Imlil Berber Cooking Class - High Atlas Amazigh Home Cooking

Imlil is a Berber village high in the Toubkal massif of the High Atlas, the base for treks up North Africa's highest peak, set among walnut trees, terraced fields and stone hamlets. Its food is Amazigh mountain home cooking - hearty, seasonal and shaped by altitude and hard winters - and a class here, in a village home, is a warm and genuine window into how the mountain people eat, far from any tourist kitchen.

You cook a slow Berber tagine over a low fire - often with mountain vegetables, lamb or chicken and the herbs and olive oil of the hills - and make the fresh bread that is baked daily and used to scoop every dish. The host may teach walnut-and-honey sweets or amlou, since walnuts grow all around Imlil, and mint tea is brewed and poured throughout. The cooking is simple, generous and rooted in what the terraces and flocks provide.

The setting is inseparable from the food. Cooking in a stone village home with the snow-topped peaks around, eating on a terrace or by the fire, and sharing the famous hospitality of the Amazigh, is the whole point. It is a gentle, grounding contrast to the intensity of Marrakech just a couple of hours below, and a real taste of High Atlas life. You finish by eating everything you made, and leave with recipes and mountain memories.