How is couscous traditionally made and steamed from scratch?

I will be honest: the instant couscous in a box has almost nothing to do with the real thing, and the first time I watched it made by hand in a Fes courtyard I understood why Friday couscous is a near-sacred event. The grandmother, Lalla Zhor, sat on a low stool with a wide, shallow earthenware basin called a gsaa. She sprinkled coarse semolina with cold salted water and began to roll it under her flattened palm in slow circles, coaxing the grains to clump and grow. It is meditative and oddly hypnotic — flour dusting the air, her hand moving for the better part of an hour until the loose semolina had become thousands of tiny, even pearls.

Then comes the part nobody outside Morocco believes: it is steamed not once but three times, and never boiled. The grains go into the perforated top of a couscoussier — the two-tier pot — set over a simmering broth where the meat and vegetables for the meal are cooking below. The genius is that no water touches the grain; only the fragrant steam rising through the holes cooks it, so every pearl drinks in the smell of the stew without going soggy. The first steaming lasts maybe twenty minutes, until you see the vapour breaking cleanly through the top.

Between each steaming the couscous is tipped back into the gsaa, and this is where the lightness is won. Lalla Zhor sprinkled it with cold water and a little oil and raked it apart with her fingers, breaking every clump, letting it cool and swell and breathe. Then back up for a second steaming, and the whole ritual again, and a third. Three rounds of steam-rest-rake. By the end the grains are separate, plump, springy, each one distinct — the opposite of the wet paste most travellers have eaten at home. A pinch of butter folded through at the end gives it a silky finish.

When we serve it on our journeys it arrives as a great mounded dome on a communal platter, the tender meat half-buried at the centre, vegetables arranged like a crown, the spiced broth poured over at the table so it soaks down through the pearls. You eat it traditionally with your right hand, rolling a small mouthful into a neat ball against your fingers — a skill worth practising and a lovely thing to be taught by the cook herself. It is the dish that, more than any other, says you are now a guest in a Moroccan home.