Long before yeast was discovered, people baked thin pancakes made of flour, water and salt. These ancient breads had (and still have) the great advantage that they will keep almost indefinitely – unlike corn, which is easily destroyed by disease or animals. Nowadays this wafer-thin pastry is sold ready-made in rolled layers – either fresh from the chiller cabinet, frozen, or dried in bags and boxes. Being very fragile, the pastry sheets should first of all be spread out on a damp piece of kitchen roll to prevent them from breaking, then brushed with egg white to keep them from rising once they have been rolled or folded into parcels.

In Greece, filo (or phyllo, from the Greek phyllon ‘leaf’) pastry is used to make small, deep-fried pastry parcels filled with cheese (tiropita), spinach (spanakopita) or minced meat (bourekakia). Filo pastry usually consists only of wheat flour, water and salt. Soaked in honey, it forms the basis of baklavá (layers of pastry filled with chopped pistachios or walnuts), kataïfi (pastry parcels filled with slivers of almond and hazelnut) and galaktobureko (filled with semolina pudding).

Yufka is slightly thinner than filo pastry, but is made in exactly the same way and plays as big a role in Turkish cuisine as filo does in Greek cooking. Yufka is often mistakenly presented as ‘Turkish puff pastry’. Yufka consists of a single layer of pastry, whereas puff pastry (which the French call mille-feuille – ‘a thousand leaves’) consists of no less than 729 or 1024 layers. Yufka is the wrapper around the savoury pastries called börek, which are filled with fish, meat, vegetables, herbs or cheese, but also of the sweet pastry baklava (made with butter, sugar syrup, ground pistachios and walnuts).

Brik is the North African variant of Greek filo pastry and Turkish yufka, and is used to make pastilla, brik and mehannecha. Pastilla is a kind of pastry pie made of many layers of brik filled with pigeon meat, almond paste, beaten eggs and grated onion, seasoned with pepper, saffron, cinnamon and sugar. Briks are triangles of pastry filled with tuna, meat or vegetables and then crisp-fried in oil. Mehannecha is a pastry roll filled with sweet almond cream.

It is impossible to imagine Asian cuisine without wan tan pastry, as it is the definitive wrapping for spring rolls. Like the above-mentioned pastries, it is also made from wheat flour, water and salt, but with a few drops of vegetable oil added. Asian cuisine is famous for its elaborate packaging, so it is no surprise that wan tan pastry is often filled and shaped into small ‘bags’ and triangular or square ‘cushions’. Pre-cooked meat, fish, poultry, vegetables or noodles are seasoned, wrapped in pastry and oven-baked at 180º C to 200º C.

Rice paper is the Asian equivalent of filo pastry. Made from rice flour, salt and water, it’s so thin you can almost see through it. Sometimes it is sprinkled with roasted or plain sesame seeds. It can be used in exactly the same way as wan tan pastry, in other words it can be rolled, folded, baked or deep-fried.

Krupuk (also called prawn crackers) are somewhat different from the other varieties of pastry, in that they are made of tapioca flour, prawns, sugar, egg and salt. Tapioca is a grainy natural starch derived from the roots of shrublike tropical plants such as manioc, which have been ground while still wet and then dried. Krupuk is made as follows: heat oil to 185º C and dip a few pieces of krupuk at a time into it. When they have puffed up and are cooked, wait another four seconds or so before removing them, letting the oil drip off.