Baklava

Baklava

A piece of baklava

Baklava or Baklawa is a rich, sweet pastry found in many cuisines of the Middle East, the Balkans and South Asia and developed in Ottoman cuisine. It is made of chopped nuts, usually walnuts or pistachios, layered with phyllo pastry, sweetened with sugar or honey syrup.

In Turkey, it is particularly associated with the city of Gaziantep.

Baklawa is a popular dessert at Middle Eastern restaurants in Israel and the Arab world. After the meal, an assortment of small pastries is typically brought to the table on a brass tray, accompanied by tiny cups of Turkish coffee.

History

The history of baklava is not well-documented. Many ethnic groups claim to have invented it, but the most substantiated claim seems to be that of the Turks, who developed the pastry as it is known today in the imperial kitchens of Topkapı Palace.

Vryonis (1971) identified the ancient Greek gastris, kopte, kopton, or koptoplakous, mentioned in the Deipnosophistae, as baklava, and calls it a "Byzantine favorite". However, Perry (1994) shows that though gastris contained a filling of nuts and honey, it did not include any dough; instead, it involved a honey and ground sesame mixture similar to modern pasteli or halva.

Perry brings evidence to show that layered breads were created by Turks in Central Asia and argues that the "missing link" between the Central Asian folded or layered breads (which did not include nuts) and modern phyllo-based pastries like baklava is the Azerbaijani dish Bakı pakhlavası, consisting of layers of dough and nuts, but not thin phyllo dough, which probably was developed in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace. Indeed, the sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries every 15th of Ramadan in a ceremonial procession called the Baklava Alayı. (Wasti, 2005)

Other say baklava is of Assyrian origin, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. It is mentioned in a Mesopotamian cookbook on walnut dishes. al-Baghdadi describes it in his 13th-century cookbook as a popular Byzantine confection. But Claudia Roden and Andrew Dalby find no evidence for it in Arab, Greek, or Byzantine sources before the Ottoman period.

The oldest known recipe for a kind of "proto-baklava" is found in a Chinese cookbook written in 1330 under the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty under the name güllach. (Buell, 1999) A similar dessert called "güllac" is found in modern Turkish cuisine.

Etymology

The word baklava entered English from Turkish; it is sometimes connected with the Arabic word for "bean" (بقلة /baqlah/), but Wehr's dictionary lists them as unrelated. Buell (1999) argues that the word "baklava" may come from the Mongolian root baγla- 'to tie, wrap up, pile up' composed with the Turkic verbal ending -v. Baklava is found in many cuisines, with minor phonetic variations on the name.

References

• Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan, eds., The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy Brill, 1999. ISBN 90-04-11946-9.
• Paul D. Buell, "Mongol Empire and Turkicization: The Evidence of Food and Foodways", p. 200ff, in Amitai-Preiss, op.cit.
• Christian, David. Review of Amitai-Preiss, op.cit., in Journal of World History 12:2:476 (2001).
• Perry, Charles. "The Taste for Layered Bread among the Nomadic Turks and the Central Asian Origins of Baklava", in A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (ed. Sami Zubaida, Richard Tapper), 1994. ISBN 1-86064-603-4.
• Vryonis, Speros, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, 1971. Quoted in Perry (1994).
• Wasti, Syed Tanvir, "The Ottoman Ceremony of the Royal Purse", Middle Eastern Studies 41:2:193–200 (March 2005)