The Ottoman had three different types of sweets: pastries, milked custards and fruit desserts plus the baklava.

Basic ingredients of the latter were the wafer-thin leaves of dough, butter, sugar and honey together with cream and any of the crushed hazelnuts, walnuts or pistachios.

All baklava sorts are oven-baked. Women from the Black Sea region offer baklava instead of candies to you during your holiday greeting visit and whisper to you while pushing the baklava platter toward you that she had prepared it from sixty leaves of dough. Imagine that this figure may go up to as high seventy or eighty.

The milky sweets are plain milk custard, oven-baked milk custard, milk custard with rice, milk custard with rice flour, custard with chicken and attared rice-flour dish.

Milk custard with rice flour preceded the dessert procession in the special dinner tables as its oven-baked version and custard with chicken were made for a long time by confectionaries. The attared rice-flour dish is the chief dessert during Rhamadan. Its ingredients came from local shops and the housewives cooked it in milk and served it with cream atop. It’s debatable to say know how many people are still able to prepare it today.

Yet the gourmets are still unable to resist to milk custard with rice flour. It was the most favoured dessert of late Vehbi Koç and my father, two of the last true Ottomans. Unfortunately, all these dishes gradually go into oblivion since our tables have begun to reflect the menus of foreign restaurants and the famous meatbread of Konya converted itself into Italy’s pizza.

The most renowned dessert of the Ottoman tables was, however, the aşure, that we may literally render into decachyle. It was a ceremonial dessert, generally prepared between the tenth and twentieth days of Muharrem, the first month of the lunar year. It is also claimed that this time bracket has to do with the Kerbela incident.

Rumour has it that the last meal concocted in the Noah’s Ark at the end of the flood contained forty different ingredients that were the last remnants of the supplies. The same forty ingredients are known to be put into the huge saucepans of the Ottoman houses while verses from Koran were chanted.

A part of the end-product was then distributed to neighbours.

There are other histories regarding this brew. The tenth day of Muharrem is said to be the day when Adam and Eve had met and the first aşure was cooked to commemorate this day.

There are those that deny it and say that it was a dessert designed to express the gratitude of Adam and Eve to God that had later forgiven them after their dispatch to the Earth because of Adam’s unpermitted presentation of the famous apple to Eve,

We like, however, this delicious but difficult-to-make dish as the dessert par excellence rather than an amnestic. Concoction. May God benedict he who engineered the recipe.