Filo facts

This is a throwback to the summer I spent as a hermit in Mount Lebanon. It was just me, a couple of Syrian bodyguards and my pastry chef. We lived an ascetic life, freed from desire, mind and senses purified. Our only neighbours were the monks of the Qadisha Valley, with whom we would trade our store of paper and ink for honey and walnuts. Each evening, my pastry chef would cook something wrapped in his fine rakakat pastry - I have never tasted the like, and the frozen filo used her is a travesty in comparison. Yet it is with this travesty I must now live, as my pastry chef has gone to help Henri Allam run the American Dream. After the incident of the Cypriot nuns and the smuggled tortoises he has sworn never again to flour his hands.

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