Hope the American readership got the summer off to a good start this Memorial Day. It was Alumni Weekend here, which gave me a chance to see some familiar faces, and in one case in particular, host one of my favorite alums for dinner.
I turned to one of my favorite recipes of all time as I often do if guests are coming. You’d think I’d have this particular recipe memorized—I’ve cooked it as many as twenty times. But it’s one of those things you have to do just so.
The general preparation is a North African dish known as pastilla or bstilla, and there’s a fair number of recipes for it out there. The basic recipe is shredded chicken that’s been braised off the bone in an aromatic saffron broth, almonds mixed with sugar and cinnamon, and eggs that have been cooked in the broth used for the chicken, layered on top of each other in a filo-dough pie. Sometimes there’s a layer of onions with dried fruit as well. The result is a dish that eats really distinctively—on one bite it’s sweet, another bite savory, and the savory-sweet textures and tastes vary from bite to bite as well.
The book I use for this recipe is the Gold Fizdale Cookbook. I don’t cook a lot of other things from it, though it has a few other outstanding recipes that have made it into my repertoire. I also didn’t know much about the authors until I sat down to write this—the book was a gift from my mother a long time ago. The biographical details add a lot of meaning to the recipes—they were a couple who were also brilliant concert pianists, close friends with many prominent mid-century writers and musicians, who also turned to food writing and hosting a television cooking show when one of them started finding it difficult to continue to play the piano.
In any event, though I’ve cooked other recipes for this dish, this is the one I come back to again and again. I do always look at the recipe (you can tell how often I have it open close to the action by the stains on this recipe). The four layers take a bit of planning and because I think they’ve really got the taste of the different elements down just right.
The recipe also gets me in the right mindset for making something with filo dough. Filo might have been the first really technical thing I learned to work with at my restaurant job: my boss wanted me to make trays of spanikopita triangles for our catering gigs and to have some in the to-go freezer at the store, which needed to be done neatly and without wasting much dough. (I eventually added a new one to the repertoire stuffed with shrimp, goat cheese and basil.) He showed me how to make them, I practiced a couple of times at home, and then I was off to the races. If you’ve never work with filo, the basic challenge is that it dries out incredibly fast, at which point it crumbles into fragments if you try to use it. So you put a damp towel under the unwrapped, unfrozen roll and another one over it. Not too damp or it will get soggy, which is just as bad. As soon as you grab a new sheet to work with, you have to have it in place and quickly brush it with melted butter before it dries out. If you aren’t organized when you start, it’s going to be a failure—whatever you’re making has to get hammered out at an industrial pace.
Anyway, I decided we needed a couple of really nice salads to go with it, so I turned to Andy Baraghani’s The Cook You Want to Be, which has rapidly ascended into the pantheon of my favorite cookbooks. His recipes are maybe the best I’ve seen when it comes to being relatively simple but having distinctive, complex flavors—none of them quite taste ‘obvious’, in the best possible way.
Back on schedule tomorrow, but this week’s posting may continue to be somewhat spotty, as I’m attending a workshop. (The one where I may end up making my point about the “skills gap”.)