baklava recipe (was Re: SC - Help with Cooking period Italianfood.)

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

David/Cariadoc wrote:

>4. On the other hand,  I think I saw something somewhere by Charles
>Perry referring to a medieval baklava--and he knows lots about
>medieval Islamic cooking.


Charles Perry wrote the entry on filo (and baklava) in the Oxford Companion
to Food and he says there, among other things:
"The idea of making the sheets paper thin is a later development. The
Azerbaijanis make the usual sort of baklava with 50 or so layers of filo,
but they also make a strange, archaic pastry called Bakï pakhlavasï
(Baku-style baklava) using ordinary noodle paste instead of filo. It
consists of eight layers of dough separated by seven layers of sweetened
ground nuts. This may represent the earliest form of baklava, resulting from
the Turkish nomads adapting their concept of layered bread - developed in
the absence of ovens - to the use of the oven and combining it with the
usual Persian pastry filling of nuts.
If this is so, baklava actually pre-dated filo, and the paper-thin pastry we
know today was probably an innovation of the Ottoman sultan's kitchen at
Topkapi palace in Istanbul. There is an established connection between the
Topkapi kitchens and baklava; on the 15th of Ramadan every year, the
Janissary troops stationed in Istanbul used to march to the palace, where
every regiment was presented with two trays of baklava. They would sling the
trays in sheets of cloth from a pole and march back to their barracks
carrying the baklava in what was known as the Baklava Procession (baklava
alayi)."

Nanna