The guidebooks will tell you that Moroccan food is excellent, and in general they are right. Marrakech is an amazing place for a feed, and by all accounts the northern cities like Fés and Meknès are excellent too. What they don't tend to mention is that once you're out of the cities and in the desert, you're in for the same food all the time, especially in the off-season. It can get really wearing.
The Berbers, who inhabit southern central Morocco, are deeply proud of their food, which basically boils down to the following:
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Salade Marocaine, which consists of chopped tomatoes, onions, green peppers and cucumber, with boiled potatoes and olives if you're in a really classy establishment.
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Tagines, which are named after the pots in which they are cooked. A typical tagine contains some kind of meat (mainly chicken or lamb) along with potatoes, carrots and a smattering of other vegetables, all cooked in the same juices.
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Brochettes, which are skewered bits of marinated meat, cooked on a barbecue.
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Harira, which is a bit like tomato soup with pulses and various other vegetables chucked in.
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Couscous, but only in theory. Couscous takes forever to cook, so unless it's already cooked or you're in a city, the chances are slim of finding any. Which is a pity, because it's not bad.
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Moroccan bread, which comes in a loaf shaped like a large, flat bun, and which is handy for soaking up the soups and juices of the above.
That's not a bad spread, but what amazed me was how totally inflexible the menus were in the desert land of the Berbers. Every hotel we stayed in, and every restaurant, provided us with the choice of tagines or brochettes, but precious little else except salad and bread. The first day it was fun, the second it was OK, the third it was a little repetitive, and by the fourth day I was dreaming of anything other than yet more tagines and brochettes. After getting sick on whichever tagine it was that blew my stomach away, I couldn't even stand the word tagine. And as for brochettes, after a while all I wanted to do was stick the skewers into the authors of our guidebook, who couldn't fall over themselves fast enough in proclaiming Moroccan food as some of the best on the planet.
Yes, the food in the Moroccan desert is good, but only for one meal. After that, it's utterly, utterly boring, which is not something the guidebooks point out. Perhaps I'm missing something, but there's a restaurant down the road from me in London where they sell top-quality Moroccan food. And guess what they sell? Salads, tagines, brochettes, harira, bread and precious little else. Except in London they're three times the price, of course.