[Sca-cooks] Early baklava recipe

[Julia Szent-Gyorgyi]

Quoth 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 [....] was likely
> pronounced similarly to the "Kul wa-Shkur" from this recipe. [...]
> 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 [...] is (ignoring tone) ku lat tsyhek.

I think the Mongols got the word from the Russians. From the Hungarian
etymological dictionary:

kalács [1370 pers.n. (?), circa 1395.] Slavic loanword, compare
Croatian-Serbian kolač 'pastry, baked good; a bundle of hoops; round
weight for a fishing-net', Croatian-Serbian dialect 'round bread baked
for special occasions'; Slovak koláč 'baked good, baked dough,
pie-shaped object', Russian [kalacs], Russian old dialect [kolacs]
'lock-shaped white roll; white wheat bread'. The Slavic words probably
go back to Slavic *kolo 'wheel'.

Kalács (very roughly /CAW-latch/) in Hungarian is sweet egg bread
(i.e. bread that contains egg and sugar in addition to the flour and
yeast). If you add mézes- 'honeyed', it means honey-cake or
gingerbread. Marie Antoinette's line is usually translated to
Hungarian as "let them eat kalács".

Julia
/\ /\
>*.*<