Bastilla

As tradition built it

Serves 6 to 8. About 2 hours.

Ingredients

The method as the tradition gives it, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them, lead dishes first.

• 2 squabs, or 3 quail, or 1.5 kg chicken in pieces
• 3 onions, grated
• 1.5 tsp each ground cinnamon and ground dried ginger
• 1 tsp ras el hanout, and ¼ tsp cayenne
• 2 good pinches saffron
• 100 g butter
• 10 eggs, beaten
• 250 g blanched almonds
• icing sugar and ground cinnamon, and warqa sheets or filo

Method

1. Cook the birds with the grated onions in a sauce spiced with the cinnamon, ginger, ras el hanout, cayenne and saffron, with water and butter, about 30 minutes.
2. Lift out the meat, strip it from the bone, and reduce the sauce until it is completely reduced and silky.
3. Whisk the ten beaten eggs into that reduced sauce and scramble about 5 minutes, until set but still creamy.
4. Toast the blanched almonds, grind them coarsely, mix with icing sugar.
5. Assemble in three discrete strata separated by buttered warqa: almonds first, then the meat, then the egg curd.
6. Bake at 230°C for 20 to 30 minutes. Finish with icing sugar and criss-crossed lines of ground cinnamon.

Notes

After Anissa Helou.

Warqa is not filo. Ouarka means paper or leaf, and the sheet is already partly cooked, which makes it sturdier and less flexible. The ratio is 200 g flour to 250 ml water plus salt and lemon juice: a batter at 125 per cent hydration, blended completely smooth, because the gluten still develops in a fluid. Traditionally it is dabbed with the hand onto an inverted heated metal dome, the tobsil dyal warqa, and peeled off. The domestic proxy is a flat pan set over a pan of boiling water, held around 100°C, with one very thin layer painted on, done when the surface dries and turns white, at 1 mm or less.

What a modern chef changes

Almonds ground to order, the birds browned, the sugar moved

Rungs 6, 2 and 4

Method

1. Grind the almonds to order and keep them whole until then. Rung 6, and the most important instruction here. Ground almonds have enormous surface area and oxidise fast, and a bastilla made with rancid ground almonds is unfixable and tastes of paint. Buy whole, blanch, fry until gold, cool, grind coarse, use within the hour.
2. Brown the birds separately and hard before the braise. Rung 2. Thirty minutes in a wet spiced sauce browns nothing, and a separate sear gives the meat layer a depth the sugar and cinnamon otherwise have to work against.
3. Move the ras el hanout to the finish and make it floral. Rung 4. A teaspoon in a 30 minute braise adds almost nothing the cinnamon and ginger are not already doing. Savoury blend in the braise, floral blend with rose and mace dusted over the almond layer as you build.
4. Do not sugar it until it leaves the oven. Icing sugar in a hot oven melts, wets the top sheet and softens exactly the shattering texture the pastry exists for.