What's it like to eat in a local Moroccan home?

You arrive and the welcome is immediate and total — slippers offered at the door, a low salon ringed with banquettes and cushions, mint tea and almonds pressed on you before you've even sat down properly. The room smells of whatever has been simmering since morning. There's no menu, no choice, no rush; you are simply going to be fed, abundantly, and your only job is to show up hungry and let it happen.

The food comes in waves and the centrepiece is shared. A tagine or a heaped platter of couscous is set in the middle of the table and everyone eats from it directly, each person working the wedge in front of them, scooping with torn bread and the right hand because cutlery is mostly beside the point. The host tears off the best bits of meat and nudges them onto your side of the dish without a word — a small, constant act of care that happens all through the meal. You eat the vegetables, the broth-soaked bread, the buttery couscous, and just when you think it's done, more appears.

Friday is couscous day across the whole country, and if you're invited then you're getting the full ceremony — a mountain of fluffy semolina built up with seven vegetables and tender meat, rolled by hand that morning. Other days it might be a lamb tagine with prunes and almonds, or chicken with preserved lemon and olives, or a rich harira soup to start. Whatever it is, the portions assume you have the appetite of three people, and 'no thank you, I'm full' is heard as a charming joke to be gently overruled.

The eating slides into the lingering, which is really the point. Tea comes back out, then fruit, then maybe a plate of sticky pastries, and the conversation stretches long past the food. You'll be asked about your family, your country, whether you're married, and told you must come back, you must stay longer, you must take some bread for the road. You leave heavier, a little dazed by the generosity, and certain that you ate the real Morocco — not the version on any restaurant menu, but the one served from the centre of a family's own table.