Best Lamb Tagine in Fes — The Imperial City's Slow-Cooked Classic

The signature Fassi tagine is lamb with prunes and almonds (lham b'barqouq), a sweet-savoury dish that anchors weddings and feast-day tables across the old city. The meat is simmered for hours with cinnamon, ginger, saffron and onion until it falls from the bone, then finished with prunes softened in honey, a scatter of toasted almonds and sometimes sesame. Fes cooks pride themselves on the balance — the sauce should be glossy and reduced, never thin, and the sweetness should lift the lamb rather than swamp it.

You will also meet mrouzia, the intensely sweet, spice-heavy lamb-and-raisin tagine traditionally made around Eid to preserve meat, and khlii — sun-dried, spiced preserved beef that Fassi households keep in jars and fold into eggs and tagines. For an everyday version, look to the small lunch canteens inside Fes el-Bali, particularly the food lanes off Talaa Kebira and around Place Seffarine, where labourers and students eat a proper tagine with bread for a modest price.

Because Fes is an inland imperial city with a long court tradition, its cooking leans richer and more perfumed than the coast — more cinnamon, more saffron, more layered sweetness. A riad dinner will plate the same dish beautifully by candlelight, but the flavour tradition is identical to the canteen. Order one tagine between two with khobz bread and a cooked-vegetable salad, and eat it at lunch when it has had the whole morning to cook.