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Baklava
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Baklava or baklawa is a rich, sweet pastry featured in many cuisines of the former Ottoman(Turkey) countries. It is a pastry made of layers of phyllo dough filled with chopped walnuts or pistachios and sweetened with syrup or honey. Gaziantep, a city in Turkey, is famous for its baklava and, in Turkey, is widely regarded as the native city of the dessert. In 2008, the Turkish patent office registered a geographical indication certificate for Antep Baklava.
Baklava was chosen to represent Cyprus in the presentation Sweet Europe of the cultural initiative Café Europe in 2006.
History The history of baklava is not well-documented; but although it has been claimed by many ethnic groups, the best evidence is that it is of Central Asian Turkic origin, with its current form being developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapi 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 then assembles evidence to show that layered breads were created by Turkic peoples 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 pakhlavasi, which involves layers of dough and nuts. The traditional Uzbek 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 thin phyllo dough as used today was probably developed in the kitchens of the Topkapi Palace. Indeed, the sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries every 15th of Ramadan in a ceremonial procession called the Baklava Alayi.
Other claims about its origins include: that it is of Assyrian origin, dates back 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 dessert. But Claudia Roden and Andrew Dalby find no evidence for it in Arab, Greek, or Byzantine sources before the Ottoman period.
One of the oldest known recipes 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). "Güllaç" is found in Turkish cuisine. Layers of phyllo dough are put one by one in warmed up milk with sugar. It is served with walnut and fresh pomegranate and generally eaten during Ramadan.
EtymologyThe word baklava entered English from Turkish; it is sometimes connected with the Arabic word for "bean" (???? /baqlah/), but Wehr's dictionary lists them as unrelated. Akin and Lambraki state that the word baklava entered into Arabic from Turkish. Buell (1999) argues that the word "baklava" may come from the Mongolian root ba?la- '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.
See also
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