Pastilla (, also called North African pie) is a North African meat or seafood pie made with warqa dough (), which is similar to filo. It is a specialty of Morocco and Algeria. It has more recently been spread by emigrants to France, Israel, and North America. History The name of the pie comes from the Spanish word pastilla, meaning in modern Spanish either "pill" or "small pastry" after the transformation of the phoneme "p" into "b" that is specific to the Arabic language. The historian Anny Gaul attests to recipes that bear "a strong resemblance to the stuffing that goes inside modern-day bastila" in 13th century Andalusi cookbooks, such as Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī's . This recipe, in Gaul's words, calls for "cooking pigeon with cinnamon, almonds, saffron, onion, and eggs, as well as a double-cooking process similar to today's conventional recipe, by which the ingredients are first cooked in a pot and then finished in the oven." The historian Idriss Bouhlila lists the dish as one of the Ottoman Algerian foods that affected Tetuani cuisine as a result of an Algerian migration to Tetuan in the aftermath of the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, while acknowledging those who consider the dish to be of Andalusi origin. Bouhlila's study corroborated Gaul's theory that the name of the dish—which according to Bouhlila is of Turkish origin—as well as the werqa pastry used to make it, arrived with the Algerian migrants to Tetuan, and spread from there to the rest of Morocco sometime after 1830. According to Ken Albala, the basic concept of pastilla was likely brought to Morocco by Moorish Muslims who left Spain in the 16th century, or perhaps earlier, because there had been considerable traffic between Morocco and Spain since the Moors conquered the latter in the seventh century. According to historian of Jewish food, Gil Marks, pastilla origin is from Morocco and was brought by sephardi Jews and, after the Ottoman version of "phyllo" called "warqa", reached the Maghreb, cooks substituted it for Spanish pastry. Sepharadi continued to pronounce the name with "p", while Arabic speakers substituted a "b" (bastila). In Morocco, pastilla is generally served as a starter at the beginning of special meals, and in one of two forms: one with poultry and one with seafood. In Algeria, pastilla is usually made with chicken or with pigeon. Poultry pastilla Poultry pastilla was traditionally made of