What is Berber / Amazigh cuisine?

Before there were imperial cities and Andalusian influences, there was Amazigh food — the indigenous cuisine of the Berber peoples who have farmed Morocco's mountains and pre-Sahara for millennia. It's the most honest cooking in the country: unfussy, seasonal, and shaped entirely by altitude and what the soil yields. Some of my most moving meals have been in a simple Atlas home, where a family tagine fed eight of us from one shared dish on the floor.

The classic is the 'Berber tagine' — a conical mound of vegetables (potato, carrot, onion, tomato, courgette) layered around a little meat, scented with cumin and olive oil, cooked slowly over coals so everything steams in its own juices. No fancy fruits or sugar; just deep, earthy flavour mopped up with bread. Couscous here is often rolled from barley rather than wheat, heavier and nuttier, sometimes served with buttermilk.

Two Amazigh treasures every guest falls for: amlou and argan oil. Amlou is a thick, addictive spread of roasted almonds, golden argan oil and honey, ground (traditionally by hand) into something between nut butter and praline — we eat it for breakfast with warm bread and it converts everyone instantly. Argan, pressed by women's cooperatives from the nutty kernels of the argan tree, drizzles over everything in the southwest. And the bread itself — tafarnout, a rustic flatbread slapped onto the searing wall of a domed clay oven — comes out blistered, smoky and irresistible.

Then there's the hospitality of the tea: in the mountains it's often a wild infusion — thyme, sage, verbena, wild lavender — picked from the slopes and steeped with mint and a brick of sugar, poured from a great height into tiny glasses. Sharing it is non-negotiable; to refuse is unthinkable. I build authentic Amazigh meals into our Atlas and valley days precisely because they strip Moroccan food back to its roots, and because eating in someone's home is the warmest welcome you'll ever get.