[Sca-cooks] Early baklava recipe

[Johnna Holloway]

Perry’s book is worth acquiring. It’s called Scents and Flavors. Available for purchase at Amazon, among other places.

Johnna

Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 17, 2018, at 9:16 PM, Alec Story <avs38 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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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