Is there a national dish of Morocco?

If you held a referendum, couscous would win. It's the dish that crosses every region, class and ethnicity in Morocco, the meal that unites Berber villages and Casablanca apartments alike. Crucially, it's the Friday dish — after midday prayers, families gather around one steaming communal platter of hand-rolled semolina topped with vegetables and meat. That weekly ritual gives couscous a status no other dish quite matches; it's woven into the rhythm of the week itself.

But ask a Moroccan and many will say tagine in the same breath, and they'd have a case. Tagine is the everyday soul of the cuisine — cooked any night, infinitely variable, the dish most travellers fall for first. So I'd put it like this: couscous is the ceremonial national dish, tagine the national habit. Together they define Moroccan eating more than any single plate could alone.

Two more deserve honourable mention. Pastilla is the showpiece — the sweet-savoury pie reserved for weddings, feasts and honoured guests, the dish a family makes when they want to impress. And harira is the dish of belonging: the soup that breaks the fast every evening of Ramadan, smelt in the streets of every city at sunset, comforting and universal. Between these four, you have the heart of Moroccan cuisine.