do you think food tastes better when cooked in clay?"

I found his answer moving and mystical: "Maybe some day scientists will come up with an explanation," he told me. "It most likely has to do with the even diffusion of heat, soft heat that creates great alchemy in the kitchen. Think of bubbles rising from within a stew, hatching slowly on the surface to the rhythm of a slowly ticking clock.

"But, personally," he added, "I believe something I was told by my grandmother, an extraordinary cook. She insisted that the best daubes were cooked in her oldest casseroles, because, she insisted, pottery has a kind of 'memory' of the food it held, and only a clay pot can keep the 'memory' of the love the cook put into it when preparing the dish."

Sizzling Shrimp With Garlic, Hot Pepper

Makes 4 to 6 servings

1 pound peeled small (about 60) or medium-large deveined (24 to 30) shrimp

1 scant cup extra-virgin olive oil, preferably Spanish

1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic