How is a tagine cooking pot made?

It is worth knowing that a tagine is two things at once: the iconic cone-lidded dish AND the slow-cooked stew that takes its name, and the pot is engineered for the food. The tall conical lid is the whole point — steam rises, hits the cool peak, condenses and trickles back down over the meat and vegetables, so the dish bastes itself with almost no added water. Watching a potter make one, you see that clever physics taking shape in clay.

A real cooking tagine is thrown on the wheel from local clay, the same way other pottery is. The potter spins up the shallow, wide base first — that is the cooking vessel itself — and then throws the tall conical lid as a completely separate piece, judging the curve by eye so it seats neatly on the base. In the pottery towns of Safi and Salé you can watch the cones rise out of the spinning clay in moments. The thrown pieces are then dried hard in the sun.

Then the pieces are fired in a kiln to harden the clay into durable earthenware. Here the everyday cooking tagine and the souvenir tagine part ways: a genuine cooking pot is usually left unglazed or given a simple, heat-safe glaze and sometimes cured with oil, because it has to survive direct flame and a charcoal brazier. The gorgeous hand-painted tagines you see stacked in the souks, glazed in cobalt and saffron with intricate patterns, are decorative serving pieces — hand-painted and fired a second time to set the colour, and not really meant for cooking over fire.

Safi is the best place to watch tagines being thrown and fired, with kilns smoking across the potters' hill, and you will see them made in workshops near Fes too. Our guides can fold a pottery visit into a route, and if you want to buy one to actually cook with, ask specifically for a cooking tagine rather than a painted display piece — the seller will know the difference, even if the stalls do not always make it obvious.