Food Traditions of Meknes and the Olive Belt

An ancient agricultural heartland

The land around Meknes has been farmed intensively for over two thousand years. The Roman city of Volubilis, a short distance to the north, was the administrative centre of the province of Mauretania Tingitana, and its extensive ruins include numerous olive presses — evidence that this was a major olive-oil producing region in antiquity. The fertile Saïss plain, well-watered and gently rolling, has supported grain, olives and orchards ever since.

This agricultural wealth underlies the region's food. Where the mountains and the desert edge produce cuisines of scarcity and preservation, the Meknes plains produce a cuisine of abundance — plentiful olives and olive oil, grain for bread and couscous, fruit from the orchards, and the produce of rich market gardens.

The olive belt

Meknes is the capital of Morocco's olive country. The groves that surround the city produce both table olives and olive oil in great quantity, and the annual harvest is a defining rhythm of rural life. Olives are central to Moroccan cooking everywhere — in tagines, salads and as a table snack — but here they are also a defining local product, and the region's oil is prized.

The imperial city itself, built up grandly under Sultan Moulay Ismail in the 17th century, has its own refined urban cuisine in the tradition of Morocco's great cities: elaborate tagines, couscous, and pastries. But the surrounding land, and the olives above all, give Meknes cuisine its particular grounding in the produce of a rich countryside.

• Olives and oil: the region's signature product, both for the table and for cooking.
• Grain: the Saïss plain supplies wheat for bread and couscous.
• Orchards and gardens: fruit and vegetables from fertile, well-watered land.

Morocco's wine country

Uniquely among Morocco's regions, the plains around Meknes are also the centre of the country's wine industry. Viticulture here has roots reaching back to Roman times, but the modern industry was developed under the French protectorate in the early 20th century, when the climate and soils of the Meknes plateau proved well suited to the vine. Today the Guerrouane and Beni M'Tir areas produce most of Morocco's wine, a small but real part of the region's agricultural output in a majority-Muslim country where wine occupies an unusual and discreet place.

For the ancient roots of this landscape, see the Phoenician and Roman food legacy; for olives specifically, see olive cultivation in Morocco; and for wine, see the history of Moroccan wine.