SC - Period cookshop at Pennsic?

[Jeff Gedney]

david friedman wrote:

> Note that the description is pretty clearly not of a shredded pastry,
> but of thin sheets--consistent with the material I quoted earlier.

Note also that shredding thin sheets may not be sufficient change of
essential nature, i.e. thin-sheetiness, to warrant changing the name
from qata'if to something else. I agree, though, that the shredding is
probably a modern variant. 

So, what do we know about the etymology of the word? (I could swear
we've been through this before...Bear?) It seems unlikely the word means
"thin sheets", or, for that matter, "shreds", given that we have a
recipe for what seems like a semolina pudding-ish halava under the same
name. Does the word tell us anything consistent about the nature of all
versions of the dish/product at all? For example, there's an article by
Charles Perry about Turkic grain foods appended to Buell & Anderson's "A
Soup for the Qan"; it refers to qatlama, which, it says, is a particular
kind of layered bread. Could the "qat" root (if it is one) be a
reference to layers, which might be seen as consistent among all the
known older recipes, as well as the modern shredded ones, too.

Purely speculation, of course.
 
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com