Baklava

For the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the Baklava is the cultural identity of the region’s dessert palette and is as ubiquitous as rice or potato is in Indian cuisine. The sweet delicacy is traditionally prepared with a delicious filling of milk and chopped nuts wrapped in a paper-thin layer of phyllo pastry, and drenched in a generous coat of honey or sugar syrup. Though the dish has earned reverence for itself all around the world, and is becoming increasingly popular in India too, the origin of this dessert is nebulous and a matter of debate among different nations.

A common convention accepts that the Baklava originated in the Assyrian empire in 800 BCE where the dish served as a special ceremonial requisite. Some historians however contest that the Baklava has emerged from the ancient Roman Placenta cake of the 2nd century BCE, made of alternating layers of pastry sheets, cheese, and honey. But there are others who have noted that the recipe for Baklava, found in Cato’s De Agri Cultura is written in Greek, suggesting that Greco-Roman syncretism was behind the Roman adoption of the dish from the Greeks, who have mentions of the dessert in the illustrious text of Homer’s Odyssey.

There is another consensus that traces the lineage of the Baklava to Turkish nomadic traditions. It is believed that Nomadic Turks of the 11th century CE regularly made a dish named Yuvgha, which was a layered, thin, unleavened flatbread cooked in a pan. A different story indicates that the Baklava originated in the Ottoman empire during the reign of the 16th century Sultan Suleiman. Legend has it that Suleiman started a tradition of presenting Baklavas to the janissary regiment during Ramadan, which became widely known in the Ottoman realm as the Baklava Procession.

There is yet another contrasting narrative that indicates the presence of Baklava in 13th century Persian cookbooks and that the suffix ‘va’ is essentially a Persian linguistic syntax, speculating a probable Persian origin for the dish. It is also assumed that the Persian roots might have allowed the dish to appear in the Indian subcontinent during the Mughal rule, much before its 21st century popularisation.

Today, there are as many as 14 different traditional and exotic varieties of Baklava found all over the world, each with a distinctive flavour profile. Pistachio Baklava, Walnut Baklava, the dry Kuru Baklava, and Cream Baklava, are only some of the innumerable variants of this iconic delicacy.