What is Moroccan honey and amlou for breakfast?

Moroccans treat honey as something close to medicine, and once you taste the range here you understand why. This is a country of wild hillsides, argan forests, thyme-covered mountains and orange groves, so the honeys are wonderfully varied and often single-flower. The most legendary — and eye-wateringly expensive — is euphorbia honey, called daghmous, which is dark, thick and startlingly bitter-spicy, prized as a tonic. Then there's fragrant thyme honey, delicate orange-blossom honey, deep jujube (sidr), earthy carob, and golden all-purpose wildflower.

At breakfast, honey is everywhere and it has a job to do. A pool of it sits on the table to be drizzled over warm bread, and it's the natural partner for baghrir — that lacy, holey pancake — whose thousand little craters drink up a mixture of melted butter and honey until each bite is soft, buttery and sweet. It goes over msemen and harcha too, and into glasses of mint tea on a cold morning.

Beside the honey you'll almost always find amlou, which deserves its own paragraph at breakfast. It's a thick, glossy spread from the argan country of the southwest, made by grinding toasted almonds with golden argan oil and honey into a nutty, caramel-coloured paste — people call it 'Moroccan Nutella', though it's earthier and more grown-up than that. You scoop it onto bread or msemen, and the toasted-almond-and-argan richness against the honey is the kind of breakfast that makes people go quiet.

My advice is to taste honeys side by side if you get the chance — a good souk vendor or argan cooperative will let you compare the bitter daghmous against the floral thyme and orange-blossom — and to buy a small jar of the one you love plus a tub of real amlou to take home. They're light, they last, and a spoonful of each on toast back home is the most delicious souvenir of a Moroccan morning.