How is tanjia cooked in the hammam embers?

Tanjia is so tied to its method that the dish is named after the pot, not the recipe — and the method is unlike anything else in Moroccan cooking. It belongs to Marrakech, and it carries a wonderful nickname: the bachelor's dish, because traditionally it was made by men, especially single workmen who had no one at home to cook for them. The beauty is that it asks for almost no skill, only good ingredients and a clever use of the city's heat. You take a tall, narrow clay urn, also called a tanjia, with a small mouth and two handles.

Into the urn goes a hunk of beef or lamb on the bone, whole cloves of garlic, a preserved lemon torn up, a spoon of smen (the aged butter), cumin, saffron threads, a little ras el hanout, salt and a splash of water and olive oil. That is it — no browning, no layering, no fuss. The mouth of the urn is covered with parchment or a piece of cloth and tied tight, sometimes sealed with paper, so it becomes a closed clay vessel. Then comes the part that makes people's eyes widen: you do not cook it on a stove at all. You carry it to the hammam.

Every traditional bathhouse is heated by an underground wood furnace tended by a man called the farnatchi, who keeps the fire burning to warm the baths above. Around and beneath that fire sits a deep bed of smouldering ash and embers, and that is the oven. The farnatchi nestles your sealed urn right into the hot ash and leaves it there for five, six, seven hours — sometimes overnight — while the bathhouse fire does its slow work. Men would drop off their tanjia in the morning, tip the furnace-keeper a few coins, and collect it on the way home.

What that gentle, all-surrounding ash heat produces is remarkable: the meat practically dissolves, the bone slides clean, and the juices, the smen and the preserved lemon melt into a dark, intensely savoury, faintly smoky sauce. You eat it straight from the urn with bread, and it has a depth that no quick cooking can fake — it is the taste of patience and of the city's shared infrastructure. On our Marrakech food experiences we arrange tanjia cooked the genuine farnatchi way, because tasting it after a visit to the furnace itself tells the whole story of how cleverly this city turned its bathhouses into ovens.