baklava

Baklava (, or ; ) is a layered pastry dessert made of filo pastry, filled with chopped nuts, and sweetened with syrup or honey. It was one of the most popular sweet pastries of Ottoman cuisine. The pre-Ottoman origin of the dish is unknown, but, in modern times, it is a common dessert of Turkish, Iranian and Arab cuisines, and other countries of the Levant and Maghreb, along with the South Caucasus, Greece, Balkans, Somalia and Central Asia. Etymology The word "baklava" is first attested in English in 1650, a borrowing from . The name baklava is used in many languages with minor phonetic and spelling variations. According to Mary Isin, an Ottoman food historian, the earliest reference to baklava is in a poem by 15th century mystic Kaygusuz Abdal. Historian Paul D. Buell argues that the word "baklava" may come from the Mongolian root 'to tie, wrap up, pile up' composed with the Turkic verbal ending -v; baγla- itself in Mongolian is a Turkic loanword. Sevan Nişanyan considers its oldest known forms (pre-1500) to be baklağı and baklağu, and labels it as being of Proto-Turkic origin. Another form of the word is also recorded in Persian,. Though the suffix -vā might suggest a Persian origin, the baqla- part does not appear to be Persian and remains of unknown origin. Linguist Tuncer Gülensoy states that the origin of baklava is (feed) in proto-Turkish and suffixes are added. The word changes as > > .