[Sca-cooks] African dish

[Lilinah]

Well, i'm now only a day or two behind in reading the list (i get the 
digest which accounts for why i'm generally a day late and a dollar 
short in responding to conversations)

Anyway, i'm sure this has been answered, but i'll just go ahead and 
add this redundifying redundification...

"Sarah Fitzpatrick" <fitz at ccountry.net> wrote:
>There is an northern African dish (Algeria?) with the crust made of a soft
>dough dabbed on a hot pan (a wok like turned upside dowm over the heat
>source) then pealed off and stacked. The pie is made of chicken, almonds
>layers of dough and I forget what else.  Maybe 10 sheets, filling and
>repeat. It is in the Time Life Cookbook for Africa.

Sounds like the famous Moroccan dish pigeon bistiyya. The process you 
describe of dabbing the dough is how Paula Wolfert describes her cook 
Fatima making warqa. Modern recipes in US cookbooks for bistiyya 
(often spelled in a rather Spanish way as bistilla) substitute 
chicken for pigeon, and phyllo (here we go, back in a circle again) 
for warqa.

When i was in Morocco (Dec 2000-Jan 2001) i did not eat the 
traditional pigeon bistiyya, since i was travelling with vegetarians. 
There is a new thing, which is little "hand pie" like bistiyya in 
Morocco - and i was served one of these. It contained shellfish, and 
i seem to recall bean threads (!!!), those stretchy transparent 
noodley things that show up in Thai and Indonesian dishes, and IIRC, 
in Vietnamese... arrgh, i forgot the name... uh, Imperial rolls? I 
*assume* the wrapper was warqa, although i didn't ask. It certainly 
had well-developed gluten, but was very thin and very transparent 
(sheesh, were they using the Vietnamese rice wrappers that are used 
for Imperial rolls???).

Now, i have NO data to add here about phyllo or proto-baklava. But 
since phyllo is Greek, and bakalva is eaten just about anywhere the 
Ottoman Empire controlled, i think that barking up the phyllo tree 
may well be barking up the wrong tree. If the Turks made something 
(regardless of whether they learned it from the Hungarians, or 
brought it from the Central Asian Turkish homeland, or learned it 
from the Mongols), and the Greeks learned to make it from the Turks, 
i can just about guarantee that the Greeks will give it a Greek name 
and deny learning it from the Turks (ok, that's a bit strongly put, 
and certainly not 100% true, but just the same...) So i suspect that 
phyllo is not the key to baklava, but a later development.

OK, I am going to ask my consort's Syrian coworker if he knows what 
the stuff is called in Arabic. Can't say this is going to increase 
clarification, but, what the heck, it'll add more fun to the 
confusion.

And didn't the Magyar/Hungarians go west to Europe from the Steppes? 
Could they have learned their layered dishes from some Turks before 
they even arrived in Europe?

Anyway, more useless thoughts.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita