Knafeh

• 1. Introduction

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  Knafeh, a pastry dessert of the Arab world, once stretched 74 meters across a single table in the Palestinian city of Nablus. That happened in 2009, and the result earned the Guinness world record for the largest knafeh. It weighed 1,765 kg. To build it, cooks used 600 kg of Nabulsi cheese, 300 kg of sugar and 35 kg of pistachios. A sweet that can fill a street-length table clearly means something to the people who make it. So where does the strange name come from? Who first baked it, and what did the earliest versions hold? And why does one pastry travel from medieval cookbooks to Turkish geographic protections to a chocolate bar made in Dubai? The first puzzle sits in the word itself, and scholars have never fully settled it.

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• 2. A Word With Two Ancestors

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  English speakers have spelled the word as kanafeh, kenafeh, kunafah, kunafeh, konafa, knéfé and kunafa, among other forms. Each one is a borrowing from Levantine or Egyptian Arabic. Nobody agrees on where the Arabic word began. One theory points to the Coptic Egyptian kenephiten, which meant a bread or a cake. Another traces it to a Semitic root meaning "side" or "wing". That root connects to the Arabic kanafa, which means to flank or enclose. A pastry that wraps around its filling would fit that second idea neatly. The word also turns up early in One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. Yet the stories about who first ate knafeh are older than most surviving recipes, and they involve a caliph.

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• 3. Caliphs and Cookbooks

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  A popular tale says knafeh was invented to ease the hunger of caliphs during Ramadan. The story appears in writing as early as the 10th century. Tellers place it in Fatimid Egypt, or in Damascus under the Umayyad Caliphate, where Levantine dessert makers supposedly cooked it for Mu'awiya I. The paper trail is thinner than the legend. Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq compiled a tenth century Arabic cookbook called Kitab al-Tabikh, or Book of Dishes, drawing on recipes from Abbasid courts. It never mentions knafeh. It does include a chapter on qatayif, a pancake dumpling dessert that began in the Fatimid Empire. Knafeh finally shows up in a 13th century cookbook by an unknown author, covering the Maghreb and Al-Andalus. That book describes knafeh as a pancake dumpling thinner than qatayif, cooked on a flat pan. Some of its recipes layer the thin pancake with fresh cheese, bake it, and finish it with honey and rose syrup. Around the same century, Ibn al-Jazari recorded a market inspector from the Mamluk period. This official rode through Damascus at night to check the quality of knafeh, qatayif and other Ramadan foods. Cooks later invented a new method, dripping thin batter from a perforated container onto a metal sheet. The batter set into hair-like strings. In the mid-15th century, an Ottoman Turkish translation of Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Tabikh added several fresh knafeh recipes without saying where they came from. A question about those recipes was still open: when did cheese become the center of the dish?

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• 4. The Cheese Arrives

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  Recipes from 18th century Damascus, both Turkish and Arabic, always filled knafeh with different kinds of nuts. That detail comes from a historian who argues that cheese-filled knafeh appears in no historical record before the 19th century. The claim sits awkwardly beside the earlier western recipes that already called for fresh cheese. An 1844 dictionary of Syrian and Egyptian Arabic, written by a Swedish Orientalist, mentions a knafeh of string dough with qaymaq, a sort of cooked cream. Food historian Daniel Newman points to a cookbook published in Beirut in 1885 as the earliest documented cheese-filled version. That book, Ustadh al-Tabbakhin, gives four knafeh recipes. One is filled with cheese. A second, called burma, is rolled. A third, mafroukeh, has pastry that cooks rub by hand to soften it. The fourth, knafeh basma, uses two layers of pastry. In 1935, Gustaf Dalman described a basma knafeh made with sweetened cheese between two pastry layers, sold in Sidon and Jerusalem. By the 1970s the range was wide enough for the Syrian author Khayr al-Din al-Asadi to count 10 different kinds in his book on Aleppo. He finished it in 1971, and it was published after his death in 1981. Nablus knafeh was among the ten.

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• 5. Nablus and Gaza

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  "A Palestinian Institution" is how knafeh has been described, and its home is the city of Nablus. The local version is called knafeh Nabulseyeh, or Nabilsiyeh, after the city. Nablus is known for a knafeh that, in one description, "is filled with the city's trademark firm, white, salty nabulsi cheese". A sweet syrup called qatir covers it. It has a single layer of pastry on top of the cheese, either rough kadayif or soft semolina dough. Cooks usually prepare it upside down and then flip it. Soft dough is the more popular choice. The link between place and pastry has a paper trail. In 1923, one writer called knafeh "a part of a Nabulsi's life". In 1950, ʻAbd al-Wahhāb ʻAzzām wrote in his book Riḥlāt that "Nablus is famous for its knafeh". Today Nabulseyeh is the most common version in Jordan and Palestine, and academics call Nablus the modern-day knafeh capital. In Nablus itself, people also tuck knafeh into pita bread and eat it for breakfast. Farther southwest, the Gaza Strip has its own version, knafeh Ghazawiya. The pastry there is made from semolina and bulgur, and it is filled with a variety of Gazan nuts and spices. Nutmeg and cinnamon replace the cheese entirely.

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• 6. Cousins and Descendants

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  In Syria and Lebanon, a cousin called osmalieh builds a sandwich from two layers of kadayif. Cooks press the dough into a cake pan and fry each layer in ghee or cooking oil. They spread qishta between the layers and garnish the top with ground pistachio, qatir, lemon or orange blossom, and flower petals. People eat it hot or cold. Its name comes from Ottoman, or Othman. Modern cooks sometimes fill it with ice cream or cream cheese. Across the border in Hatay Province, Turkey, the dessert is called künefe. It uses a mozzarella-like local cheese and a syrup of water, sugar and lemon juice. In 2012, the EU Commission approved Antakya Künefesi as a Protected Geographical Indication. Both that listing and the Turkish one require two separately heated pastry layers around the cheese. Elsewhere, knafeh basma takes its name from a Turkish word for "pressed", and people have called it a "baklava-like cake". Its relative balluriyeh is dense, made with pale strands of kadayif and pistachios. People disagree on whether to count balluriyeh as baklava or as knafeh. Knafeh madlouqa, a Levantine dessert, gets a cream topping, and a 1936 journal of The Palestine Oriental Society defined it as knafeh with cream and ground pistachios. In Lebanon, street vendors sell kaak knafeh, a knafeh sandwiched in sesame-coated bread. The newest descendant is a chocolate bar from Fix Dessert in Dubai, filled with kadayif and pistachio. It first sold under the name "Can't Get Knafeh Of It", though it contains no cheese at all.

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• 7. Pastry and Syrup

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  Khishnah, nāʿimah, muhayara and mabruma are the four words cooks use for knafeh pastry. Khishnah means rough, a crust of long thin noodle threads. Nāʿimah means fine, a semolina dough. Muhayara is a mix of the first two, and mabruma is a twined noodle pastry. The cook heats the pastry in butter, margarine, palm oil or traditional semneh. Then comes a spread of soft sweet cheese, such as Nabulsi cheese, with more pastry on top. In khishnah knafeh, the cheese is instead rolled inside the pastry. In the last minutes of cooking, the cook pours over a thick, sweet sugar syrup called attar, thinned with water and scented with a few drops of rose water or orange blossom water. Cooks sometimes tint the top layer red or orange. Crushed pistachios are a common garnish, and nuts or cream such as qishta can replace the cheese inside.

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• 8. A Contested Plate

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  Knafeh is served throughout the Middle East, yet it is described as particularly associated with Nablus and as a "cultural touchstone for Palestinian identity". That connection makes its presence on other menus a sensitive matter. Knafeh is popular in Israel, where many eateries and chefs prepare it. Some Palestinians have criticized presenting knafeh as an Israeli food without any mention of its Arab origins. They call that cultural appropriation. So an argument about ownership now sits beside a dessert that people also serve on special occasions, on holidays and throughout the month of Ramadan.

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