BAKLAVA

A Turkish classic with a noble past, this sweet, layered pastry has spread across the Middle East and beyond, with each country adding its own twist to the recipe

- MARY IŞIN

Nightingale's nests, twisted turbans, lover's lips... In the UK, we may be most familiar with baklava made in a large circular tray and cut into diamond-shaped pieces, but in Turkey, this sticky, sweet pastry comes in a whole variety of forms- often with pleasingly poetic names to match.

A syrup-soaked sandwich of tissue-thin yufka pastry and ground nuts, baklava has been the ultimate Turkish festive indulgence for centuries, prepared for all manner of special occasions, from weddings to religious festivals. It's a descendent of the börek and similarly layered, folded — often savoury - yufka pastries, which have been an essential part of Central Asian Turkic cuisine since at least the 11th century.

This culinary tradition is thought to have been combined with the Arab practice of soaking pastries and doughnuts in honey or sugar syrup, resulting in what's now known as baklava. And, as the earliest written mention of it by name is in a 15th-century poem- unnamed, as was common at the time - by Turkish Sufi dervish Kaygusuz Abdal, we can assume it was already an established dish at this point.

By the 16th century, baklava had become food of renown, and was eulogised by poets in lines such as this, from a verse by Nazmi of Edirne: 'O delightful, delicate, sweet, pleasant baklava, O jewel, O sultan, of Ramazan meals.' Around the same time, baklava makers in palaces and the homes of statesmen across the Ottoman Empire became specialist pastry chefs, comprising a class known as baklavacı.

A kitchen register from Topkapi Palace in 1474 reveals that baklava with 41 layers was made daily during Ramadan (or Ramazan, as it's known in Turkish), and demand was so high the team of baklavacı couldn't keep up. The task of rolling out the huge numbers of required pastry sheets was therefore outsourced to women working at home.