What's the difference between tagine and couscous?

These are the two pillars of Moroccan cooking and travellers often blur them, so here's the clean distinction. A tagine is both a dish and the vessel: that beautiful conical earthenware pot whose tall lid traps rising steam, lets it condense, and drips it back down so the food braises slowly in its own juices. The result is meltingly tender meat or vegetables in a thick, intensely spiced sauce. You eat it communally, scooping with torn bread — no cutlery needed.

Couscous is something else entirely: not a stew but a grain. Tiny rolled granules of semolina, steamed (never boiled) over a bubbling pot of broth in a two-tier couscoussier, three times traditionally, until each grain is light and separate. It's then mounded on a platter, crowned with stewed vegetables — pumpkin, carrot, turnip, courgette, chickpeas — and usually a piece of lamb or chicken, with the fragrant broth ladled over.

The cultural rhythm matters here. Couscous is the Friday dish — the after-mosque family meal, the thing grandmothers spend the morning rolling and steaming. If you're invited to a Moroccan home for Friday lunch, couscous is almost certainly what's coming, served from one giant communal dish that everyone eats from, working the patch directly in front of them. Tagine, by contrast, is everyday food, cooked any night of the week.

My advice: order both, ideally on different days. Have a tagine your first night to learn the pleasure of bread-scooping, and time your couscous for a Friday if you can, so you taste it at its freshest and most ceremonial. And note — proper couscous is hand-rolled semolina, not the instant box stuff from home. The texture is a revelation.