Follow the thin gold thread of filo pastry from the imperial kitchens of Topkapi to a small tray on your table.
The imperial kitchens of Topkapi Palace once employed 1,200 cooks — an army of specialists devoted to nothing but feeding the Sultan's court. Among them, the helvacibasi (chief confectioner) occupied a position of startling prestige, responsible for the desserts that defined Ottoman hospitality.
Filo — from the Greek phyllo, 'leaf' — was the helvacibasi's canvas. The art was to stretch it so thin you could read a firman (imperial edict) through it. Apprentices spent years learning the motion: slow rotations of a thin rolling pin, gravity doing half the work, the dough responding only to patience and an absolute stillness of mind.
'The nut should sing, not drown.' — Koko, on the Gaziantep tradition.
Baklava was not everyday food. It was processional. The Baklava Alayi (Baklava Procession) saw trays of the pastry carried through the streets of Constantinople on the fifteenth day of Ramadan, delivered to the Janissary corps as a show of imperial munificence. To receive baklava from the Sultan was to know you were still trusted.
Empires fall; recipes travel. Greek, Arab, Armenian, and Sephardic Jewish communities each carried versions of the pastry into diaspora, adapting it to local nuts, local honey, local rose water. Today's baklava is an atlas of migration, every variation a page.
Koko's version cleaves to the Gaziantep tradition — pale, pistachio-filled, lighter on syrup than most. 'The nut should sing,' she says, 'not drown.'