The Origins Of Baklava - Is It Turkish?

• published: 04 Jan 2015
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Baklava is a rich, sweet pastry made of layers of filo filled with chopped nuts and sweetened and held together with syrup or honey. It is characteristic of the cuisines of the former Ottoman Empire, and is also found in Central and Southwest Asia. The word baklava is first attested in English in 1650, a borrowing from Ottoman Turkish باقلوا /bɑːklɑvɑː/. The name baklava is used in many languages with minor phonetic and spelling variations. The origin of the name is disputed. The Turkish etymologist Sevan Nişanyan claims an old Turkish origin (baklağı or baklağu). Buell 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; baγla- itself in Mongolian is a Turkic loanword. Though the suffix -vā might suggest a Persian origin, the baqla- part does not appear to be Persian. Another form of the word is also recorded in Persian, باقلبا (bāqlabā). The Arabic name بقلاوة baqlāwa is doubtless a borrowing from Turkish, though a folk etymology, unsupported by Wehr's dictionary, connects it to Arabic بقلة /baqlah/ 'bean'. History Turkish Baklava served with kaymak and pistachios, typical of Turkey Although the history of baklava is not well documented, there is evidence that its current form was developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The Sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries every 15th of the month of Ramadan in a ceremonial procession called the Baklava Alayı. Two well-supported proposals for the pre-Ottoman roots of this Istanbul dessert are that it came from a Central Asian Turkic tradition of layered breads, or that it came from Roman placenta cake, part of the Byzantine culinary traditions of the city of Istanbul, which had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. One source writes that baklava was already present in a 13th Century Turkish cookbook and as such can be considered the Turkish dessert with the strongest links to pre-Anatolian Turkish cuisine. The tradition of layered breads by Turkic peoples in Central Asia has been suggested as the "missing link" between the Central Asian folded or layered breads (which did not include nuts) and modern phyllo-based pastries like baklava would be the Azerbaijani dish Bakı pakhlavası, which involves layers of dough and nuts.[clarification needed] The Uzbek pakhlava, puskal or yupka, and Tatar yoka, sweet and salty savories (boreks) prepared with 10–12 layers of dough, are other early examples of layered dough style in Turkic regions. The practice of stretching raw dough into paper-thin sheets probably evolved in the kitchens of the Topkapı Palace, based on Central Asian prototypes. One of the oldest known recipes for a sort of proto-baklava is Güllaç, also found in Turkish cuisine. It consists of layers of phyllo dough that are put one by one in warmed up milk with sugar. It is served with walnut and fresh pomegranate and generally eaten during Ramadan. The first known documentation of güllaç is in a food and health manual written in 1330 that documented primarily Mongol-Turkic foods called Yinshan Zhengyao (飮膳正要), which was written by Husihui (忽思慧) who was a Turkic physician to the Mongol court of the Yuan dynasty Other sources state that baklava originated earlier in Roman cuisine, and its successor, Byzantine cuisine. Indeed, nut and honey based sweets were popular ancient desserts. Patrick Faas states that the honey covered baked layered-dough dessert placenta of Roman times was the origin of baklava, "The Greeks and the Turks still argue over which dishes were originally Greek and which Turkish. Baklava, for example, is claimed by both countries. Greek and Turkish cuisine both built upon the cookery of the Byzantine Empire, which was a continuation of the cooking of the Roman Empire. Roman cuisine had borrowed a great deal from the ancient Greeks, but placenta (and hence baklava) had a Latin, not a Greek, origin—please note that the conservative, anti-Greek Cato left us this recipe. Also, placenta played a traditional role in ancient Roman religion." In Greek the word plakous (Greek: πλακοῦς) was used for Latin placenta and the Byzantine scholar Speros Vryonis describes one type of plakous, koptoplakous (Byzantine Greek: κοπτοπλακοῦς), as a "Byzantine favorite" and "the same as the Turkish baklava", referring ultimately to book XIV of the Deipnosophistae, as do other writers. “ Shape the placenta as follows: place a single row of tracta along the whole length of the base dough. This is then covered with the mixture [cheese and honey] from the mortar. Place another row of tracta on top and go on doing so until all the cheese and honey have been used up. Finish with a layer of tracta. … place the placenta in the oven and put a preheated lid on top of it … When ready, honey is poured over the placenta. ”