[Sca-cooks] Period Baklava

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Apr 5 04:37:11 PDT 2007


On Apr 4, 2007, at 10:57 PM, David Friedman wrote:

> In a previous post I gave the recipe for the leafy dish, which
> exactly fits your description except that it is fried rather than
> baked and is from the 13th century.

Yes, I realize that. And you can make various varak-like pastry  
sheets and use it like phyllo, but phyllo, under that name, is made  
by a machine that pours a thin batter over hot rollers that bake the  
batter, scrapes the pastry off the rollers, and stacks the result to  
allow the steam escaping from the pastry to render it flexible. Yes,  
very similar to the leafy dish, also very similar to the process for  
making the wrappers for Shanghai spring rolls, and not all that far  
from some versions of oatcakes, either.

My point being that while antecedents may be substantially  
(structurally and even functionally) similar to phyllo, they may have  
sufficient conceptual dissimilarities that they become, on some  
levels, something else. I haven't seen (although there may be)  
evidence that phyllo, under that name, predates the mechanical  
process used to make it, so I have to wonder about the extent to  
which some of these antecedents are really linear antecedents.

Yes, we're getting a bit forensically chi-chi here, but it's sort of  
unavoidable. Let's try this: a very small spearhead and a large  
arrowhead are similar in a lot of ways, sometimes indistinguishable  
to the naked eye, used in a reasonably similar manner, made of the  
same materials, but still not completely the same thing. This would  
be an example of substantial similarities and some conceptual  
differences.

Parched grain and various flattened grain products have been around  
for centuries, but the market for Kellogg's Corn Flakes did not arise  
from a bunch of people standing around wishing someone would come up  
with an industrial process for creating a new flattened, parched  
grain product. Rather, the corn flake was invented -- using a process  
not too different from that for phyllo, and not too far off in its  
date, either --, and people's eating habits were altered to create a  
niche for the product. I'm not sure if this is entirely untrue of  
phyllo, which is why I suggested that it probably had clear period  
antecedents, but may, itself, be post-period.

I suppose when we look at the antecedents for phyllo, it's easy to  
suppose that the Turks are a likely bridge between Middle Eastern  
varak and Greek phyllo. Do we have any reason to believe the Greeks  
were eating a phyllo-like pastry before, roughly, 1453? Is it an  
early example of a marketing campaign altering a national cuisine?

Adamantius, too early in the morning and not enough caffeine...



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, let them eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04






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