What food is Marrakech famous for?

If one dish belongs to Marrakech and nowhere else, it's tanjia — and the first time I lowered my spoon into one, the meat simply collapsed off the bone into a glossy, saffron-stained sauce. Named after the urn-shaped clay pot it cooks in (never the dish itself), tanjia is beef or lamb shin packed with preserved lemon, garlic, cumin, saffron and a knob of smen (aged butter), sealed, and carried to the neighbourhood hammam. There the furnace-man buries it in the ash that heats the bathhouse water, and seven or eight hours later you collect a pot of meat so tender it needs no knife.

It's known here as the 'bachelor's dish' — traditionally the meal a man cooked for himself on his day off, dropping the pot at the hammam in the morning and retrieving it after the souk. I always tell guests to order it a day ahead at a proper Marrakchi restaurant, because the slow burial is the whole point; you can't rush it on a stove and get the same melting depth.

Then there's mechoui — whole lamb rubbed with cumin and butter and roasted in underground pit-ovens until the skin crackles and the flesh pulls apart in your fingers. The mechoui alley off Jemaa el-Fnaa is one of my favourite lunches in Morocco: you point at the carcass, they hack off a portion by weight, hand you bread, cumin and salt, and you eat standing up. Nearby, vendors ladle babbouche, a peppery snail broth scented with thyme and liquorice root that locals swear cures everything from colds to hangovers.

Come evening, the food stalls of Jemaa el-Fnaa unfurl under lantern smoke — grilled merguez, khlea-laced eggs, harira by the bowl, and trays of chebakia and sticky sellou. Marrakech eats with theatre, and I'd happily spend a whole trip just grazing the square. Our culinary days here build in a tanjia ordered at dawn so it's waiting, perfect, by the time we've finished the souks.