Moroccan Food: 15 Traditional Dishes to Try

Tagine is the dish most visitors eat first, and it is named after the pot it cooks in: a shallow clay dish with a tall cone-shaped lid that sends the steam back down, so the meat and vegetables stew slowly with their spices in their own juices. The classics are chicken with preserved lemon and green olives, lamb or beef with prunes and almonds, and kefta, meatballs in tomato sauce with eggs cracked on top at the end.

A good tagine takes hours of slow cooking, so the best ones are served at lunch, in family homes and in small restaurants that start cooking in the morning. On the coast you will also find fish tagine, with tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. Every family has its own recipe. Scoop it up with bread and eat from your side of the dish.

Couscous is semolina rolled into tiny grains and steamed over a pot of simmering meat and vegetables, then served in a large dish with the stew on top. Couscous with seven vegetables is the classic; couscous tfaya adds onions caramelised slowly with raisins and cinnamon. It is often called the national dish of Morocco, and in 2020 UNESCO listed the knowledge and practices of couscous, shared by Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania, as intangible cultural heritage.

Friday is couscous day: families gather for it after the midday prayer, and many restaurants cook it only on Fridays. On other days, ask for it in advance, or learn Moroccan cooking yourself at a cooking class, where you steam it the traditional way.

Pastilla, also spelled bastilla or bstilla, is a round pie of paper-thin warqa pastry filled with spiced chicken or pigeon, eggs and fried almonds, baked until crisp and dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. Sweet on the outside and savoury inside, it is the dish that surprises visitors most.

It is made for weddings and guests, so it often opens a feast. In the ports of the north, look for seafood pastilla, filled with fish, prawns and vermicelli and served without the sugar.

Harira is the Moroccan soup you will meet everywhere: a thick tomato soup with lentils, chickpeas and fresh herbs, coriander and parsley, sometimes with small pieces of lamb, thickened at the end with a little flour and water. A squeeze of lemon goes in at the table.

During the month of Ramadan it is the soup that breaks the fast at sunset, served with dates, hard-boiled eggs and chebakia, the honey-soaked pastry. The rest of the year it is a cheap, filling lunch or dinner in small cafés.

Bissara is a soup of dried split fava beans cooked with garlic until smooth, then finished with olive oil, cumin and paprika. It is warm, filling and costs very little, which makes it the winter breakfast of workers and students across the north of Morocco, eaten with bread and a glass of tea.

In Tangier it is served from big pots in small cafés from early morning. It is vegan as it is, and one of the first tastings on our food tour.

Kalinte, or calentica, is Tangier's own street snack: a savoury tart of chickpea flour, water and oil, often with egg, baked in wide round trays until the top turns golden. Vendors cut it into squares, sprinkle salt and cumin on top and serve it warm, on its own or inside a piece of bread.

The name comes from the Spanish word caliente, hot, and the same dish exists across the Strait in Gibraltar, where it is called calentita. In Tangier, eat it hot from the tray in the medina.

A Moroccan meal opens with small plates of salads, most of them cooked: zaalouk, aubergine and tomato stewed with garlic, cumin and paprika until soft enough to spread on bread; taktouka, roasted green peppers with tomato; carrots with cumin; beetroot; and a fresh salad of diced tomato, cucumber and onion.

They arrive together and you dip into all of them with bread before the main dishes. For vegetarians they make a meal on their own.

Brochettes are small skewers of beef, lamb, chicken or liver grilled over charcoal; kefta is minced beef or lamb mixed with onion, parsley, coriander, cumin and paprika, shaped on skewers or into patties. At a grill stall you often choose the meat yourself and watch it cook.

They come with bread, a tomato and onion salad and a pinch of salt and cumin. Ask for a mix, and share.

Morocco has two coasts, and Tangier sits where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, so fish is part of everyday cooking here. Sardines grilled over charcoal, fried fish, prawns in garlic and chilli and fish tagine are all easy to find, and the catch comes straight from the port.

Morocco is one of the world's great sardine producers, and sardines are the cheapest fish on the menu. In many fish restaurants you choose your fish at the counter and pay by weight.

Some dishes are kept for special occasions. Mechoui is a whole lamb or a shoulder roasted slowly until it falls apart, eaten with the fingers and a pinch of salt and cumin; it is the centre of weddings and of Eid al-Adha. Tanjia, the dish of Marrakech, is beef cooked for hours with preserved lemon, garlic and spices in a clay jar set in the embers of a hammam furnace.

Rfissa is shredded msemen pancakes under chicken and lentils, in a broth scented with fenugreek and ras el hanout, cooked for family gatherings and, by tradition, for a mother after a birth. These dishes are made for an occasion, so ask a day ahead.

Bread comes with every meal and works as the spoon. Khobz is the round, flat loaf; in the old towns many families still shape the dough at home and carry it to the communal oven of the neighbourhood, the ferran, where the baker bakes it for a small fee.

From the griddle come msemen, a square, flaky pancake folded in layers; baghrir, the spongy semolina pancake with a thousand holes; and harcha, a crumbly semolina bread. Eat them warm with butter and honey, olive oil, or amlou, a spread of almonds, argan oil and honey.

A traditional Moroccan breakfast is bread or griddle breads with olive oil, olives, fresh jben cheese, eggs, honey and amlou, with mint tea or coffee with milk and a glass of fresh orange juice. In winter, add a bowl of bissara or harira.

At a café it is quick and cheap; in a riad or a family home it becomes a long spread. Street stalls sell sfenj, rings of fried dough, from early morning.

Moroccan street food is cheap, fresh and best where the queue is long. Sfenj are rings of fried dough, eaten plain or with sugar; maakouda are fried potato cakes, often served in bread with a spicy sauce; and in the evening, carts sell babbouche, snails simmered in a broth with herbs and spices, which you drink from the bowl.

Sandwiches are everywhere: grilled kefta, sausages or fried fish in half a round loaf, with salad, and harissa if you like heat. Eat what is cooked in front of you and you will do well.

Mint tea is green gunpowder tea brewed with a large handful of fresh mint and sugar, then poured from high above the glass so it foams. It comes with every welcome, after every meal and in every shop where you sit down to bargain.

In Tangier, the classic place for a glass is Café Hafa, on the cliffs above the Strait. The tea ritual, and what it means to be offered a glass, is in our guide to Moroccan culture.

Traditional Moroccan desserts are mostly pastries served with tea. Kaab el ghazal, gazelle horns, are crescents of thin pastry filled with almond paste and orange flower water; ghriba are crumbly cookies of almond, sesame or coconut; chebakia are twisted flowers of fried dough soaked in honey and covered in sesame, made above all for Ramadan.

After a meal, the usual dessert is simpler: fresh fruit, oranges with cinnamon, or dates and nuts. Pastry shops sell by weight, so you can fill a mixed box.