How is pastilla (bastilla) assembled and made?

Pastilla is the dish that makes guests put down their forks and ask how on earth it is made, because it does something no other savoury dish dares: it is sweet and savoury at once, and it is built like a piece of architecture. It is a festival centrepiece — you meet it at weddings and grand dinners — and it begins with the pastry, warqa. This is gossamer-thin, almost translucent leaves, made by dabbing a ball of wet dough rapidly onto a hot dome of metal so it leaves a tissue-like film that is peeled off. Watching a woman make warqa is mesmerising; the dough seems to barely kiss the surface.

The classic filling is pigeon, slow-braised until falling apart with onions, saffron, ginger, plenty of fresh coriander and parsley, and a base of warming spices. The cooking liquid is then thickened with beaten eggs scrambled soft into it, almost like a savoury, lemony custard that binds everything. Most kitchens now use chicken, which is gentler and easier to source, but the principle is the same: a moist, fragrant, deeply spiced meat layer. Separately, almonds are fried golden, then crushed with sugar and cinnamon into a sweet, crunchy rubble — the layer that startles people.

Then it is assembled in a round pan like the layers of a story. Sheets of warqa are fanned out across the base and up the sides, brushed with butter, overlapping so the edges hang over the rim. The almond mixture goes down first, then the saffron meat and its eggy sauce on top, then more warqa, and finally the overhanging edges are folded back over the top and tucked under to seal the whole thing into a neat golden drum. More butter, and it goes into the oven — or, traditionally, is shallow-fried — until the pastry is shatteringly crisp and burnished bronze all over.

The finish is pure theatre and is what everyone photographs: a heavy dusting of icing sugar over the whole dome, then fine lines of cinnamon laid across it in a diamond lattice. You break through that crackling, sugar-dusted lid into the hot, savoury, saffron-scented meat and the sweet almond crunch beneath, and the contrast is unforgettable — sweet, savoury, crisp, soft, all in one bite. On our culinary days I love having guests help layer one, because only when you have wrestled the fragile warqa yourself do you appreciate the patience a good pastilla demands.