What are the best vegetarian Moroccan dishes?

Vegetarians are often nervous before they arrive and delighted once they do, because Moroccan cooking is naturally generous with vegetables, pulses and grains. The headline dish is the vegetable tagine — carrots, potatoes, courgettes, turnips, peppers and tomatoes, sometimes with chickpeas, slow-cooked with cumin, ginger, saffron and preserved lemon until everything is silky and the kitchen smells incredible. A good vegetable tagine with fresh bread is a complete, deeply satisfying meal, and it's on virtually every menu in the country.

Then there are the cooked salads, which I think are the secret glory of the Moroccan table. Zaalouk is a smoky, garlicky aubergine-and-tomato dip that I'd happily eat by the bowlful; taktouka layers grilled green peppers and tomato with cumin and paprika; there's beetroot salad, carrot salad with orange-blossom and cinnamon, and herby tomato-and-onion mixtures. They arrive as a spread of little dishes to scoop with bread, and a meze of four or five of them is one of the best vegetarian feasts going.

For something heartier, lean on the soups and pulses. Bissara — that thick split-pea or fava soup of the north — is naturally vegetarian and ribsticking. Lentil dishes (adas) simmered with cumin and tomato are everywhere and cheap. Vegetable couscous, mounded with seven seasonal vegetables, is traditional Friday food and gorgeous, though here you must ask — the broth is often made with meat, so request a vegetarian version. Briouats (filled pastry triangles) come with cheese or vegetable fillings, and msemen and breads make great cheap fuel.

My one honest caution: 'vegetable' on a menu doesn't always mean meat-free. Couscous, harira soup and even some vegetable tagines are traditionally built on a meat or bone stock, so a polite 'bla lham, bla marqa' (without meat, without meat broth) is worth learning. Riads and home cooks will happily make a proper vegetarian feast if you ask ahead — I've sat down to all-vegetable spreads of six or seven dishes that meat-eaters at the table envied. Eat where vegetables are the point, and Morocco rewards you handsomely.