What olives does Morocco have and how are they cured?

The olive counter in a Moroccan souk stops me in my tracks every single time. It's a long bank of glistening pyramids in greens, dusty pinks and deep blacks, some slicked with oil, some flecked with red chilli or chopped herbs, some swimming with slivers of preserved lemon and garlic. The vendor will press a couple into your hand to taste before you commit, and the colours tell you the ripeness: green olives are picked young and taste firm and grassy, violet or pink ones are mid-ripe and rounder, and black are fully ripe, soft and rich.

What really fascinates me is the curing, because the same olive becomes a dozen different things depending on how it's treated. Green olives are often 'cracked' (zeitoun mkalleb) — split with a stone so the brine and dressing soak in — then steeped with garlic, chilli, cumin and herbs into a punchy, crunchy snack. The wrinkled, intensely savoury black ones, meslalla, are cured dry in salt until they shrivel and concentrate. In between sit the mellow violet olives, beautiful with preserved lemon and a thread of argan or olive oil.

And they're genuinely woven through the whole day, not kept aside as a nibble. A little dish of olives appears the moment you sit down at breakfast, beside the bread and oil. They're scattered through the small cooked salads, folded into bakoula, and they're essential to the great chicken-with-preserved-lemon-and-olives tagine, where they go in near the end so they stay plump and briny. They turn up in fish dishes from the coast and even in some breads.

My favourite thing is to let guests graze a whole olive stall — taste the chilli-garlic green ones, the salt-cured black, the violet with preserved lemon — and then carry off a paper twist of their favourite to nibble back at the riad with mint tea. Buy a bottle of good local olive oil while you're at it; Morocco's is excellent, grassy and peppery, and shamefully underrated abroad.