The Wedding Meal: The Order of Dishes and Who Eats When

By half past midnight the guests at a Moroccan wedding have been in the hall for three hours. They have had milk and dates at the door, a plate of pastries and two glasses of tea at their table, and nothing else since lunch. The bride has entered on the amariya and changed twice. The older guests have begun to look at the kitchen doors. When the doors open and the waiters come through with the first platters, a sound goes round the room that is not applause and is not quite relief.

The Moroccan wedding meal is served late, in a fixed order, from shared platters, and it is judged by everyone present with a severity that the dresses and the music escape. A wedding is remembered for its lamb. This article sets out the order, the dishes, their regional substitutions, who cooks them, and who eats them and when. It sits inside the wedding sequence hub at the point where the guests finally eat.

The order, stated

Across the urban country the order is the same, with substitutions by region and by budget. It is worth setting out first, plainly, because its fixity is the point.

Two things are absent from this list and their absence is discussed below. There is no soup, no salad, and in the urban hall no couscous. There is, in the overwhelming majority of Moroccan weddings, no alcohol.

Milk and dates at the door

The first thing a guest is given is a glass of milk and a date, from a tray held by a young woman of the family or a waiter at the entrance. It is the Moroccan welcome, the same one offered to a guest at a house, a returning pilgrim, or a visiting official, and at the wedding it is the sign that the guest has crossed from the street into the family’s hospitality. The milk is cold, sometimes flavoured with orange-blossom water; the dates are the best the family could buy, often Medjool from the Tafilalet oases. A guest takes one date and drinks the milk in a swallow. It takes ten seconds and it is not omitted.

The same milk and dates will be given to the couple on the platform after the bride’s entrance, and the pair feeding each other a date is the meal’s first ceremonial act, hours before the meal.

The pastries and the wait

On each table, when the guests sit, there is a plate of pastries and a pot of tea, and this is what sustains the room until the bastilla. The pastries are the Moroccan almond repertoire: kaab el ghzal, the crescent of almond paste in thin pastry; ghriba, the cracked shortbread; briouat, the small triangles of almond in fried pastry dipped in honey; fekkas, the twice-baked almond biscuit; and, at a Fassi wedding, the more elaborate almond sweets that Fez is known for. They are made by a professional pastry maker booked by the family, or by the caterer, or — in families that keep the older form — by the women of the family over the preceding week, in quantities measured in kilograms.

The tea is poured by waiters from the tall pots, into small glasses, with the height that aerates it, and it is sweet. It is poured again whenever a glass is empty. A guest who has had four glasses of tea and a plate of almond pastries by midnight has had a good deal of sugar and no protein, and this is why the meal, when it comes, is received as it is.

Bastilla

The first course is bastilla (also pastilla, bstila): the layered pie of thin warqa pastry filled with shredded pigeon or chicken cooked with onions, spices, and eggs, layered with fried almonds, cinnamon, and sugar, baked, and dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon in a lattice. It arrives as a single large round, one per table of eight or ten, and it is cut into wedges by whoever is nearest, with a knife if one has been provided and with the side of a hand if not.

Bastilla is a Fassi dish by origin — Fez claims it, and the pigeon version is the Fassi standard — and it is served at weddings across the country because the wedding meal is a Fassi meal exported. The seafood bastilla, with fish, shrimp, and vermicelli, is a coastal alternative from Casablanca and the north and is served at weddings there either instead of or, at large weddings, in addition to the chicken one. Guests who are served both consider the family generous.

The bastilla is the course most likely to be commented on. A wet bastilla, a bastilla with too little almond, a bastilla whose pastry has gone soft in the warming cabinet — these are noticed, and the caterer’s reputation in the family’s circle depends on it.

The meat

The second course is meat, and the choice of meat is the choice that defines the wedding’s scale.

Mechoui is the top of the range: a whole lamb, or a whole young sheep, roasted slowly — in a pit, on a spit, or in a large oven — until the meat pulls from the bone, and brought to the table as a joint or a quarter, with cumin and salt to dip it in. One lamb serves three or four tables. A wedding that serves mechoui to three hundred guests has roasted a dozen animals, and everyone in the hall can do the arithmetic.

Lamb with prunes and almonds — lham bel barqoq — is the standard: lamb shoulder or leg braised until tender in a sauce of onion, ginger, saffron, and cinnamon, finished with prunes cooked in honey and fried almonds, and served on a platter with the sauce. It is the dish most Moroccans mean when they say “the wedding tagine,” and it is what most caterers serve.

Chicken with olives and preserved lemon — djaj m’qalli — is served at many weddings as a course between the bastilla and the lamb, or in place of the lamb at a modest wedding, or alongside it at a large one. In Fez it may be the djaj m’hammer, roasted after braising.

Tanjia, in Marrakech, replaces or accompanies the lamb: beef or lamb cooked for hours in a clay urn buried in the ashes of the neighbourhood hammam’s furnace, with preserved lemon, cumin, and smen, and served from the urn. It is a Marrakchi dish and it appears at Marrakchi weddings and almost nowhere else.

The meat is eaten from the shared platter with bread and the right hand, as any Moroccan meal is eaten. Forks are on the table in the hall and are used by those who prefer them. The bread is round khobz, in baskets, replaced as it goes.

What is not served

Three absences are worth stating because foreign guests expect the things absent and Moroccan guests would notice their presence.

Couscous is not served at the urban wedding night. This is a firm convention in the halls of Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech, and it surprises visitors who assume couscous is the Moroccan festive dish. It is — but for other festivities. Couscous is the Friday dish, the mourning dish, the dish of the sabah in some families and of the seventh day in others. At the wedding night it would be out of place, and a caterer who proposed it would be corrected. In the countryside and at Amazigh weddings the convention runs the other way: couscous, with the meat of the sheep slaughtered for the occasion, is the wedding dish and is served in enormous quantity to the whole village. The two conventions coexist and do not argue with each other.

Soup and salad are not courses at a wedding. Harira belongs to Ramadan; the cooked salads belong to the family table. A wedding meal goes from pastry to bastilla to meat without a lighter course, and the fruit at the end is the only thing on the table that is not rich.

Alcohol is not served at the great majority of Moroccan weddings. Soft drinks, water, juice, and tea are the drinks of the hall. At some weddings among the wealthy, and in some families that drink, alcohol is served — discreetly, at certain tables, or in a separate room — and this is known and not discussed. It is stated here because it is true, and because the presence of a bar at a Moroccan wedding is a statement about the family, not a detail of the catering.

Who cooks

Three kinds of cook produce the wedding meal, and the choice among them is a choice about the wedding’s form.

At a home wedding, in a town or a village or an old-city house with a courtyard, the tabbakha is hired. She arrives two days before with her assistants and her equipment — the enormous pots, the gsaa basins for kneading and mixing, the charcoal braziers — and she cooks in the courtyard or on the roof for the number of guests the family has told her, plus a margin. She is paid a fee and fed, and her team is paid by her. The women of the family work under her direction on the pastries and the bread. A good tabbakha is booked as far ahead as a good negafa, and in the towns she is often the same woman for every wedding on the street.

At a hall wedding the traiteur is hired, and the traiteur is a business: a kitchen, a staff, a menu with prices per head, a van, and waiters. The hall may impose its own traiteur or allow the family to bring one. The traiteur cooks off-site or in the hall’s kitchen, plates for tables of eight or ten, and serves on a schedule agreed with the negafa so that the meal does not collide with a dress change. The traiteur’s bastilla is a factory bastilla and is judged as such.

Wealthy families in Fez and Rabat sometimes keep both: a traiteur for the hall and a tabbakha, or a family cook in the dada tradition, for the bastilla alone, because a bastilla made by a woman who has made a thousand of them is a different thing from a caterer’s, and the guests know.

Who eats when

The meal is served to the tables in order, and the order of service, and of who is left out of it, is set.

1. The couple’s table, first

   The platform, or the table nearest it, is served first. The couple themselves rarely eat: the bride is in a dress that does not permit it and the groom is being photographed. Their platters go to their siblings.

2. The families’ tables

   The tables of the two families’ close relatives — parents, grandparents, uncles — are served next, and the oldest guests in the room, wherever they sit, at the same time. A waiter who serves a table of young cousins before a table of grandmothers will be told.

3. The room

   The rest of the hall is served in waves, from the platform outward. In a large hall this takes half an hour, and the tables served last watch the tables served first eat.

4. The workers, in the kitchen

   The musicians, the bearers, the negafa’s assistants, the photographer, and the drivers are fed in the kitchen or a side room, from the same dishes, after the room has been served. The negafa herself eats when the last dress is on.

5. The leftovers

   What remains — and at a Moroccan wedding a great deal remains, because the quantities are set to make sure nothing runs out — is packed by the family and distributed the next day to neighbours, to the poor, and to anyone who helped. A wedding with no leftovers is a wedding that was short of food, and no family wants that said.

In families that seat men and women separately, the two halves of the hall are served in parallel, and the women’s side is served first in most of them. In families that seat children at their own tables, the children are served with the room, and their tables are the loudest.

A wedding is remembered for its lamb. The dresses and the music escape the severity with which the meal is judged. Editorial statement — Moroccan Rituals

Quantities and cost

The quantities are large and they are large on purpose.

A tabbakha planning for three hundred guests will plan for three hundred and fifty, because guests bring guests and because running out is the one failure the family will not be forgiven. A bastilla for a table of ten weighs two to three kilograms. A lamb with prunes for the same table uses two to three kilograms of meat. Mechoui is counted in animals: one per three or four tables. The pastries are counted in kilograms per hundred guests — five to eight of kaab el ghzal alone at a generous wedding — and the tea in kilograms of sugar and leaves. The fruit is counted in crates.

The cost, per head, from a traiteur in a major city, is commonly cited at anything from one hundred and fifty to four hundred dirhams for the meal alone, before the hall, and the range corresponds to the meat: chicken and lamb-with-prunes at the low end, mechoui at the top. A tabbakha at a home wedding is cheaper per head and more work for the family. For three hundred guests, the meal is commonly the single largest line of the wedding after the hall itself, and it is the line the groom’s family, who by convention pay for the night, argue about longest.

Regional forms, and the morning after

The sequence described here is the urban form, and it is recognisably the Fassi meal — bastilla, then meat — carried to the rest of the country by the caterers and the negafat. The regions keep their own.

The morning after, at the sabah, the food changes register entirely. The breakfast at the groom’s family’s house is msemen and baghrir with honey and butter, sfenj, harcha, and in many families seffa medfouna, the sweet vermicelli with chicken buried inside it and cinnamon and icing sugar on top — a dish that is, in its sweetness and its concealment, the sabah’s own. It is brought or sent by the bride’s mother, in most families, and it is the first meal the bride eats as a wife, seated, with her hands free. The article on the sabah takes it from there.