Food and culture tours: Finding the world's best Moroccan cuisine

"There's no snail soup," says Meryem Ameziane, disappointment in her voice. I'm trying my best not to look pleased. Snail soup is a winter dish in Morocco but in mid-May we're teetering on the brink of summer. I've been saved. With a fresh spring in my step, I stride forth through the pulsing medina of Fez towards our next foodie adventure.

Fez is the mecca of food in Morocco, home of the finest traditional cooking, and Meryem Ameziane, of Plan-it Fez, is my guide on a four-hour food tour of the city's tangled medina, the old city.

It begins with a tasting session in the honey market. Digging into deep plastic barrels, Ameziane hauls out treacly spoonfuls of thyme, fig, lavender, acacia, eucalyptus and finally euphorbia honey, which you can only take in very small quantities, with powerful medicinal properties.

Next, chicken and meat from the head of a sheep, served with chilli sauce, and cheeses made from goat and a mild sheep's cheese, almost like a dry ricotta. The cheese man says they also make cheese from cow's milk but he's not a fan, it all tastes the same to him. There's a huge crowd around the sweet stall where we queue for triangular pastries dripping with honey and stuffed with almond paste. We sample dates from glistening piles, a Moroccan addiction, and they're delicious, especially the Medjool dates which sometimes come wrapped around a walnut.

"What's this?" Ameziane asks us, holding up a dried flower head with stiff bristles clustered in a cone-shape. It's the toothpick plant, the dried umbrel of the Ammi Visnaga, known here as bushnika, originally from the Nile delta. Pull off a stem and you're on your way to clean teeth.

Every neighbourhood has to have a hammam, a fountain, a mosque and a bakery, Ameziane tells me, and here's the bakery. Lit only by the fire within his wood-fired oven, the baker using a long paddle to shove bread about. It's a sociable occupation. Women come here with trays of biscuits to be baked. They sit and chat, and the baker gets all the local gossip. Traditionally he was the matchmaker. A man in search of a wife would ask the baker who was available, and whether she knew how to make good biscuits.

We fold ourselves into a tiny tea stall where the tea seller works behind an elaborate copper urn. He's a character, theatrically beheading piles of aromatic herbs – geranium, sage, wormwood, orange blossom – but above all mint, and heaps of sugar, steeped in glasses and served boiling hot. It's important to serve tea at maximum temperature when you serve it to a friend. They'll hang around waiting for the tea to cool, and you'll have more opportunity for a chin wag, and Moroccans love nothing better.