Round up on griddle-baked thin pastry
Thank you everyone who has responded here, and on Facebook or Twitter, or via personal emails. Once again, I am amazed at the way these tools speed up intellectual interaction. Soon the days that I remember when you sent off a letter and waited weeks for response and even then could never gather up the kind of interaction that’s gone on here in the last 36 hours will be a distant memory. Please read all the responses. There’s lots of good stuff there.
Here’s a quick, first shot at a summary.
1. I change to griddle-baked instead of seared, thanks to Robyn Eckhardt’s comments.
2. There is a huge world of these very thin pastries that deserves to be better known. Very roughly they correspond to the world of Islam, including South India (though perhaps not northern Mughal India), Southeast Asia and possibly Horn of Africa.
3. The thin pastries seem to have been used either in tharid, the signature meat and bread dish of Islam (though surely at the upmarket end) or as pie casings or wrappers for savories or sweets (Charles Perry, Anissa Helou, Susan Ji-Young Park, Ammini Ramachandran et al).
4. They are put on the heated surface in a variety of ways:
By spreading a handful of pretty liquid dough
By tapping the dough on with the hand or a spoon
By spreading a thin batter
By flipping the liquid dough on with a cloth
By using a brush to spread the dough on (Adam Balic is one who speculates this is modern)
5. The heated surface may be a metal griddle (the commonest now, it seems), an upturned pot (I’m going to take the liberty of adding a photo that Paula Wolfert–I’ll take it down immediately if you have worries, Paula–sent Adam Balic in response to his forwarding Ammini’s video which, like the one in Ammini’s post, is black), or perhaps just stones.
6. That the technique is a tricky one, that it could have been spread by the migration of just a few skilled cooks.
7. That to make these pastries, you have to have either fine white flour or fine rice flour (missed that before, sorry). Prior to the end of the nineteenth century, these were reserved for the elite. Then new milling techniques made both much more widely available.
Note that I am assuming that all these techniques belong to a single family. In spite of Katy’s plea, I see no reason (with possible exception below) to think they were independent inventions. And for Nancy, who wonders why I talk about recent invention in relation to spring rolls wrappers, well, I’ve decided my default position is to assume something is recent until it is proven to be ancient.
Up for grabs.
1. When these doughs were invented. I’d now guess not before the (say) 9th or 10th century with the flowering of Islamic cuisine (pity we don’t know more about Sassanid). Quite likely, as Charles Perry says, “as part of the madness for the thinnest possible bread in medieval Moorish Spain and North Africa.” Certainly still there in Ottoman times. (By the way, Charles, I think Gene Anderson dates Chinese dumplings too late. I think they were there by the beginning of the CE).
2. What the connections, if any, with China are. Robyn Eckhardt believes the Chinese version of this pastry comes from Fujian (right, Robyn?) Agreed that there was massive Chinese migration from their and Canton to Southeast Asia. But do we have any evidence about the history of these pastries in South China? Or their connection, if any, with ping.
Finally, I find it interesting to compare this with the history of oven baked pastries in Europe (raised crust, short crust, puff pastry, etc. etc). All these depend on both fat and ovens.
The griddle baked pastries perhaps shouldn’t even be called pastries, if the European sense of pastries using fat is the norm. They are a dry pasta or bread.
- Griddle Baked Pastry in Andhra Pradesh and (?) in Eritrea
- Thin rice starch batter pastry from the 6th century AD
Hello Rachel,
The only thing I have to add to the discussion is a personal anecdote *apologetic*
As a child growing up in Malaysia (I am Malaysian Fujian and Cantonese Chinese by descent), I remember watching my maternal Auntie (who is Fujian Malaysian Chinese) making fresh popiah (spring roll) skins using the griddle method.
She would work the dough until it was the consistency of very soft rubber, yet cohesive enough to form into a (wobbly!) ball. The ‘ball’ was then rubbed over a hot round griddle to form the popiah skins.
I had a shot or two at it myself and remember many burnt fingers as a result – it was terribly difficult trying to 1. manoeuvre a floppy (almost writhing!) ball of dough evenly to cover the entire surface of the griddle in one shot and 2. move the ‘ball’ quickly enough that the entire griddle surface was covered before parts of the popiah skin began charring.
Hope my two cents helps!
Yes, it certainly does. Personal experience always adds a lot.
If you’re interested in more anecdotes about making thin pastries…
I’ve been developing a line of Algerian pastries (and cookies) with staff/trainees who are graduates of various culinary schools from allover the States and a few from Europe. None of them came out of school well versed at making thin sheets of pastries. Maybe, they made strudel in class once or watched a demo of it.
And none of them have had to hand make thin sheets of pastries at any other place of work. If they’ve made them at all, they used sheet feeders or pasta machines.
Making thin sheets of pastry entirely by hand is a highly specialized skill. And warka (also called malsouka, brik/brick or dioul), made using the traditional searing method, is one of the most difficult techniques to master.
I forget the details of Gene Anderson’s argument that baozi dumplings are inspired by the Persian sambosag/samosa. I’ll try to dig them out.
One problem with Chinese food history is that the Chinese writing system systematically obscures foreign borrowings because the only way you can write sounds is to use characters that also represent naive Chinese words.
Anderson points out that the Central Asian dumplings mantu have usually been considered to have a Chinese origin because of the Chinese spelling mantou, which has the appealingly vivid meaning “barbarian heads,” but when the Chinese first start writing about mantou, they write the name in several different ways, indicating that they are trying to represent the sounds of a foreign word. Since the Chinese language is full of homophones, there are a lot of choices and inevitably the characters that have a plausible meaning get chosen.
Another example: the Chinese sweet called saqima, the spelling of which has a barely plausible meaning in Chinese. But sachima is actually a Manchu word meaning “chopped off.” It’s almost certain to be the Central Asian sweet called chakchak in Uzbek. There are a surprising number of Central Asian food words in Manchu,.
Charles, I am of Chinese origin. I struggled to understand a couple of issues you mentioned in the above. For the rest of your comments, I can write a whole article about it. It is a complicated language. For the last sentence the reason why there are a surprising number of Central Asian food words in Manchu is because Mongolian and several other Central Asian languages and even Korean and Japanese (though consider only ‘generally’) belong to the same language system Altaic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
I have answer to the Mantu business but it’s not something I can explain in a few lines. There is no particular reason or system why certain Chinese characters are chosen to ‘represent’ a word – sachima can be written 10 or more ways in whatever way they want and none of them necessarily has any connection with the other. It’s a fascinating and perhaps ‘unpredictable’ language for Westerners.
Sorry I am mixing Manchu and Mongolian in my last comment – but Manchu also belonged to Altaic language family. And in Chinese history, the dynasty established by Manchu was conquered by the Mongols under Genghis Khan. To have some ideas about the connection between the Mongols and the ethnic groups in Central Asia – check out this nomadic tribes called Xiongnu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiongnu
By the way, Sachi means chop off, ma means in squares. Sachima –Chop off in squares.
I dismiss baozi has connection with Samosa – first baozi is steamed and round shaped. Chinese dumpling boiled is called Shuijiao. And just because two people in different places make similar food, it doesn’t mean there has to be a connection or one is inspired by the other. There are only so many different ways you can wrap up fillings and eat it.
here’s my contribution for griddle pastries:
in the southern crete region of sfakia, which is very rocky and dry, making it less accessible (which partly explains the remoteness of the personality of a sfakiot), the well-known cretan griddle pastries are made (sfakianes pites: http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2007/09/sfakianes-pites-honey-pies.html )
in many villages in and around the prefecture of hania, crete, seamless flat pastries containing wild greens are often made:
http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2008/03/fennel-pies-marathopites.html
these pies are recognised as unique to crete, and they have a rustic look to them – but the same method for making these pies is also used in mediterranean turkey, with the same fillings:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27068303@N05/3229413329/in/photostream/
(they also do a potato filling too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27068303@N05/3229413785/in/photostream/ – more information can be obtained from http://mediterraneanturkishfoodpassion.blogspot.com/search/label/Boreks%2FPastries%2FPides )
Thanks so much, Maria. I look forward to looking at these later today. The more the merrier!
here’s one of my photo posts of hania which might help to put a lot of those similarities in the griddle pastries of parts of turkey and greece into perspective
http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2009/06/kolotsita.html
Thanks again, Maria. I´ll be getting back to this soon.