Baklava

Baklava is a rich, sweet pastry found in many cuisines of the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans and originating 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.

History

The history of baklava, like that of many other foods, is not well documented. Though it has been claimed by many groups, the best evidence is that it is ultimately of Middle Eastern origin, but that its current form was developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapı Palace.

Various claims are made about the origins of baklava: that it is of Assyrian origin; that it dates to ancient Mesopotamia, and was mentioned in a Mesopotamian cookbook on walnut dishes; that al-Baghdadi describes it in his 13th-century cookbook; that it was a popular Byzantine dish; and so on. But Claudia Roden and Andrew Dalby find no evidence for it in Arab, Greek, or Byzantine sources before the Ottoman period.

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 then assembles 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 Baki pakhlavası, which involves layers of dough and nuts, but not thin phyllo dough, which probably was developed in the kitchens of the 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)

The oldest known recipe for a sort of proto-baklava is found in a Chinese cookbook written in 1330 under the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty under the name güllach. (Buell, 1999)

Name

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. The pastry is often confused with "bacalla", a fish treated with salt, predominantly eaten by people of Italian origin on Christmas Eve. 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:

• Afghan baghlawa
• Albanian bakllava
• Armenian Template:Hayeren (pʼaḫlava)
• Assyrian baqlāwaḧ
• Azeri paxlava
• Bangladeshi
• Bosnian baklava
• Bulgarian баклава (baklava)
• Croatian baklava
• Egyptian بقلاوة (baʼlēwa)
• Georgian tapluna.

• Greek

μπακλαβάς (baklavás)

• Hungarian Baklava
• Indian बकल।व।
• Iraqi
• Israeli Template:HbrbbetTemplate:HbrpatahTemplate:HbrqofTemplate:HbrshvaTemplate:HbrlamedTemplate:HbrqamazTemplate:HbrvavTemplate:HbrqamazTemplate:Hbrhe or בקלוה (baqlawa)
• Kurdish baqlawa
• Lebanese بقلاوة (baʼlēwa)
• Levantine بقلاوة (baʼlēwa)
• Macedonian баклава (baklava)
• Montenegrin baklava

• Pakistani
• Persian باقلوا (baqlavā)
• Palestinian بقلاوة (bak'lawa)
• Philippine baklava
• Polish bakława
• Romanian baclava
• Serbian баклава (baklava)
• Somali baqlawad (baklawad)
• Syrian بقلاوة (baʼlēwa)
• Turkish baklava, Ottoman باقلوا
• Tunisian بقلاوة (baʼlēwa).

Preparation

A piece of baklava

See also

• Related cuisines: Afghan, Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Lebanese, Levantine, Iraqi, Serbian, and Turkish

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)