But first, I want to tell you about my relative, Osnat Moshe, from Agur. I never heard about Osnat until reading an article about her in the local food magazine (Al Hashulhan, Oct, 2008) and later found out that she is my mother’s cousin (in a convoluted sort of way) . The article included a simple recipe for bread baked on a saj and filled with walnuts and sugar. I skimmed the title because it didn’t look very interesting to me. I didn’t realize the importance of this recipe as part of the larger development of baklava until I read what Charles Perry had to say.
At this stage into my reading I did a google search for nomadic Turkish bread because I wanted to see how it actually looked like and stumbled upon a fascinating article about Josephine Powell. She was an American who spent her entire life documenting the daily lives of the Turkish nomads, photographing them and collecting artifacts to preserve their cultural heritage. While looking at some of her photographs I saw one that was particularly interesting, of women baking bread on a saj. What struck me immediately was the fact that they make their bread exactly how my relatives, Kurdish Jews, make them. In Israel Bedouins, Druze and Arabs all make their own version of saj flat bread but they usually flip the dough in their hands to create a thin disc which they place on the saj using a pillow. My relatives use a rolling pin to create large flat discs and place them on the saj using the rolling pin, the way the Turkish nomads do. The Kurds call their bread lachma rakika (meaning thin bread)
As mentioned above, ancient Turkish nomads used to layer their bread, a primordial form of baklava which still exists today as can be found in the Uzbeki tradition of layering saj bread with sour cream. Then I remembered the simple recipe called kada from the magazine, which as mentioned, is saj bread filled with walnuts and sugar. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t even read her recipe through, the ancestor of the famous baklava! Although Osnat was born in Iraqi Kurdistan she lived close to the border with Turkey in a village called Homs. She calls this stuffed bread Kada meaning a stuffed bread or pastry in Aramaic (similar to the root Qat, meaning layer). Aramaic is an ancient language which was the most common dialect of commerce, the lingua franca three thousand years ago. The question is if this word was borrowed from the Arabic or vice verse? This word is also the root for the more famous Kadayif a shredded fillo stuffed pastry.
As Charles Perry mentions there is a long way between simple stuffed saj bread and the baklava made with hundreds of layers. It is a long way, but there were several stops in the middle which I will write about in my next post. For now Oshnat Moshe’s famous ancient baklava recipe which I have yet to try:
Kada
Stuffed dough with walnuts and sugar
1/2 kg flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dry yeast
Oil
Filling
25 grams butter, cut into small cubes
100 grams (1/2 cup) sugar
500 grams walnuts, ground
In a mixer, combine all the ingredients for the dough and add about 1 1/4 cups water until a soft but not sticky dough is formed. Put the dough in a warm place and let rise for 1-2 hours, or until it doubles in volume. Combine the ingredients for the filling and mix well. Divide the dough into tennis ball size pieces. Flatten each ball into a large flat disc, brush some oil on the surface and place part of the walnut filling in the center. Fold the corners of the dough over the filling and flatten into a circle. Cook on a saj until brown and turn over, browning the other side. A cast iron skillet can be used if a saj is not available.
Kurdish saj bread is made without yeast but here it is included, perhaps for the added flavor.
Source: A Taste of Thyme, edited by Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper (The taste for Layered Bread among the Nomadic Turks and the Central Asian Origins of Baklava by Charles Perry)
Picture of the Yufka from Wikipedia Commons
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Fascinating food history! Thank you for sharing this! And kada sounds delicious!
I just loved this post- always interested in food history, espcially those of Turkey and other ancient cultures. Thank you!
There’s a modern Turkish equivalent to qatma as well – katmer (you already know about yufka). Kat is a storey or layer, and the verb “katmak” (qatmaq)is to add onto something. Katmer can mean many things – sometimes just plain thin bread, other times a thin saj bread folded over a filling, which may be either savory or sweet. (This is also known as gözleme, which I believe is a reference to “köz” or hot coals.) Walnuts and pekmez (molasses usually made from grapes or white mulberries)or sugar is one common sweet filling. There are many other layered breads here as well. Does Perry say anything about the actual origin of the word baklava/baqlawa? The thin rolling pin used to roll the yufka is called “oklava” in Turkish, what’s the Arabic equivalent?
That’s so interesting. I love learning the origins of dishes.
Hi Sarah, thanks for stopping by my blog. Came to check out yours:) What a fascinating story about baklava. We make Baklava in Azerbaijan too. It is a little different from baklava that is made in Turkey, Greece and the Middle East, but the concept is the came – layers of thinly rolled out dough and the nut filling. Yum!
Loved reading this post! It’s very enlightening. Thanks for sharing.
I am reading Nawal Nasrallah’s take on the origin of baklava, very interesting and convincing. I gather the information for a post.
Bunch of wishful fairy tales trying to Turkify an ancient Anatolian and middle eastern pastry. Baklava has nothing to do with any “Turkic people” of “central Asian origin”. If anything Baklava is a Greek invention. It was started in Assyria (present day Iraq) 2,700 years ago, with a very primitive recipe, and reached Greece where it was more or less developed into it’s current form.
During the centuries Baklava was further developed by Armenians with the introduction of cinnamon and cloves then Arabs with rose water and cardamom. Lastly these people being the subjects of the Ottoman empire perfected the Baklava. There is nothing Turkish about Baklava other than the Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs having perfected the pastry within the Ottoman empire.
Hi Sarah,
A very interesting topic, indeed. Thanks.
I would like to share with you my latest on the etymology of this famous pastry, baklawa. To begin with, as I axplain in my Iraqi cookbook, early medieval Baghdadi recipes for making baklawa-like stuffed rolls, called lawzeenaq/lawzeenaj/lawzeena can be found in the extant Arabic cookbooks, the earliest of which is al-Warraq’s 10th century Kitab al-Tabeekh.
Now to etymology. In my forthcoming second edition of Delights from the Garden of Eden, I suggest the following (which would answer a question one of your readers, Sazji, raised):
Here is the excerpt from my book:
Baklawa: Possible Etymology
Why baklava, pronounced baqlawa in Arabic, was called so in the first place, nobody knows for sure. Here are my latest findings, which might lead us somewhere:
The thin rolling pin used in rolling out bakalwa dough is called oklava in Turkish, which indeed is a combination of ok =stick + lava =lavash/lawash (thin sheets of bread). That is a stick for rolling out thin sheets of pastry.
In medieval Arabic terminology, thin and malleable sheets of bread were called rugaq labiq. Now, labiq was used synonymously with lawish, which explains where our modern name for thin sheets of bread lawash comes from (Arabic sound w is pronounced v in Turkish).
Oklava is used to roll out baklava. Therefore, baklava is a combination of bak/baq + lava. The lava part is explained above. Now we come to the first part bak/baq. Our clue is in Steingass’ dictionary of Persian words: of the meanings of bugh/bogh: any outward covering or wrapper, pouch, or bundle (the Arabic sound q, is pronounced gh in Persian, and k in Turkish).
Therefore, baklawa may plausibly designate ‘thin sheets of dough used as wrappers for stuffed pastries.’
what a fascinating discovery, you truly are a culinary detective. I just asked my grandmother the name for the thin long rolling pin she uses to make her Kurdish bread. She calls it gira or machalbana but I am not sure if these words are Kurdish or Aramaic as she tends to get the two mixed up. This doesn’t seem to connect to Baklava but I will write to someone who specializes in these languages to see what he has to say. The bread that she makes on the saj is called Lachma Rakika (Aramaic) which reminds me of the rugaq labiq of Medieval Arabic. http://www.sarahmelamed.com/2010/01/kurdish-flat-bread/
Thank you for leaving such an interesting comment.