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Easy Moroccan Rfissa (Chicken with Msemen and Fenugreek)

Rfissa takes a completely different approach to the idea of a meal in a bowl. Instead of broth with things floating in it, you start with the bread — torn msemen laid across the base of a platter — and the broth soaks through it, turning the flatbread into something soft and deeply savoury, swollen with all the spices and fat and fenugreek that went into the pot. The chicken is almost secondary. What you're really eating is the bread and the broth together, which is why every bit of flavour you build in the pot matters. The fenugreek is the ingredient that makes rfissa taste like rfissa. It's sharp and slightly bitter, with a strange sweet warmth underneath that people often describe as maple-like — and it perfumes the whole dish. Soaking the seeds for at least 30 minutes (overnight is better) pulls out some of the harshness, leaving a cleaner, rounder flavour in the broth. Don't skip this step. Traditionally, rfissa is made with trid — a tissue-thin pastry steamed and stacked in layers — or with msemen, the flaky, layered square flatbreads found at every Moroccan breakfast table. For a weeknight version that doesn't require making bread from scratch, a good thick flour tortilla works better than you'd expect. It won't be trid, but it soaks the broth correctly and disappears into the dish the right way. Rfissa is a dish for celebrations and long family lunches. It's rich, slow-cooked, and has the kind of depth that gets slightly better as the bread absorbs more broth while you're eating.