[Sca-cooks] Early baklava recipe

[Alec Story]

Very interesting - a recipe that Duke Cariadoc sent my way from *The Mongol
Empire and its Legacy* is rendered in that book as "Güllach," but the
Chinese name, from *Jujia Biyong* (居家必用 "Compendium of Essential Arts for
Family Living", full text available at ctext.org
<http://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&res=482245>, no English wikipedia article
but there is one in German
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujia_biyong_shilei_quanji>) was likely
pronounced similarly to the "Kul wa-Shkur" from this recipe.  (He also
noted that Perry rejected it as a proto-baklava)

The recipe in question is paragraph 508 and 509 from the text, "古剌赤" ("old
perverse red," so nonsensical that it's almost certainly a loanword) which
in Mandarin is gǔ là chì, but the Middle Chinese reconstructed
pronunciation from *A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval
Chinese* is (ignoring tone) ku lat tsyhek.  This is the Baxter-Sagart 2011
reconstruction for those interested.

This reconstruction intentionally avoids using IPA because it's
representing a guess at the old pronunciation and only one of many possible
dialects, but the simliarity between ku lat tsyhek and Kul wa-Shkur seems
high especially for recipes that are at least superficially similar.

My literal translation of the recipe, for those interested:

"Take "chicken clear," [egg whites?] bean [soy, adzuki, meng, etc.] powder,
and yogurt [or some other fermented milk product like koumiss or kefir].
Mix it well, spread it out, and shallow-fry it to form cakes.  Make a layer
of fine white sugar, pine nut meat, and walnut meat.  Follow it with a
layer of cake.  Like this make 3-4 layers.  On top, irrigate with Hui
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people> oil [ghee?] mixed with honey,
and eat them."

This is very similar to thin pastry wafers with sugar and nuts on top of
them if you ignore the vast difference in the actual wafers themselves.

Has anyone asked Language Log about this topic?  They seem to enjoy going
down Central Asian loanword rabbit holes...

Incidentally, I had this book on my list of books to translate, and this
post reminded me that I had already done two recipes - and solved the
problem of reading the whole thing to find the part with food in it.
Thanks!

On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 8:42 PM Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com> wrote:

> Of interest to those who have followed the subject over the years, comes
> this Charles Perry recipe.
>
>
> http://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/2017/an-early-baklava-recipe-from-scents-and-flavors/
>
> Johnna
>
> Sent from my iPad
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