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By Root 1033 0

de la Brocquière, “first esquire carver to Philippe le Bon,” who traveled across “Turcomania” on his way from Palestine to France in 1433, came across Turkmen nomads near Adana, in southern Anatolia. With their customary hospitality, they offered the passers-by cheese and grapes and “a dozen of thin cakes of bread, thinner than wafers: they fold them up as grocers do their papers for spices, and eat them filled with the curdled milk, called by them Yogort.” A few days later he “lodged” at another Turkmen encampment of round felt “pavilions.” “It was here I saw women make those thin cakes I spoke of. They have a small round table, very smooth, on which they throw some flour, and mix it with water to a paste, softer than that for bread. This paste they divide into round pieces, which they flatten as much as possible with a wooden roller [oklava] of a smaller diameter than an egg, until they make them as thin as I have mentioned. During this operation, they have a convex plate of iron [saç] placed on a tripod [sacayak], and heat it by a gentle fire underneath, on which they spread the cake, and instantly turn it, so that they make two of their cakes sooner than a waferman can make one wafer.”

Yufka is still a rural staple today, and a coarse homemade yufka is as widely consumed as bread in most Anatolian villages. Yufka rolled around a spread of grape molasses is a popular shepherd’s snack. The village woman’s quick meal of katlama (literally “folded”)—crumbled cheese and butter wrapped in yufka and toasted on a hot griddle—is still hugely enjoyed in the countryside.

Finer leaves of yufka are sold to make börek in markets, bakers, and yufkacı shops all over the country. Rolled out into large circular, gauzelike sheets, 60 centimeters (2 feet) in diameter, they will have been lightly dry-cooked on both sides on a hot iron griddle, exactly as Bertrandon described six centuries ago. The ingredients, even the utensils, are the same. Only the fuel has changed, as campfires have given way to electricity.

Simple snacks evolved over time into more complicated tray-baked böreks, employing ever more varied ingredients and cooking facilities, and, above all, calling for a large, well-organized community to gather round the börek tray and enjoy a shared meal.

Plain yufka dough made with wheat flour and water came to be enriched with eggs to create a softer pasta dough. Flaky pastry came from working in butter, fat, or oil, leading in turn to strudel and puff pastry. All could be used to envelop a delectable filling and be baked or fried as neat parcels of every shape and size.

The börek has an extensive place in Turkey’s culinary repertoire, and the choice of fillings is infinite. Something that is protein-rich to complement the carbohydrate of the pastry makes for a perfect nutritional balance. From cheese to spicy ground meat or sautéed meat cubes with nuts and raisins; from chicken or turkey to fish and lentils; from offal such as brain or tripe to vegetables—the list is almost endless. Spinach, leek, potato, aubergine, courgette, pumpkin, cabbage and spring greens, sorrel, and nettle can all be included. And fillings are often further enhanced with butter, yogurt, milk, eggs, and fresh herbs.

As to the cooking, theoretically one needs an oven, whether modern or rustic, in which to bake böreks. But delicious tray böreks are still cooked, as they would have been in earlier times, on an open fire and covered with an iron lid, with the embers piled on top to create an ovenlike effect. Or else they can be simply cooked very fast on an open flame, then flipped over like a pancake and cooked on the other side.

Perhaps the forerunner of all pastries, yufka must have opened up a whole new culinary horizon, leading the way to a constellation of böreks, and a further galaxy of baklavas—for that is what you have when the pastry is given a nut-based filling, sweetened with honey or sugar syrup. Baklava calls for yufka rolled out into paper-thin leaves so fine that you can almost see through them: it may have anything from forty to eighty