Easy Baklava Recipe

I reached the village on the Monday of Holy Week, when poppies were thick along the road and the first real warmth of the year was still only a rumour. Mornings were cold enough for a woollen shawl, afternoons turned the stone walls to honey, and every evening a thin wind slid down from the hills carrying wood smoke and the smell of wet earth. My friend met me where the bus stopped, laughing, with a paper bag of oranges in one hand, and by dark I was seated in a kitchen where a pot of lentils muttered on the stove. Holy Week is lean in a Greek house. No meat, no cheese, no eggs, and the grandmother who ruled that kitchen treated the rule with the seriousness other people keep for weddings.

Tuesday began with a bucket of lime wash pushed into my hands before I had found my slippers. In the days before Pascha a Greek house is scrubbed from roof to doorstep. Curtains are beaten on the line, copper pots are rubbed until they throw the sun back, and the edges of every step and the stones around the lemon tree are painted white with a fat brush. I laid a crooked stripe along the garden wall, and yiayia, passing with a basket of laundry, straightened it with one raised eyebrow. By noon my wrists were speckled white and my back ached, and I was fed a plate of boiled wild greens, shining with olive oil and lemon, eaten standing in the doorway. It was the best lunch I had eaten in a year.

On Wednesday pappou took me up the hill behind the house to gather horta, the wild greens that fill the lean days of Lent. He walked ahead with a knife and a plastic bag, bending every few steps and naming each green as he cut it, while I trampled daisies behind him and got every name wrong. The hill smelled of crushed thyme and warm rock, and far below the sea lay flat and bright as a hammered plate. Church bells carried up the slope, thin and clear, and pappou crossed himself without breaking his stride. By Thursday, he promised, the village would smell of bread and onion skins, and I would be useful.

The days that followed were measured in small rituals. On Thursday we dyed eggs red in a blackened pot, a dozen at a time, with onion skins and a splash of vinegar, and the water turned the colour of old wine while the house filled with a sharp sweet steam. The first egg out of the pot is set aside beneath the icon in the corner, where it stays a full year for luck.

Mary Magdalene, yiayia told me over the steaming pot, carried a basket of white eggs to the emperor Tiberius and greeted him with the news that Christ was risen. The emperor laughed and said a man could sooner believe the eggs in her basket had turned red. As he spoke, every egg in the basket flushed crimson. Yiayia told it with her wooden spoon held up like a staff, and my friend, who had heard it a hundred times, mouthed the words along with her. When the eggs came out of the dye she rubbed each one with an oiled rag until it shone like a lacquered bead, and I was given the job of lining them up on a tray, a long red row that caught the afternoon light from the window.

The afternoon belonged to tsoureki. I was put to kneading beside the wooden trough, and my forearms learned in an hour what the rest of me had never known. The dough was heavy and silky, scented with mahlepi, the ground kernel of a wild cherry stone, and with mastic, the resin of a tree from Chios that yiayia crushed with sugar in a brass mortar until the air tasted of pine and cold sweetness. She braided each loaf in three strands, one for each person of the Trinity, and pressed a plain egg into the crown. The red eggs, she explained, were swapped in only after the loaves had cooled, so the dye would never bleed into the crumb. The house filled with the smell of warm bread and lemon, and for the first time that week nobody sat still.

Good Friday was silent and heavy. Nothing was baked and nothing was fried, the church bell tolled slowly from morning to dusk, and the village women, who had spent the day heaping the flower bier called the Epitaphios with lilac, roses and stocks, carried it through the lanes while the whole village walked behind with thin candles in their hands. The air was cold and perfumed. I remember the glow drifting between whitewashed walls, the low voices of the old lament rising and falling, and how even the dogs lay still.

I had been part of that morning without knowing how much it would matter to me. At first light my friend and I were sent into the garden with scissors and a basket to cut every rose, stock and sprig of lemon blossom we could find, and we came back with wet sleeves and scratched knuckles. The women had been at the church since dawn, tying flowers to the wooden frame of the Epitaphios stem by stem, and when we arrived with our basket the old ladies took it without a word and pressed a needle and thread into my hand. I tied lilac with a fumbling knot, and they quietly retied it. Nobody spoke above a whisper. The church smelled of wet petals and old wax.

Dinner that night was a bowl of lentils with a thin sharp stream of vinegar, the vinegar offered on the cross, my friend whispered, and no oil, no bread but a heel, no talk at the table. Afterwards I lay awake in a narrow bed under a crocheted blanket and listened to the bell tolling once a minute across the dark, slow as a heartbeat, until the moon came up over the water and silvered the whitewashed wall I had painted on Tuesday.

Saturday was baklava day. My friend woke me before the light, and I found yiayia already at the table in a black cardigan, sleeves pushed above the elbow, her hands floury to the wrist. A long thin rolling pin, nearly as long as a broomstick, leaned against the wall. She never hurried. She rolled the dough, stretched it across the backs of her hands, and rolled it again until the pattern of the oilcloth showed through, and she said this was where the whole day was won or lost, because a thick sheet will never shatter. Years later I would lean on the packet from the freezer aisle, but I have never forgotten how that dough seemed to breathe.

Pappou, her husband, sat by the window cracking walnuts with a small stone hammer, and the shells dropped into a tin pail with a dry clatter that went on for an hour. He chopped the kernels by hand on a worn board with a curved knife, never in a machine, because he liked the pieces uneven. Some were as fine as sand and some as big as a lentil, and the big ones, he said, were what you tasted at the end.

I was handed a second knife and the other end of the board. He showed me how to rock the blade, tip down and heel rising, and told me without looking up that a machine makes dust and dust makes paste. The walnuts were toasted first in a dry iron pan with a pinch of cinnamon and a single crushed clove, shaken over a low flame until they shone with their own oil and the kitchen smelled like a church spice cupboard. My first handful went too fine and he tipped it back onto the board with one finger. My second was better. By the third he was humming. A spoon of fine semolina went into the bowl with the nuts to catch their oil.

By ten the kitchen smelled of butter. Yiayia melted it slowly in a deep pan until a white foam rose and she skimmed it off with a spoon, leaving only clear gold below. The tray, a heavy dark metal one blackened by decades of Easters, was brushed from corner to corner. Then the counting began.

I was given a corner of the table and a stack of sheets, and for one hour I was the happiest apprentice in the country. Then a sheet tore. Then another stuck to my thumb. Yiayia, without turning, said that phyllo smells fear. She took the stack away from me, gave me the brush, and told me to paint the butter on in one long stroke from the near edge to the far, no stopping, the way you paint a boat. My hand shook for the first ten sheets. By the twentieth it knew what to do.

Over that afternoon the rules came out one at a time, never as a lecture, always as a remark thrown over her shoulder while her hands kept working. I wrote them in a notebook with butter on my thumbs.

The butter must be warm, never hot. She held her wrist over the pan and said it should feel like a sleeping child's forehead. Hot butter cooks the sheet before the oven does and leaves it leathery.

A spoonful of crushed rusk goes into the nuts. She kept a jar of old paximadi, the hard twice baked bread of the islands, and crushed a handful with a bottle. Mixed into the walnuts and almonds with cinnamon and a little sugar, it soaks up syrup so the filling stays crumbly and does not turn to paste.

The tray is cut before it bakes. With a long sharp knife she drew the diamonds right down to the metal, and the blade gave a papery rasp on every stroke. Then she pressed one whole clove into the centre of each piece, for fragrance and for a kind of signature. Then, from her fingertips, she flicked cold water across the top like a blessing, so the edges would not curl in the heat.

What I had missed, because I was sent to fetch lemons, was the pause before the knife. The assembled tray had stood a quarter of an hour in the cool pantry, so the butter between the sheets could firm and the layers stop sliding. When I asked why, she said the dough needed to be fooled into sitting still. Then, after the cut, she ladled warm clarified butter over the whole top and tilted the tray, so that the fat ran down every cut to the base like gold finding a riverbed. The cutting itself was a ceremony. She used the longest, thinnest blade in the house and drew each line in one stroke, the diamonds, the rombos, even and clean. Pappou, passing through for water, said that in his mother's village an uneven cut brought bad luck on the house until the next Easter. My own first diamond was a rhombus drunk on wine, and he crossed himself in mock terror.

The oven was an old gas one that she lit with a match and a muttered word. By two the kitchen smelled of butter turning to caramel, and the sound from inside changed from a hush to a faint crackle, which she said meant the middle was done.

This was also when she told me about the proika. In the villages of her mother's youth, she said, a girl was judged for marriage in the kitchen. The mother of the groom would come to sit at the table, drink her coffee, and watch the girl roll dough until it was thin enough to read a letter through. A sheet that tore was a bad sign. A tray of baklava that came out of the oven in clean golden layers was worth more than a field of olive trees. Yiayia had passed her own test, she said with a straight face, by rolling for two hours in front of a mother in law who never once blinked, and then burning her fingers on the pan to show she was not afraid. Her husband, from the window, said she had trembled the entire time. She threw a dishcloth at him.

The honey goes in last. While the tray baked she simmered sugar and water with a strip of orange peel, a cinnamon stick, three cloves and a squeeze of lemon, and only after pulling the pan off the heat did she stir in a spoon of thyme honey. Boiled honey, she said, loses its perfume and keeps only its sweetness.

The peel came from the bitter orange tree by the gate, the nerantzi, whose fruit nobody eats but whose skin scents everything it touches, and she cut it in one long ribbon that curled in the pan like a green spring. The honey came from pappou's brother, who kept hives on the hill. In a good year, she said, he gave her thyme honey from the island slopes, bright and wild, and in a lean year the dark, resinous fir honey from the mountain, which she liked almost better. She wanted honey with a hillside in it, she told me, because sugar by itself was only sweet, and sweet by itself was a child's pleasure. A bergamot rind, where it could be had, did the same work with a floral bitterness. The kitchen window stood open and the smell of the syrup went out over the yard and brought a neighbour to the gate to ask what the occasion was.

When the tray came out, deep gold and spitting, she let the syrup cool to room temperature and poured it slowly along each cut. The hiss rose as steam and smelled of orange blossom and cloves. Then she did what tested everyone in the house. She left it on the sideboard, uncovered, and walked away.

We walked to church a little before eleven. The night was clear and cold, the sky packed with stars, the smell of jasmine and damp stone drifting out of the gardens. People gathered in the courtyard in dark good clothes, each holding a long white candle tied with a ribbon, and children carried small ones decorated with glitter and tiny plastic eggs. Inside, the service rolled on in low chant until just before midnight, when every light in the church was put out.

Before that darkness the church was an ocean of warm light and sound. Incense hung in the nave in slow blue layers, the oil lamps swung on their chains, and the old men in the stalls sang in voices cracked by sixty winters. Somebody's grandchild fell asleep standing against a pillar. My friend leaned close and murmured the meaning of each hymn into my ear, and I stood with my candle unlit and my palms damp. I had been told that the flame would come to us from Jerusalem, flown to Greece in the days before and carried from one church to the next, and I found that I believed it more than I could explain.

In that darkness a few hundred people held their breath. Then a single flame appeared at the door of the sanctuary, and the priest sang that they should come and take the light. Wick touched wick, and the fire ran from one candle to the next, across the church, down the steps, into the courtyard, until the whole village stood in a lake of small flames and every face was gold. The bells began. Fireworks cracked over the hills. Strangers kissed on both cheeks and said Christos Anesti, Christ is risen, and the answer came back, Alithos Anesti, truly He is risen. I said it too, and was kissed by a man I had never met.

My own candle caught from the woman beside me, whose hand shook, and the wax ran onto my knuckles and I bore it with a joy I have not felt since. My friend's mother pulled me against her coat and held my face between her hands and said something in Greek that I did not understand and have never forgotten. The church doors stood open. Over the roofs the first firework went up in a white chrysanthemum and the hills answered with the sound of a hundred more. Children ran in circles, their small candles trailing sparks, and the breath of the whole village rose into the black air in one gold pillar.

Forty days of hunger, one night of flame, and a tray that waited on the sideboard.

Everyone shielded their candle with a hand all the way home, because a flame that survives the walk is a good sign for the year. At the door, yiayia drew a cross of black smoke on the lintel. Inside, a bowl of magiritsa, the lemony lamb soup that ends the fast, was waiting. We cracked the red eggs against each other in a game called tsougrisma, and the winner is the one whose egg does not break. It was well past one in the morning when yiayia finally lifted the cloth from the tray, cut the first diamond, and set it on a saucer before me. The top shattered into the saucer. The middle was soft with syrup. The base stayed crisp. I did not say a word for a full minute.

We stayed at the table until the window turned grey. Pappou told stories of Easters in the mountains, the aunts argued cheerfully about whose egg had cracked first, and the children were laid on a heap of coats in the corner. Sometime near four I put my head down on my arms beside the empty saucer, and the last thing I remember is yiayia, tiny and upright in her good dress, lifting the small oil lamp under the icon and lighting it from her candle, to burn until next Pascha. When I woke the light was pink and a rooster was shouting down the lane, and somebody had put a blanket over my shoulders.

By dawn on Sunday I had eaten more symbolic food than in all my life before, and slowly the logic of it came clear. Nothing about the food of Pascha is accidental. It begins with the forty days of Lent, when the house gives up meat, cheese, milk and eggs, and the pantry fills with beans, greens, olives, bread and the pale flesh of octopus and cuttlefish on the permitted days. By Holy Week the family has been lean for weeks, and the cooking that follows is a homecoming.

The first meal after the Resurrection is magiritsa, and nothing else will do. It is made of the lamb's innards, chopped small and simmered for hours with spring onions, dill and soft lettuce, then finished at the last moment with egg and lemon beaten into the broth until it turns pale and glossy. It is the colour of spring and tastes of green hills and sourness. The visitor finds it strange at one in the morning. By the third spoonful he is quiet. After forty days of lean food it eases the stomach back into the world, which is why, yiayia said, no sensible Greek begins a feast on roast meat. Crusts of tsoureki go into the bowl and come out soaked.

The red eggs are boiled on Holy Thursday, and for days they sit in a bowl in the corner like jewels no one may touch. Cracked at last in tsougrisma, they carry a challenge and a greeting at once. One person holds an egg point up and says Christos Anesti. The other strikes it with the point of their own and answers Alithos Anesti. The egg that survives wins, and its owner is said to carry luck for the year. The loser peels his egg and eats it. By Monday there are red shells in every pocket, every flowerpot and every corner of the courtyard.

Tsoureki is the bread of the table. The three braids stand for the Trinity and the red egg in the crown for the blood and the renewal of life. Mahlepi gives it a faint taste of bitter almond and cherry and mastic gives it the cool resinous perfume that no other bread has. Beside it come koulourakia, the butter biscuits twisted into small rings or plaits, dipped in coffee by the old men and in milk by the children. Both taste of the week they came from.

Sunday brings the meat. The lamb, always a young one, is salted and rubbed with oil, lemon and oregano and turned over charcoal for five or six hours. Beside it hang the kokoretsi, skewers of lamb offal wound in intestine, and potatoes roast in a tin beneath the spit, soaking up the drippings until they turn golden and sticky. A salad of crisp romaine with dill and spring onion cuts the richness, and a jug of the village wine goes round. Cheese comes from the hills, brined in barrels, and the sweets come last, the baklava among them, with thick coffee.

Every greeting for the next forty days is Christos Anesti and every answer Alithos Anesti. Strangers say it on the road. The baker says it as he hands you your change. The hymn of the Resurrection is sung at every service for those weeks, even at baptisms and weddings, and the oil lamp under the icon burns without pause, lit from the flame of that night. When the older women part they say Kalo Pascha, a good Easter, and mean a good year.

Easter Sunday began before dawn with men in the yard lighting charcoal. By eight the lamb was threaded on a long iron spit and turning slowly, brushed with olive oil, lemon and oregano, and the smell of it drifted over the rooftops and woke the village for the second time. Someone cranked a motor, someone else preferred to turn the spit by hand, and everyone had advice. Kokoretsi, the herb scented skewer of offal wrapped in intestine, turned beside it, and I was handed the first crisp piece with a look that said I was not allowed to refuse.

I was given the spit for an hour. The iron handle was greasy and hot and the weight of the lamb pulled at my shoulder, and the men took turns to correct my rhythm. Too fast, too slow, steady, like a clock. Every few minutes someone brushed the meat with a bunch of oregano dipped in lemon and oil, and the fat hissed on the coals and sent up a smoke that got into my eyes and my hair. By ten I smelled of woodsmoke and oregano and was prouder than I have ever been of an unwashed shirt. Down in the lane the neighbours were already calling Christos Anesti to one another over the walls, and the answer came from every gate.

The sun was warm by noon. Long tables were pushed together beneath a plane tree in the yard and covered with white cloths, and neighbours arrived with trays on their heads and under their arms. Tsoureki, the braided Easter bread with a red egg baked into the crown, was torn by hand and passed around with salad, lemon potatoes, and cheeses wet from the brine. Someone brought a radio. Within an hour the older men were dancing slow and straight backed, hands on each other's shoulders, and the children were running wild through the olive grove with eggs they were not supposed to crack yet.

Somebody put a hand on my back and I was in the line. The kalamatianos is a dance of twelve steps, they told me, which became six when they saw me, and then three. I stepped on a stranger's foot, then on pappou's, then took a handkerchief from a white haired woman who towed me round the circle with the strength of a fisherman. The wine arrived in unlabelled bottles, thin and bright and sour, and was poured into small tumblers by a boy who seemed to be everywhere at once. The sun dropped lower and long shadows ran across the tablecloths, and the plane tree overhead let go of a little pale fluff that drifted down into the salad.

The baklava came out at four with the coffee, cut smaller and passed on plates to everyone, including strangers like me. It tasted of cinnamon and cloves and thyme honey, and yiayia watched my face with narrowed eyes until I nodded. By evening the light went long and gold, the tables were a wreck of bones and shells and crumbs, and a guitar began somewhere in the dusk. The tray, I noticed, was empty except for a few clove heads.

That was the baklava that mattered, said yiayia, the baklava of the second day, the butter settled and the syrup walked all the way down. She watched my face over the rim of her coffee cup. The top still gave its small crack, the middle had gone dense and fragrant, and the base, which I had worried about, was crisp as a biscuit. I told her in my worst Greek that it was the best thing I had ever eaten, and she said it was only the second best, because her mother's had been better, and then tucked another piece onto my plate when she thought I was not looking.

At six the bell called us again for the Vespers of Love, where the Gospel of the Resurrection was read in one language after another so that every voice in the world might hear the news. We stood in the evening light falling through the open door and listened, and the old women were crying. Night came down slowly. The tables were cleared into the dark, the lamb bones carried off for the dogs, and a boy with a guitar sat on the wall singing songs that everyone knew except me.

The best baklava is the one you were not allowed to touch.

That night, while the village slept, pappou told me what he knew of the pastry's past, sitting on the back step with a small glass of tsipouro between us, the sea black below and the stars thick as spilled salt. He was certain about one thing. The thirty three sheets are the Greek count, tied to the years of Christ. The Armenians, he said, make theirs with forty, for the forty days of Lent, and the cooks of Gaziantep across the border are famous for the same number, each side swearing the other copied the arithmetic.

He had his own view of the number. Thirty three sheets, he said, was less a recipe than a prayer, and the old women laid the sheets down one by one, counting under their breath, so that the tray became a kind of rosary. Lose the count and you start again, because a tray laid carelessly is a tray laid without thought for the day it is for.

Pappou said the ancient Mediterranean was full of layered, honeyed pastries, and that he had grown up hearing their names. The Romans had placenta, sheets of dough with cheese and honey, and Greek households like to name an old sweet called gastris, built of nuts and honey, as the great grandmother of baklava. Nobody at the table could say how straight the line ran from those old sweets to the tray on his sideboard, and pappou waved the question away with his glass. Whatever the road was, he said, the Byzantines were baking something like it long before the Ottomans took their kitchens.

The oldest claim of all, he told me, belongs to the Assyrians, who are said to have layered thin unleavened bread with chopped nuts and honey as far back as the eighth century before Christ, and baked it for kings. That bread, he insisted, was nothing like the leaf thin sheets of his wife's kitchen, rough and chewy as a flatbread. The Greeks, he said with a flourish, took the bread and taught it to float. It was the Greek hand that learned to roll and stretch the dough until it was thin as a leaf, and the very word for the dough, fyllo, means leaf. Then he lifted his glass, daring me to contradict him.

The name itself is a puzzle. Some say baklava came from an old Turkic word that meant to wrap or to tie, a pastry bound in layer upon layer. Others say it came along the eastern roads with the Armenian merchants, who slipped cinnamon and cloves into the nuts, which is why a Greek tray still smells of the spice caravans. Pappou did not care which. He loved that a single word, he said, could be claimed by every kitchen from the Balkans to Baghdad.

What pappou told with the most relish was the grandeur the pastry gained in the Ottoman palace. In the Topkapi kitchens baklava was made in huge copper trays, and every year on the fifteenth of Ramadan the sultan sent trays of it to the Janissary soldiers in a ceremony that came to be called the Baklava Procession. Soldiers lined up in the courtyard, each took a tray in their hands and carried it away on their shoulders. Eating baklava at the sultan's gift, the story went, was a sign that you still held his favour.

He told that part like a man who had stood in the courtyard. Dusk after the long day of the fast, the copper trays shining, the cloth lifted on a mountain of golden pastry. The drums, the lines of soldiers in tall hats, each man bending to take his tray and carrying it off high on his shoulder through the gate. The smell must have followed them all the way home. A sultan who feeds his soldiers well, pappou said, has bought their loyalty with a dessert, and a soldier who refused the tray was a soldier with something to hide.

In Greek homes it settled into feasts, weddings and Pascha, and each family hid its own small variations. Yiayia said her own grandmother made a fasting version in Lent, with olive oil in place of butter, and kept the buttered one for the day the fast broke. Orthodox Easter follows the older calendar and often falls one to five weeks after Western Easter, so the tray in that village appeared on a table long after the chocolate bunnies had been forgotten elsewhere.

Baklava had other days besides Pascha. A tray was baked for a name day, when the saint of the house is celebrated and neighbours drop in uninvited. A tray was baked for a wedding and sent to the families on both sides. A tray went across the lane to a new mother with her baby. A good baklava, yiayia said, is the tray you can carry across the village to someone who needs it, because it keeps, it travels, and it says what you cannot.

The recipe travelled home with me in a notebook stained with butter, but my kitchen had other ideas. Walnuts here did not taste as sweet, the butter was thin beside the ghee on my own shelf, and the shelf above it held cardamom, saffron, rose water and kewra, which my memory of that village kitchen could not ignore. Over a dozen trays, the baklava slowly turned into something that belonged to both places. The Greek count of the layers stayed. The clove stayed in a few pieces. Everything else became a conversation between a village in April and an Indian pantry.

This is what I make now, and it comes out the same way every time, as long as the phyllo stays damp and the syrup stays cool.

My first tray alone was a lesson in humility. The walnuts I bought were stale and bitter. The butter was too hot and cooked the sheets to leather. I tried to cut after baking, and the top exploded into a hundred shards across the counter and into my hair. The syrup, boiled with honey from the start, tasted of nothing but burnt sugar. I rang my friend that night and described the whole tragedy, and I could hear yiayia in the background asking what was so funny, and then the sound of her laughter, long and loud, travelling down the line. The message came back through my friend: do it again.

I did it again, and again. Over a dozen trays the recipe began to wander. Ghee crept in where the butter had been, because the jar on my own shelf smelled of home. Cardamom followed, then saffron. Cashews and pistachios slid in beside the walnuts, because they were what I had and because they tasted of the sweet shops of my childhood. The clove stayed in a few pieces, a small salute. The thirty three sheets I could not bring myself to change, though my tray is smaller and takes twenty four from a packet, a compromise I confess to.