Middle Eastern dessert, baklava filled with ground almonds and topped with rose and orange blossom sugar syrup.
Although the history of baklava is not well documented, there is evidence that its current form was developed in the imperial kitchens of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The Sultan presented trays of baklava to the Janissaries every 15th of the month of Ramadan in a ceremonial procession called the Baklava Alayı. Two well-supported proposals for the pre-Ottoman roots of this Istanbul dessert are that it came from a Central Asian Turkic tradition of layered breads, or that it came from Roman placenta cake, part of the Byzantine culinary traditions of the city of Istanbul, which had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. One source writes that baklava was already present in a 13th Century Turkish cookbook and as such can be considered the Turkish dessert with the strongest links to pre-Anatolian Turkish cuisine.[18] The tradition of layered breads by Turkic peoples in Central Asia has been suggested as the "missing link" between the Central Asian folded or layered breads (which did not include nuts) and modern phyllo-based pastries like baklava would be the Azerbaijani dish Bakı pakhlavası, which involves layers of dough and nuts.[clarification needed] The Uzbek pakhlava, puskal or yupka, and Tatar yoka, sweet and salty savories (boreks) prepared with 10–12 layers of dough, are other early examples of layered dough style in Turkic regions. The practice of stretching raw dough into paper-thin sheets probably evolved in the kitchens of the Topkapı Palace, based on Central Asian prototypes. One of the oldest known recipes for a sort of proto-baklava is Güllaç, also found in Turkish cuisine. It consists of layers of phyllo dough that are put one by one in warmed up milk with sugar. It is served with walnut and fresh pomegranate and generally eaten during Ramadan.
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