Pastilla (Sweet and Savoury Chicken Pie)

Variations

• Pigeon, the original: it was made with young pigeon rather than chicken, and still is on a formal table in Fez. Chicken is a 20th-century substitution that goes the same direction.
• Seafood pastilla: fish, prawns and squid with vermicelli and harissa, and no sugar or cinnamon on top. Common around Casablanca and effectively treated as a different dish.
• Milk pastilla (pastilla au lait): the pastry fried crisp separately and layered with cream — a dessert that shares only the shell.
• Filo instead of warqa: the original wrapper is warqa, dabbed by hand onto a hot plate. Filo is the closest substitute and needs butter between every sheet to puff comparably — the same handling as baklava.
• Size: a feast pastilla is one 40cm round; restaurants now often make individual ones, which come out crisper because there is more pastry per filling.
• Against spanakopita and baklava: all three are layered thin pastry, but spanakopita ends savoury and baklava ends in syrup. Only pastilla finishes with dry sugar over a savoury filling.
• Its relation to tagine: the filling is, in effect, a chicken tagine with saffron and ginger. The same braise from the same country arrives either in its own broth or inside pastry.
• What it is served with: on a Moroccan table it comes before the couscous, or as the opening dish of a feast. One round is a meal by itself.

Tips

• The sugar is the dish. Dusting icing sugar over a savoury pie looks like an error, so it is the step most often skipped — and skipping it leaves you with a chicken pie. Meat braised with saffron, ginger and cinnamon already leans sweet; the sugar completes the lean and ties the almonds and cinnamon together (what sugar does, balancing flavour).
• The filling must be dry. This is essentially the only way the dish fails: a wet filling steams the base pastry into dough. Reducing the broth and then setting it with egg is what step four is for. Tilt the pan — if anything runs, it is not ready.
• The egg exists so the broth is not thrown away. Setting beaten egg into the reduced braising liquid is how you remove the liquid without losing its flavour. Poured in wet it soaks the pastry; poured away it takes the taste with it (cooking eggs, thickening).
• Almonds on the top layer. They need to be nearest the face you dust, so that sugar, cinnamon and almond arrive in the same mouthful. Buried at the bottom, that combination falls apart.
• Chop the almonds, do not grind them. They are the only crunch in the whole pie; powdered, the thing becomes uniformly soft. Toasting them first is not optional either.
• Butter between every filo sheet. The butter makes steam between the layers and pushes them apart. Stacked dry, they bake into a single sheet (butter).
• Let the filo hang over the rim. Folding those overhangs back over the filling is how this pie is closed. Trim the sheets to fit the pan and you have nothing left to close it with.
• Keep it from drying out. Filo goes brittle within minutes in open air. Cover the sheets you are not using with a damp cloth.
• Invert it to serve. The face that sat against the pan is the smoothest and most evenly coloured, so turn that side up onto the plate, and dust the sugar over that.
• Cinnamon in a lattice. Sifting lines of cinnamon across the white sugar is the Moroccan convention and reads far better than mixing the two. A cut strip of paper as a mask keeps the lines straight.
• You can make it a day ahead — the filling, at least. A cold filling is easier to handle and weeps less. But wrap and bake it on the day you eat it.