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There is not much joy in the watery and unconvincing harira.

"In the Jewish Moroccan household I grew up in, harira was served on colder evenings in the late fall and throughout the winter as a dinner soup," food writer Liz Vaknin told me via email.

Harira, as Vaknin describes it, is a velvety smooth tomato-based soup, spiced with warming cinnamon and ginger and earthy cumin and cilantro, and fortified with lentils, chickpeas and even thin pieces of noodles.

"After sharing this find with my mother, I learned that her family would make harira for breakfast, too. It was only when she and my father moved to the U.S. that she stopped making it for breakfast because 'it just wasn't something that Americans did.'"

She made North African foods special to Ramadan: harira, a savory Moroccan soup, along with a peppery dip and homemade bread.