pita

Pita ( or ) or pitta (British English) is a family of yeast-leavened round flatbreads baked from wheat flour, common in the Mediterranean, Levant, and neighboring areas. It includes the widely known version with an interior pocket, also known as Arabic bread (; khubz ʿarabī). In the United Kingdom, Greek bread is used for pocket versions such as the Greek pita, and are used for barbecues as a souvlaki wrap. The Western name pita may sometimes be used to refer to various other types of flatbreads that have different names in their local languages, such as numerous styles of Arab khubz (bread). History Pita has roots in the prehistoric flatbreads of the Near East. There is evidence from about 14,500 years ago, during the Stone Age, that the Natufian people in what is now Jordan made a kind of flatbread from wild cereal grains. Ancient wheat and barley were among the earliest domesticated crops in the Neolithic period of about 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent. By 4,000 years ago, bread was of central importance in societies such as the Babylonian culture of Mesopotamia, where the earliest-known written records and recipes of bread-making originate, and where pita-like flatbreads cooked in a tinûru (tannur or tandoor) were a basic element of the diet, and much the same as today's tandoor bread, taboon bread, and laffa, an Iraqi flatbread with many similarities with pita. However, there is no record of the steam-puffed, two-layer "pocket pita" in the ancient texts, or in any of the medieval Arab cookbooks, and according to food historians such as Charles Perry and Gil Marks it was likely a later development. Etymology The first mention of the word in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1936. The English word is borrowed from Modern Greek (, "bread, cake, pie, pitta"), in turn from Byzantine Greek (attested in 1108), possibly from Ancient Greek or, both "pitch/resin" for the gloss, or from (, "fermented pastry"), which may have passed to Latin as cf. pizza. In Levantine Arabic it evolved into , (since Old Arabic /p/ evolved into /f/). Other hypotheses trace the word back to the Classical Hebrew word (, lit. "a morsel of bread"). It is spelled like the Aramaic, from which it was received into Byzantine Greek (see above).