Om Ali

This homely Egyptian dessert has become very popular in the last thirty years. People in Cairo say it arrived from the villages of Upper Egypt; but there it is said to be from Cairo. (One theory is that it is a bread pudding introduced by a Miss O’Malley, an Irish mistress of the Khedive Ismail.) People find all sorts of ways of making it – with pancakes, with thinly rolled-out pastry and, more easily, with pieces of bread. I have found that fila pastr