Baklava

• 1. Introduction

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  Baklava is a pastry of paper-thin filo dough, chopped nuts and sweet syrup or honey, and almost nobody agrees on who made it first. Today it sits on dessert tables across West Asia, Southeast Europe, Central Asia and North Africa. It has also won fans in South Asia, even though it is not a traditional sweet there. Several cultures have laid claim to it, and each tells a different story. So where did it really begin? What does its name actually mean? And why do bakers in some countries count the sheets of dough as carefully as a ledger?

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• 2. A Word With Many Roots

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  In 1650 the word baklava appeared in English for the first time, borrowed from a form written in Arabic script. The earliest known mention of the pastry itself is a poem by Kaygusuz Abdal, a mystic of the 15th century. Where the word came from is a harder question. The historian Paul D. Buell proposes a Mongolian root, baγla-, meaning to tie, wrap up or pile up. He pairs it with a Turkic verb ending, -v. The Mongolian root, he notes, was itself borrowed from Turkic.

  The lexicographer Sevan Nişanyan reaches a Turkic answer by another road. He gives baklağı and baklağu as the oldest known forms, both from before 1500, and calls them Proto-Turkic. A Persian form, bāqlabā, is also recorded. Its ending, -vā, might suggest Persian roots. Yet the baqla- part does not look Persian, and its origin remains unknown.

  The linguist Tuncer Gülensoy offers a third path. He starts from bakl-ı, a Proto-Turkish word meaning feed, and adds the suffixes -la-ğı. The word then shifts from bakılağı to bakılavı and finally to baklava. The Arabic name baqlāwa, by contrast, comes from Turkish. The oldest rival story about the pastry itself begins much earlier, in ancient Greece.

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• 3. Greek Cakes and Honey

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  Scholars name three main roots for the pastry. One is the Greek placenta cake. Another is the medieval Arabic lauzinaj. The third is the layered bread of Central Asian Turkic tradition.

  The Greek case begins with Homer's Odyssey, written around 800 BC, which mentions thin breads sweetened with walnuts and honey. In the fifth century BC the poet Philoxenos wrote a poem called "Dinner". In it, hosts serve a cheesecake of milk and honey, baked into a pie, during the final drinking course of a meal.

  The word placenta comes from the Greek plakous, meaning something flat and broad. The poet Archestratos mentions plakous as a dessert served with nuts or dried fruits. He praises the honey-drenched Athenian version. The earliest detailed placenta recipe dates to the 2nd century BC. It describes a baked, honey-covered dessert of layered dough, and the food historian Patrick Faas identifies it as the origin of baklava.

  The Byzantine Empire kept the tradition alive under the name koptoplakous. The historian Speros Vryonis calls it a "Byzantine favorite" and "the same as the Turkish baklava". On the island of Lesbos, thin pastry leaves with crushed nuts, baked and covered in syrup, are still called platsenta.

  Not everyone accepts the link. Book XIV of the Deipnosophistae lists gastris, kopte sesamis and kopton. Those have a filling of nuts and honey, with honey and ground sesame above and below, closer to pasteli or halva. They have no dough at all, and certainly no flaky one.

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• 4. Medieval Cookbooks

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  A food and health manual called the Yinshan Zhengyao, written in 1330, holds the first known mention of güllaç. Hu Sihui, an ethnic Mongol court dietitian of China's Yuan dynasty, compiled it to record the foods of the Mongol Empire. Güllaç is a Turkish dessert, and some consider it the origin of baklava. Sheets of filo are placed one by one in warmed milk with sugar. It is served with walnut and fresh pomegranate and is generally eaten during Ramadan.

  The Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq in the 10th century, has no baklava recipe at all. It does include lauzinaj. This is small pieces of almond paste wrapped in pastry "as thin as grasshoppers' wings" and drenched in syrup. Some writers say it resembles modern baklava more than any other old dessert. Charles Perry disagrees, writing that "it was not much like baklava".

  A 13th-century book of the same name, by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi, gives similar lauzinaj recipes. He wrote it in 1226 in what is now Iraq. It drew on an earlier collection of recipes from the 9th century, which had Persian inspiration. According to the food historian Gil Marks, Middle Eastern pastry makers were the ones who later worked out how to layer the ingredients.

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• 5. Palace Kitchens

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  Gil Marks traces baklava to either Ancient Persia or the Ottoman Empire. A separate claim credits the Assyrians, saying they prepared it in the 8th century BC. The written record is thin, and the history of the pastry is not well documented.

  An archaic version is said to have been prepared in the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish version was probably developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapı Palace in Constantinople, which is modern Istanbul. There the pastry took on a ceremonial role. On the 15th of the month of Ramadan, the Sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries. The occasion was a formal procession called the Baklava Alayı. What went onto those trays is the next question.

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• 6. Pan and Syrup

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  Baklava is normally baked in a large pan, and the work starts with many sheets of dough laid down one at a time. Melted butter and vegetable oil separate the sheets. A layer of chopped nuts comes next, usually walnuts or pistachios, although hazelnuts and almonds are sometimes used. More sheets of dough cover the nuts.

  Most recipes repeat the dough and nuts several times. A few use only a top and bottom sheet of pastry. Before baking, the cook cuts the tray into regular pieces. Parallelograms shaped like lozenges are common, as are triangles, diamonds and rectangles.

  After baking, a syrup is poured over the hot pastry and left to soak in. Honey, rosewater or orange flower water may flavor it. The baklava is usually served at room temperature, and ground nuts often garnish the top. Cooks in different countries follow this outline but fill in the details their own way, down to the number of sheets they stack.

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• 7. Counting Layers

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  Forty sheets of dough is one Armenian answer to how thick a pakhlava should be. The number matches the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the desert during Lent. Another Armenian variation copies the Greek style, which calls for 33 layers, one for each year of Jesus's life. Greek baklava is supposed to be made with those 33 sheets as well.

  In the Armenian city of Gavar, the local version uses 25 layers. The filling is cleaned, dried, chopped walnuts with sugar, and the syrup is made from honey and flowers. The people of Bayazet, then an Armenian city, used to make it there. They moved to Gavar and the surrounding regions in 1830 and took the recipe with them. The tradition of making pakhlava in Kyavar, as Gavar is also known, is on Armenia's intangible cultural heritage list.

  Azerbaijan runs the numbers in other directions. Tenbel pakhlava has 8-10 layers and a top coated with egg yolk. Ganja pakhlava uses 18 layers, with rose petals added to the dough. Guba pakhlava has 50 layers of rishta, a thin dough, and a top coated with saffron. Uzbek cooks make pakhlava with 10-12 layers of dough, in the family of sweet and salty pastries called börekler.

  Syrian baklava uses 24 layers of buttered phyllo, and its story has an important chapter in Turkey.

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• 8. Cities and Regions

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  In 1871 a man named Çelebi Güllü brought a baklava recipe to the Turkish city of Gaziantep. He had learned it from a chef in Damascus. In Syria itself, baklava is mostly served on special occasions such as Eid al-Fitr or Syrian Christmas. The cooks use samneh, a clarified butter, and a syrup of sugar, orange blossom water and lemon juice. A relative called warbat is filled with a semolina custard. Syrian and Lebanese baklava is traditionally flavored with rose water.

  Gaziantep turned the Damascus recipe into its own. The city is famous for baklava made from locally grown pistachios, often served with kaymak cream. In 2008 the Turkish patent office registered a geographical indication for Antep Baklava. In 2013 the European Commission registered it as a Protected Geographical Indication, the first Turkish product to receive such a designation.

  Elsewhere in Turkey, cooks along the Black Sea commonly use hazelnuts. Midye Baklava is shaped like a mussel, and şöbiyet adds kaymak to the nut filling. In Algeria, baklawa originates in the city of Constantine and uses no filo. Bakers use a thin dough called malsouka or warqa and fill it with almonds. Each diamond-shaped piece gets one almond on top before baking, and honey, sugar and lemon juice make the syrup.

  Iranian baklava is less crisp than other versions and uses less syrup. Yazd, Tabriz, Qazvin, Kashan and the Gilan province are known for their variations. In Greece, cooks in the south mostly use almonds and cooks in the north use walnuts. Local names include samousades, zournadakia and masourakia. Albanians prepare bakllava for Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox holidays and for the New Year. In Bulgaria, families eat it for dessert after dinner during the winter holiday season.

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