[Sca-cooks] African dish

[Lilinah]

Huette von Ahrens <ahrenshav at yahoo.com> wrote:
>--- 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.
>  > Sarah
>
>I believe that the "hot pan" you are thinking of is a tajine or 
>tagine, which is a ceramic
>pan with a ceramic cone-shaped chimney to bake or stew foods without 
>having to stir
>them.  Almost all the North African tajines are ceramic, but there 
>are metal ones made
>in America and Europe using the same principles.

I'm pretty sure it's not a tajine. My recollection is that the pan 
was metal - it looks rather like an upside down wok, which an upside 
down tajine would not. I'm not quite certain where my copy of Paula 
Wolfert's "Couscous and other good foods from Morocco" is at the 
moment. She's got a photo of her cook Fatima dabbing away, making 
warqa. Wolfert lived in Morocco for several decades, and goes back. 
She is a very noted food historian who specializes in Mediterranean 
foods.

Also, "varak" which Adamantius mentioned appears to be cognate with 
warqa (there's all this vowel shiftiness in Arabic, and in Moroccan 
Arabic especially) and "borek" and "brik" are probably also cognate, 
since Berber Arabic tends also to drop vowels in favor of amazing 
consonant clusters.

Mmm-mmm, tasty consonant clusters...

-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita