What food is the north of Morocco and the Rif known for?

The first thing I tell anyone heading north is to follow your nose to a bissara cart at breakfast. In the Rif, where mornings come in cold and damp off the mountains, this thick split-pea (or fava bean) soup is the national hug — pale green, almost porridge-thick, slicked with a coin of olive oil, a dust of cumin and a fierce splash of harissa, mopped up with torn bread before the souk fully wakes. I've stood shoulder to shoulder with Chefchaouen porters at 7am eating it from a chipped bowl, and nothing in the south quite matches that ritual.

The north is also where Morocco meets the sea twice over — the Mediterranean and the Atlantic both wash these shores — so seafood runs through everything. In Tangier and Tetouan you eat fried fish the Andalusian way, dredged in seasoned flour and flash-fried until shattering-crisp, piled on butcher paper, squeezed with lemon. There's grilled sardine, fresh anchovy, and rice dishes that owe an obvious debt to Spanish paella, a fingerprint left by centuries of crossing the Strait and the Andalusi families who settled Tetouan.

Up in the mountains the flavour turns greener and more pastoral. Rif cooking uses more fresh herbs and wild greens than the south, and you'll find fresh goat's cheese — jben — soft, lightly sour, eaten with bread, honey and a drizzle of the region's grassy olive oil. The Rif is olive and herb country, and the food tastes of it: lighter tagines, more vegetables, a cooler hand with spice than the perfumed, sweet-savoury cooking of Marrakech or Fes.

And then there's the sweet side, where the Andalusian influence sings loudest. Tetouan in particular is famous for delicate, almond-heavy pastries and the kind of refined sweets that came north with the exiles from Granada. Pair them with the north's signature mint tea — poured high, sweet and strong — on a blue Chefchaouen terrace with the mountains behind you, and you understand that northern Moroccan food is its own world: cooler, saltier, more European-edged, and gorgeously unhurried.