Moroccan cuisine

 There are stalls to fit every taste and pocket; a bowl of harira, a traditional rich tomato and lentil soup with beef or chicken, seasoned with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon, or b’sarra, white bean soup with olive oil and garlic; add a sandwich served in a khobz, a small, round flat loaf with the top nipped off to form a pocket, filled with freshly deep-fried slices of liver dribbled with a green chilli sauce, or a hand-full of merguez, thin spicy sausages, and you will be set up for a stroll around the souks. (Keep an eye open for the really esoteric mixture of merguez, hard-boiled egg and tuna fish.)
Kebabs shops appear on almost every street corner around the globe these days, but in Marrakech vendors snub the effete pressed meat served elsewhere in favour of slices of real lamb, glistening with dribbling fat, sprinkled with cumin and salt as the cook hands it over to you wrapped in a paper cone. Chicken with preserved lemons, delicately spiced with kasbour (fresh green coriander) and served with piquant olives; brochettes of lamb and liver, seasoned with red pepper and cumin, carefully grilled over charcoal, which spits and smokes as the luscious fats fall on to it; beef or lamb tajines, cooked with raisins, prunes and almonds, have their conical tops whisked off by the waiters, just as the lids of elegant silver salvers would be at the Savoy. (Although you may want to leave the tajine of sheep’s or calf’s feet and the sliced camel’s head to the locals to enjoy, and it would take a certain amount of culinary courage to sample a cooked sheep’s head or bowl of sheep’s testicles – cooked, of course.)