[Sca-cooks] Period Baklava at Last

[lhart at graycomputer.com]

The lentil one might be fun to play with!
Red lentils would be attractive.
Green, maybe not so much.

Are you going to try it with the sourdough as well?

Randell Raye


________________________________
From: Sca-cooks <sca-cooks-bounces+lhart=graycomputer.com at lists.ansteorra.org> on behalf of David Friedman <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2020 11:55 PM
To: sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Subject: [Sca-cooks] Period Baklava at Last

/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://www.daviddfriedman.com>
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/

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