Güllaç

Sheets of dried starch pastry as thin as paper, softened one by one in warm sweetened milk scented with rose water, layered with ground walnuts and finished with pomegranate seeds: güllaç is the Ramadan dessert of Istanbul, eaten after iftar in the weeks when the pastry appears in every grocer, and almost nowhere the rest of the year. The name is usually explained as güllü aş, rose food, and the dish is older than baklava in the Ottoman record; a version is described in the fourteenth-century Chinese dietary manual written for the Mongol court, and it was served at the circumcision feast of Süleyman's sons in 1539. The pastry itself, a batter of wheat starch and water dried into translucent rounds, is made by a handful of Istanbul producers, and the dessert's whole character comes from how long those sheets sit in milk.