Evans’ Rag

Vol 1 Issue 37

her Mother’s Baklava

D makes her mother’s baklava. Though we’ve both eaten sweeter desserts, her mother’s baklava is deadly enough on its own. Honey drenching the thin, crisp phyllo wrapping crushed pistachios and other magic ingredients makes you want to cry, “Mainline!” Or something to that effect. D makes it strictly for parties. Baklava doesn’t last too long in our house, but that’s certainly not my fault.

My first encounters with baklava was in a small Greek restaurant in Miami. Being the well-traveled sophisticate that I was in my twenties, raised in Sumter, that cultural mecca, then spending a couple years on the elm-less avenues of gray New Haven, I naturally assumed baklava had to be a Greek treat. (Greek treat—say it fast.) I also learned to appreciate souvlaki on rice with roasted tomatoes in that storefront restaurant.

So is baklava originally a Greek dessert? I picture Alexander marching his Macedonian phalanx through Persia, Lebanon, working around to Egypt, passing on certain food groups such as desserts, and spreading Greek culture far and wide, including baklava. [1]

Sugar’s not my friend by a long shot, so these days I work to avoid it, however D’s baklava isn’t to be passed up. Her mother’s baklava certainly wasn’t, not after her Sunday dinners. D’s father would charcoal-grill the lamb and beef kofta to well done, and her mother would feed us righteously on baked rockfish, falafel, stuffed cabbage leaves, grape leaves, spanakopita, molokhia, a spinach-based soup when D’s mother was fasting and macaroni béchamel when she wasn’t. D’s mother used garlic by the head.

But the baklava and konafa ruled in D’s mother’s house.

When Ryan first came to dinner with us, I was sure my exasperatingly picky son wouldn’t make it through to dessert, but by the time D and I were dating, Ryan had grown into a teenager who sought out new foods–who knew? He discovered, to the old man’s shock, that he liked lamb. And of course the baklava.

I always had the feeling that D’s mother was partial to the vegetable dishes, tea and baklava.

In 2014, D and I spent several days in Istanbul back before Erdogan went viral. We were always sampling the baklava as ethno-cultural research of a Middle Eastern treat. In one restaurant high overlooking the Bosporus, we tried a flight of three different baklavas, all different, all excellent. With Turkish coffee, to be sure.

The thing about honey is that it likes to drape itself lovingly over all that it’s ladled across, and it’s not so intensely sweet that your taste buds go totally nuts (pun intended). What the bees have wrought let no man split asunder, or words to that effect.

My Irish grandmother–who raised two granddaughters and her daughter’s one wilding boy child joining the party late–Granny knew her way around pies, buns and cookies. I am told by D that I haven’t met a bread I didn’t like. This is true. And it’s all Granny’s fault. After an afternoon of football, or constructing fortifications out of pine straw and branches, until it got dark, or she rang her dinner bell (She got tired of yelling “Dinner!” because it was no telling where the wilding boy child might be running the neighborhood, so my mother bought her a large clanging bell. Honest.) I’d slink back inside to pound a dozen or so of her cookies before dinner–or still better her homemade cinnamon buns–I’ve searched for buns as good ever since.

Best Buns in Shirlington comes close and their scones aren’t bad either. There’s my shout-out to Carlos and his baking crew.

Mind, Granny thought garlic was a spice to be used ever so sparingly, and would smother a perfectly fine salmon fillet in so much cream it might as well have been bread. When D and I finally visited Ireland in the early 90s with the two boys in tow, we learned that the Irish generally couldn’t cook any better than the Brits one island over. Do not, under any circumstances, order pizza in Sligo is all I’m going to say.

But then there was Granny’s cherry pie–sigh–I’ll stop there.

She taught her daughters how to roll out the dough. Then taught her oldest daughter’s first child, my sister, how to do the same at the age of three. The photograph has seen better days, despite hours of photoshopping to improve it, Granny appears ghostlike in the picture, though I can attest that it’s her.

It’s Granny’s fault I eat all the baklava I can get my honeyed hands on.

Parting Take

Alison Krauss’s “The Lucky One” beats the hell out of a much older song, “You’re So Vain.”

Fingerpicking guitars, sad fiddle, a dobro maybe–and her angelic voice vs. Carly Simon’s stridency? No competition. Similar subjects about men who they couldn’t seem to touch, but Krauss’s understated lyrics make me stop and listen. Understatement.

I’d be way sadder if I was the one Alison was singing about.

And that’s the truth as Lily Tomlin’s little girl, Edith Ann would say.

[1] From Wikipedia: “Although the history of baklava is not well documented, its current form was probably 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.  There are three proposals for the pre-Ottoman roots of baklava: the Roman placenta cake, as developed through Byzantine cuisine, the Central Asian Turkic tradition of layered breads, or the Persian lauzinaq.”