Pastilla in Marrakesh: Morocco's sweet-savoury pigeon pie

Overview

Pastilla — also written bastilla or bstilla — is the dish that surprises visitors more than any other on a Moroccan table, because it puts icing sugar and cinnamon on top of shredded poultry and expects you to eat the two together. It is a round pie: layers of paper-thin pastry enclosing spiced pigeon or chicken cooked down with onions, saffron and eggs, a stratum of toasted almonds crushed with sugar and orange-blossom water, all baked until the pastry crisps and then dusted, on top, with a snowfall of icing sugar and a lattice of cinnamon. Cut into it and the layers are the whole point: crackle, then savoury meat, then sweet almond, then sugar.

It is not Marrakesh’s own invention, and it is worth saying so plainly. Pastilla is a Moroccan dish eaten across the country, with an especially strong claim attached to Fez, and the city guide is right to call it the local showpiece rather than the local staple. Its usual origin story is Moorish: that it came with the Muslim and Jewish refugees who left al-Andalus — Andalusi Spain — as Granada fell, bringing the technique of the tissue-thin pastry with them. That account is widely repeated and culturally real, but it is tradition rather than firmly documented history, and even the name is argued over — often linked to the Spanish pastilla, “little tablet”. Take the Andalusi story as the lovely, plausible thing it is, not as a dated fact.

What is not in doubt is the pastry. The genuine article is built from warqa (ouarka), sheets so thin they are made by dabbing a loose batter onto a hot metal dome and peeling off what sets — closer to a cooked crêpe than to rolled dough, and the single hardest thing in the dish to fake.

What to order

The word to say is pastilla, and the real decision is the filling. Three versions you will meet:

• pastilla djaj — chicken. This is the common, everyday version now and the safest first order: sweet-savoury, generous, and made everywhere.
• pigeon pastilla — the original and the prestige version, made with squab. It is richer and gamier, it is what a traditional kitchen serves at a feast, and it costs more and is rarer. If a menu offers a true pigeon pastilla, that is the one to try if you want the dish as it was.
• seafood pastilla (pastilla aux fruits de mer) — a modern, coastal creation of fish, prawns and vermicelli in the same pastry, and crucially savoury only, with no sugar. It is a genuine dish and a good one, but it is a different experience; order it if the sweet-savoury combination is not for you, not expecting the classic.

One more to keep straight so you order what you mean: pastilla au lait, “milk pastilla”, is a dessert — layers of fried warqa with sweetened milk, cream and almonds, served in a bowl. It shares only the pastry with the savoury pie. Ask for the milk version and you will get pudding, which is delightful and not dinner.

Pastilla is traditionally a large, shared centrepiece brought to the table whole and cut for everyone, often as the opener to a feast rather than a main course. Many restaurants now serve a single-person size, which is the practical way for a visitor to try it without committing a table to one dish.

What to avoid

The tell here is the pastry, and it is visible before you taste anything. A serious pastilla is wrapped in warqa, which bakes into fine, slightly irregular, shatteringly crisp leaves. A lazy one is wrapped in industrial filo or spring-roll wrappers, which bake flat, even and a little bready, and taste of packet. If the crust looks machine-uniform and thick, the kitchen has skipped the one component that cannot be bought ready-made to the same effect.

Be wary, too, of the sugar being used as cover. A heavy blizzard of icing sugar on top is traditional, but on a dull pastilla it is also camouflage — for a dry filling, a mean amount of almond, or meat that is more bone and gristle than flesh. The balance you want is a filling moist and savoury enough to carry the sweetness, not a sweetness deployed to rescue the filling. A version that is sugar and pastry with barely anything between them is the one to regret.

Finally, a pastilla handed to you within minutes at any hour has been made in bulk and reheated. It reheats poorly: the warqa goes chewy and damp, and the contrast that is the entire pleasure of the dish collapses. In the traditional places it is assembled and baked to order or in small batches, which is exactly why they ask you to wait or to order it ahead.

Practicalities

Pastilla is a celebration and showpiece dish, not everyday street food, and it is priced above the tagines and grills around it: reckon on roughly 50 to 120 dirham — very approximately €5 to €12 — for a single-person chicken version in a sit-down restaurant, with pigeon dearer again and a whole shared one more still. A suspiciously cheap pastilla almost always means industrial pastry and a thin filling; the labour in the real thing is the cost.

Because the good version takes real assembly, the traditional move is to order it ahead in places that make it properly, or to accept it as part of a set feast menu (diffa) where it arrives as the grand first course. It is rich and filling out of proportion to its size — a single portion is a substantial course on its own, and a shared one is a starter for a whole table, not a side.

It is eaten with the hands or a fork, and it is gloriously messy: sugar scatters, the pastry shatters, and that is normal rather than a sign anything went wrong. There is no season to it, but it belongs to occasions — a Friday lunch, a wedding, a feast — far more than to a quick weekday meal, and the places that treat it as an occasion are the ones that make it best. As the city guide notes, the traditional kitchens and riads that do it well often sit outside the card-taking restaurants of the new town, so carry cash for them.