What are Moroccan festival and celebration foods?

Moroccan festival food is where the cooking goes all out, and Ramadan is the great showcase. Each evening the fast is broken with a near-sacred trio: a bowl of harira — that velvety tomato, lentil and chickpea soup — alongside dates and chebakia, the sticky, sesame-coated, honey-soaked pastry flowers fried specially for the month. The smell of harira simmering and chebakia frying drifts through every neighbourhood at dusk. I find sharing an iftar table during Ramadan one of the most moving food experiences in Morocco — the whole country exhaling and eating together at the same moment.

Eid al-Adha, the great sacrifice feast, is the meatiest celebration of the year. Families roast or grill lamb in every form — mechoui (whole roast lamb), grilled liver and offal skewers wrapped in caul fat (boulfaf) on the first day, then slow tagines and couscous from the rest of the animal over the following days. Nothing is wasted, the cooking goes on for days, and the hospitality is overwhelming. If you're invited to an Eid table, go: it's Morocco's food culture at its most generous.

Weddings and big family occasions bring out the showpiece dishes. A traditional diffa might open with pastilla, move through a sweet seffa (steamed vermicelli with cinnamon and sugar and hidden meat), a mrouzia or lamb-with-prunes, and a mountain of couscous, course after course arriving for hours. These are the most elaborate things Moroccan kitchens produce, often prepared by teams of women over days, and they're meant to dazzle. A Moroccan wedding feast is a marathon of the country's finest cooking.

And no celebration ends without sweets and tea. The pastry trays are works of art: kaab el ghazal (almond-paste 'gazelle horns'), ghriba (crumbly almond or sesame shortbread), sellou/sfouf (a toasted-flour, almond and honey energy sweet, beloved after childbirth and Ramadan), briouats in honey, and dates stuffed with marzipan. They come with glass after glass of mint tea poured from on high. Whatever the occasion — religious feast, wedding, naming day or simply a guest arriving — in Morocco it is marked, without fail, by something sweet and a pot of tea.