What is Moroccan Jewish cuisine?

Moroccan Jewish cuisine is one of the oldest and most beautiful threads in the country's food, woven over more than two thousand years of Jewish life in Morocco. Its signature dish is skhina — known elsewhere as dafina or hamin — the Sabbath stew. Because observant Jews can't light a fire on Shabbat, the pot is assembled on Friday afternoon — beef or lamb, chickpeas, potatoes, whole eggs in their shells, a packet of wheat or rice, sometimes a stuffed meat roll called kouclas — sealed, and left in a very low oven overnight. By Saturday lunch it's a deep, brown, melting stew, the eggs turned creamy and tan from the long cook. Eating skhina is a window straight into Moroccan Jewish family life.

Necessity bred genius with preservation. Jewish cooks were masters of preserved lemons, pickled vegetables and salted, cured and confited foods — partly for kosher practicality, partly for the Sabbath when nothing could be freshly cooked. Many techniques and dishes that feel quintessentially 'Moroccan' today were carried, refined or popularised within Jewish kitchens, and the exchange ran both ways: Muslim and Jewish neighbours cooked alongside each other in the mellahs for centuries. Fish in chermoula, slow-cooked sweet-savoury meats, and intricate pastries all live in both traditions.

Sweets and festival foods are a world of their own. There are date-and-walnut confections, almond-stuffed pastries, marzipan-like sweets and special bakes tied to Jewish holidays — fried treats for Hanukkah, sweet couscous and honeyed pastries for celebrations, and the elaborate dishes of the Mimouna feast that closes Passover, when tables groan with crepes, honey, butter and sweets and homes are thrown open to neighbours. The food is inseparable from the calendar and the hospitality around it.

You can still taste this living heritage in Morocco today. The old mellah quarters of Fes, Marrakech and Essaouira, and the kosher and Jewish-Moroccan restaurants in Casablanca, keep these dishes alive, and Essaouira in particular wears its Jewish-Moroccan history openly. I love guiding food-curious travellers through it, because Moroccan Jewish cuisine isn't a footnote — it's a foundational ingredient in the national table, and understanding it deepens every other meal you'll eat in the country.