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A History of Börek
- smonff 7y agoExcellent dish for programmers.
- masklinn 7y agoDunno, pastries are often nice but the flaky dough is messy to eat in front of a computer, and the bite-sized pastries tend to be sweet and covered in sticky stuff.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoI love the idea that folded Philo dough originated to emulate oven-fluffy bread -- when ovens weren't available.
- CatrionaJasica 7y agoBörek may have its origins in Turkish cuisine and may be one of its most significant and, in fact, ancient elements of the Turkish cuisine, having been developed by the Turks of Central Asia before their westward migration to Anatolia in the late Middle Ages, or it may be a descendent of the pre-existing
- keiferski 7y agoI've always thought that schools should teach history with food. Bring in börek and you can teach about Byzantium, the Ottomans, and Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa in general. Bring in pierogi and teach about Central Europe, Russia, Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukraine, and so on. Better yet, make the foods during class itself.
- edzillion 7y agoAnd Irish history?
- matt-snider 7y agoI like this idea a lot! It would also be neat to just distribute the material from certain core subjects like history across several other courses. So in history you're learning about the Ottoman Empire and in home ec preparing börek. Or WW2 in history and cryptography in computers class.
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- carlob 7y agoAn excellent book about this is Cuisine and Empire by Rachel Laudan. However I think you're missing one of the points of teaching history in schools, which is to instill some sort of shared sense of national identity (which is mostly made up). I'm Italian, and we are taught that there is some kind of common thread between Caesar, Dante, Machiavelli, and modern Italy. What if we were taught that the durum wheat we use for pasta came from North Africa, that the same idea of making pasta is probably Chinese (by way of the Mongols)? Most of what we consider staples nowadays are either very recent inventions or come from immigration and interaction with our neighbors. How could we justify closing our borders to the refugees coming from the other side of the Mediterranean if we didn't believe the nationalist propaganda? Another great example of the political use of cuisine is the adaptation of Greek moussaka from its Ottoman ancestor, which involved adding Béchamel to make it more French...
- aytekin 7y agoI was at a luxury Turkish resort in the Mediterranean this summer. It had an amazing open buffet. You could find anything you want. I'd just fill two plates with different boreks and nothing else. Hot, right out of the oven, they were amazing.
- afroisalreadyin 7y agoThis reminds me that I should bake a börek again sometime. With a decent salad, you can have it even for lunch or dinner.
- theobeers 7y agoI wasn't quite convinced by the etymology, so I figured I would check Gerhard Doerfer's Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersischen (vol. 2). It turns out this is not an easy word to trace.[0] Doerfer judges it as not originally Turkic, owing to its limited distribution and absence in older texts, and suggests that it more likely came from Iranian languages. So far so good. But, he adds, "Here it also seems to be unetymologizable." Womp womp… It may be that Andreas (sic) Tietze found something else—I haven't looked at his Turkish etymological dictionary, which was unfinished at the time of his death. If there were a clear answer, however, I don't think it would have escaped Doerfer and the others who looked into this. [0] https://i.imgur.com/sTbWtq6.png https://i.imgur.com/sTbWtq6.png
- egeozcan 7y agoSevan Nişanyan (an Armenian-Turkish language researcher) suggests that it may be of Persian origin (būrak, a dish made with dough and meat). He, however, doesn't dismiss the possibility that it may have some etymological relationship with the Slavic word peirogi (pirog пирог, pirojki пирожки - a dough dish) and the Persian word having a Turkic root (having made a full circle like tülbent). https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=b%C3%B6rek&view=annotated https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=b%C3%B6rek&view=annotated
- theobeers 7y agoI love Nişanyan Sözlük! It's an incredible resource. Anyway, Doerfer mentions the pierogi theory, attributing it to Ramstedt (see the last part of the screenshot I posted), but he says it's been refuted by Vasmer. (Presumably Max Vasmer? Wow, that guy had a hell of a career.) There is the impression of something circular going on. If you look for būrak in the Dehkhoda Persian dictionary, you'll see that it was also known as a kind of yogurt soup/stew, with the name perhaps originating as an alternate form of the Turkic (!) bughrā. That, in turn, may be an abbreviation of bughrā-khānī, which you can find described, e.g. in Steingass's dictionary, as a pastry dish dressed with milk or gravy. (It was allegedly named after a ruler of Khwarazm.) So, if you wanted to piece the whole thing together, you could theorize that bughrā-khānī was shortened to bughrā, from which the Persian būrak eventually derived—and then went back into Turkic as börek. This could also involve flexibility in the intended dish, between a stuffed pastry with gravy, and some kind of soup… maybe with dumplings? It wouldn't be the strangest instance of metonymy. You know, it's crazy for me to revisit this topic. Some time ago I was trying to figure out a sixteenth-century Persian poem, in which there are references to bughrā'ī and māhīchah. The best I could figure out, it was supposed to mean a soup with pieces of pastry in it. It never occurred to me that this might be connected to a theorized etymology of börek.
- bump64 7y agoIf you visit the Balkans make sure to try it. There are many variations of the börek and all them are great.
- neoberg 7y agoBorek and Goran Bregovic are the only 2 things that whole Balkans can agree on.
- carlob 7y agoThey also all agree that their country once comprised all of the Balkans and possibly was the cradle of western civilization.
- cableshaft 7y agoThere's a few places in the Chicagoland area that serve Börek (I see it spelled Burek here also). The one closest to me offers fillings of ground beef, spinach and feta, mushrooms, or potato. They are all very good.
- hellwd 7y agoAt least in Bosnia, there are no variations of the börek. There is only one börek - with meat. Other "variations" with cheese, potato etc.. they have also a different name. Basically if you order a börek, you will get it with meat.
- input_sh 7y agoYes, this is a common "fight" between people in Bosnia and neighboring countries: In Bosnia, "börek" (or "burek", as is its local spelling) is only filled with meat, while the rest of the dishes fall under the broader category of "pitas" (or pies): sirnica (filled with cheese), krompiruša (filled with potatoes), zeljanica (filled with cabbage), jabukovača (filled with apples)... In Serbia and Croatia, they're all "burek" with different stuffings, so burek with cheese, burek with potatoes, etc. It's a weird hill to die on, but you will receive some weird looks if you request just "burek" in Serbia/Croatia/Montenegro, or "burek with cheese" within Bosnia.
- researcher7 7y agoActually it's not Turkish. It is an Armenian food, some of the Balkan states also had it in different forms and different recipes at the same time. Those predate even the ancestors of the Ottoman Turkish empire. This is again, part of the genocide. After committing the actual murders, the culture is stolen all good things are now claimed to be Turkish. They did this also to the Greeks, Assyrians, and some of Balkan states.
- mda 7y ago"Borek" is definitely Turkish, of central asia origin. You are conflating irrelevant things. Not everything you see in Turkish culture is "stolen" from some other culture, Turks roam a huge area in 3 different continents for thousands of years, they teach learn and adapt, what did you expect? It is getting really tired of seeing whenever something remotely Turkish is mentioned someone jumps with these.
- researcher7 7y agoFeel free to downvote more or post more revisionist history. It is not even remotely turkish, but like most "turkish" food and drinks, it was stolen from the cultures they attempted to destroy. Truth is downvoted these days.
- mda 7y agoWell, if you have a pinch of evidence, please enlighten us.
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