B’stilla — spiced pigeon pastries

A highlight of Moroccan festive dinners and banquets, these heavenly, sweet, spicy pastries are served as a first course and are traditionally made with fine sheets of warkha pastry. Claudia Roden writes in her New Book of Middle Eastern Food that making this pastry ‘requires much skill and an almost inherited experience’.

Good-quality filo pastry can be substitu