What food is eaten during Ramadan in Morocco?

Ramadan transforms Morocco’s rhythm, and the iftar table — here called ftour — is its emotional centre. After a day of fasting, the meal traditionally begins, as the Prophet did, with dates and a glass of milk the moment the maghrib call to prayer sounds. I will never forget my first Ramadan ftour in a Fez home: the silent, focused waiting, then the collective exhale and the first sweet date passed hand to hand. The streets empty completely in the minutes before sunset, then fill with the smell of soup.

Harira is the indispensable dish — the tomato, lentil and chickpea soup whose warmth and protein gently break the fast. Beside it sits the great Ramadan sweet, chebakia: sesame-dough flowers fried and drenched in honey, their stickiness the perfect foil to the savoury soup. Briouats, those crisp honeyed or cheese-filled triangles, appear too, along with sfenj doughnuts, msemen, hard-boiled eggs, and a parade of fresh juices, dried fruit and pastries. It is abundance after restraint.

Later in the evening, after rest and prayers, many families eat a second, lighter meal, and before dawn comes suhoor (shour) — the pre-fast meal to carry you through the day. This is gentler: bread with butter and honey, eggs, olives, leftover harira, slow-digesting foods, and plenty of water and milk. The whole month is a cycle of fasting, breaking, gathering and rising before light, and the food is built around sustaining and celebrating that cycle.

My honest advice for travellers: visiting during Ramadan is moving and special, but daytime cafés in smaller towns may close and the pace slows — plan around it. If a Moroccan family invites you to ftour, accept; it is one of the most generous experiences the country offers. On our culinary trips during Ramadan we arrange exactly that — a shared ftour table with a local family, dates first, harira and chebakia to follow.