What is Atlas and Berber mountain food like in Morocco?

Mountain Berber food is the soul food of Morocco, and it's quite different from the perfumed city cooking people expect. Up in the High Atlas, where I love to eat in family homes around Imlil and the Aït Bouguemez valley, the table is built on grain — barley above all. You'll meet barley couscous, barley flatbreads, and thick soups thickened with barley or lentils, because at altitude, in the cold, you want food that fills you and lasts. The flavours are earthy and direct, not sweet-savoury and layered like Fassi cuisine.

The bread alone is worth the journey. Tafarnout is baked against the walls of a clay oven or directly on hot stones, coming out blistered, smoky and chewy, and it's the centre of every meal — you eat with it, scoop with it, soak up tagine juices with it. I've sat on a rug in a Berber kitchen watching grandmother and granddaughter slap dough onto stones, and the smell of that bread baking is one of my strongest memories of the mountains. There's also berkoukes, little hand-rolled pasta pearls simmered in broth — Berber comfort food at its purest.

Mountain tagines reflect what the land gives. Lamb or mutton with prunes and almonds for a feast; otherwise turnips, carrots, potatoes, squash and dried beans, slow-cooked over a single gas ring or wood fire until everything melts together. The seasoning is gentler than down on the plains — less cinnamon-and-ginger flamboyance, more about good fat, good salt and slow time. This is food cooked by people who grow most of it, so it tastes of the valley it came from.

And then the local treasures: argan oil pressed in the foothills, nutty and golden, drizzled over bread or stirred into amlou (that addictive almond-argan-honey spread); thick fresh butter and buttermilk; walnuts; and dark mountain honey that the Berbers prize. End a cold High Atlas day with bread, amlou, fresh butter and a pot of sage or wild-thyme tea instead of mint, and you've eaten exactly as the mountains have for centuries — plain, nourishing and deeply, quietly delicious.