Recipes

These exquisite pastries called "the bride's fingers" feature in medieval Arab manuscripts found in Baghdad, fried and sprinkled with syrup and chopped pistachios. In Morocco, they are made with the thin pastry called warka or brick and deep-fried. I prefer to make them with fillo and to bake them. For a large-size version of the pastries, I use a supermarket brand where the sheets are about 12 inches × 7 inches.

I especially recommend you try the dainty little "bride's fingers" (see Variation). I make them for parties and I keep some in a cookie tin to serve with coffee. They are great favorites in our family; my mother always made them and now my children make them, too.

½ pound clear honey
½ cup water
2 cups ground almonds
½ to 2/3 cup superfine sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)
2 tablespoons orange blossom water
14 sheets of fillo
5 tablespoons (1/3 cup) unsalted butter, melted

Make the syrup by bringing the honey and water to the boil in a pan and simmering it for half a minute. Then let it cool.

Mix the ground almonds with the sugar, cinnamon, and orange blossom water.

Open the package of fillo only when you are ready to make the pastries. Keep them in a pile so that they do not dry out. Lightly brush the top one with melted butter.

Put a line of about 2 to 2½ tablespoons of the almond mixture at one of the short ends of the rectangle, into a line about 3/4 inch from the short and long edges. Roll up loosely into a fat cigar shape. Turn the ends in about one-third of the way along to trap the filling, then continue to roll with the ends opened out. Continue with the remaining sheets of fillo.

Place the pastries on a baking sheet, brush them with melted butter, and bake them in an oven preheated to 300°F for 30 minutes, or until lightly golden and crisp.

Turn each pastry, while still warm, very quickly in the syrup and arrange on a dish.

Serve cold with the remaining syrup poured all over.

variations:
Instead of the honey syrup, make a sugar syrup by simmering 1 cup water with 2 cups sugar and 1 tablespoon lemon juice for about 5 to 8 minutes, until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, adding 1 tablespoon orange blossom water toward the end.

Instead of rolling the pastries in syrup, sprinkle them with confectioners’ sugar.

These keep very well for days in an airtight cookie tin.

For the dainty little "bride's fingers," cut sheets of fillo into narrow strips—they can measure from 3 ½ to 4 ½ inches wide and be about 12 inches long. You can use larger sheets cut into 3 or 4 strips. Use 1 heaped tablespoon of the filling for each roll. It makes about 28.

Walnut Pastries in Honey Syrup (Briwat Bi Joz): Follow the recipe for Almond Pastries in Honey Syrup but use the following filling.

Coarsely grind 2 cups shelled walnuts in the food processor. Add 1/3 cup sugar and the finely grated zest of 1 unwaxed orange and mix well. Add 1 ½ tablespoons orange blossom water to the syrup.

Excerpted from Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon
Copyright © 2006 by Claudia Roden. All rights reserved.