Moroccan Dishes

Ask a Moroccan family what they cook when someone they love needs strength, and many will answer with a single word: rfissa. This is not the dish tourists photograph in Marrakech restaurants. It is the dish Moroccan mothers make for their daughters after childbirth, the one that appears at weddings and family feasts, served from

Mechoui: Morocco’s Slow-Roasted Lamb You smell it before you see it. On a narrow lane off the north end of Jemaa el-Fna, the air turns thick with rendered lamb fat and woodsmoke, and a row of men in white aprons are hauling something golden and glistening out of a hole in the floor. That is

Tangia: Marrakech’s Slow-Cooked Treasure In Marrakech — and nowhere else in Morocco — there is a dish that takes a whole night to cook and a whole neighborhood to make. It arrives inside a clay urn, sealed with paper and string; when the seal cracks open, the beef is so tender it barely holds onto

Pastilla (Bastilla): Where Sweet Meets Savory — Morocco’s Most Surprising Pie No dish ambushes a first-time visitor to Morocco quite like the pastilla. It arrives at the table looking exactly like a dessert: a golden, perfectly round pie, dusted with powdered sugar, cinnamon traced across the top in a careful lattice. You cut in, the

7 Tagine Varieties to Try in Morocco Order a tagine in Morocco and you are not ordering one dish — you are ordering a whole family of dishes. The word tagine names the clay pot first: a shallow earthenware base with a tall conical lid that traps steam, lets it condense, and rains it back

Couscous: The Friday Dish of Morocco If you are in Morocco on a Friday around noon, you will smell the dish before you see it: steam, meat broth, and turmeric drifting out of apartment stairwells and restaurant kitchens. In Fes, Marrakech, and every village between them, Friday is couscous day. This is the meal that

If Morocco had to be summed up in a single dish, it would be the tagine. Ask for “the tagine” in just about any restaurant in the country and something wonderful will arrive at your table, still bubbling, in the very pot it cooked in. The word means two things at once: the slow-cooked stew,