[Sca-cooks] Period Baklava
Anne-Marie Rousseau
dailleurs at liripipe.com
Thu Apr 5 08:35:03 PDT 2007
An interesting thing to think about....
What makes baklava baklava?
Is it the fact that it's a pastry with honey and nuts?
Is it the fact that its made with phyllo?
Is it the fact that its made by a yaya in a black kerchief? ;)
Once you distill down to the idea of "what makes it baklava", I think we can
look at similar recipes and each decide for ourselves if it satisfies that
niche or not. And the part that is most interesting ot me is that the answer
will be different for each one of us :)
--Anne-Marie
-----Original Message-----
From: sca-cooks-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org
[mailto:sca-cooks-bounces at lists.ansteorra.org] On Behalf Of Phil Troy / G.
Tacitus Adamantius
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 4:37 AM
To: Cooks within the SCA
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Period Baklava
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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