[Sca-cooks] Period Baklava at Last

[David Friedman]

/A Persian Cookbook The Manual/ by Bavarchi is an early 16th century 
cookbook, translated by Saman Hassibi & Amir Sayadabdi. It contains four 
Baklava recipes. Two of them layer thin bread not with nuts but with 
cooked lentils, one isn't layered at all, but one is fairly close to 
what we think of as Baklava.

I made it for the first time this afternoon, using lavash I had made 
yesterday from a simple modern recipe. None of the bread recipes in the 
original are"excellent thin bread." I have a period flat bread recipe 
from al-Warraq, but don't know if it would be closer to the original, 
and it uses sourdough so would have taken longer.

There are various things I will tweak next time, but it came out pretty 
well. Here is the original recipe:

*Baklava II*

Take two large trays and some excellent thin bread and size [it] to fit 
the tray. Then, melt a /man/ of clarified oil in another tray and dip 
the thin bread, one by one, in that oil and place on the [other] tray. 
Sprinkle a fistful of sugar and ground almond over the bread. Dip 
another bread in oil [and place over the other one] and sprinkle sugar 
and ground shelled almond on it again [and repeat] until the tray is 
filled. Place another tray on top of it [to cover it] and place a coal 
fire underneath it so it boils slowly. Once the bottom side is [assumed 
to be] fried, lift the edge of the bread with the tip of knife to test, 
if it was fried, flip it in the [other[ tray, and place over the fire 
again so the other side is fried, too. Pour some boiled sugar syrup over 
it so it boils and absorbs the syrup [so the liquid is dried] and oil 
reappears. Serve in a china [dish] and sprinkle some rosewater.

I don't know what "clarified oil" is, but it's apparently solid at room 
temperature. The one candidate that occurred to me was ghee, so that's 
what I used.

-- 
David Friedman
www.daviddfriedman.com
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/