Words: Kate Leahy / Photos: John Lee

Everyone thinks they know what baklava is. Before writing this book, I thought I did. Still, if John's Earth-shattering lavash experience could set in motion the idea for this book, baklava confirmed that Armenia had more surprises in store.

In college, spurred by a fascination on how my Armenian-American friends always seemed to talk more about food than anyone else I knew, I spent my senior year writing a thesis on the link between food and Armenian-American cultural identity. This meant that along with taking a deep-dive into the history of Armenians in America, I read every Armenian-American community cookbook available through interlibrary loans and visited Armenian church bazaars, where volunteers were quick to point out the particulars of the food, including the baklava. First, the layers of filo, clarified butter, and walnuts are sweetened with a simple sugar-water syrup, not honey, making it less sweet and sticky than other types of baklava. And second, it's spelled with a "p," not a "b."

With this baklava (paklava) information still locked in my memory years later, I was thrown off by a pastry we sampled after wandering around Tatev Monastery, a striking UNESCO heritage site in the southern part of Armenia perched next to a cliff.

Before leaving the village of Tatev by gondola (which is how tourists avoid a slow, windy drive around a gorge), we stopped at a cafe for tea and baklava. What arrived was a flakey, buttery, not-too-sweet pastry filled with walnuts that miraculously held in place. Rather than sticky, the diamond-shaped pieces were firm enough to pick up by hand and eaten. I couldn't discern exactly what was in the filling, either.

The cafe owner clarified that the filling was made up of beaten egg whites and sugar in the style of baklava that's always made in this part of Armenia. I looked at Ara and John—we knew we needed this recipe for this book. Thanks to the patient step-by-step instruction from Goris resident Anahit Badalyan (pictured below), the next day we got it.

It's still one of my favorite recipes in this book, not only because it's a clever way to use eggs efficiently—yolks for the dough and to glaze the top, egg whites for the filling, with no extra yolk or white left—but also because it's a reminder that even when you think you think you know about a subject, there's always more to the story.

This recipe and others can be found in our cookbook Lavash