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
