qatṭā’if (often pronounced ’aṭāyif in modern Arabic) is a crepe of considerable antiquity—the name may come from an Aramaic verb meaning “to make dough.” Today the qaṭā’if might be made like a Western crepe, but the traditional technique is to knead a stiff, leavened dough and then work in enough water so that it can either be rolled out thin or used as a batter or a dough.
The oldest qaṭā’if, typically fried and then rolled around a filling of nuts, appear in a tenth-century cookbook from the court of the Abbasid caliphs. A sweet called khushkanānaj min qaṭā’if maqlī (a cookie made from stuffed crepes) was made by frying a crepe just long enough to stiffen one side, with the upper side remaining tacky, so that it could be folded around a nut filling, sealed shut, and deep-fried. This sweet may have been a recent invention, because in North Africa it was called “Abbasid qaṭā’if.” It is still made in Arab countries; the Turks call it dolma kadayıf.
Later cookbooks added new recipes, such as a stack of crepes (abū lāsh) and jamāliyya, a deep-fried pastry made by sealing two crepes together around a filling. There was already confusion between qaṭā’if and thin baked or griddled flatbreads. In an unrecorded process, a pastry wrapper in the form of vermicelli-like threads evolved around the thirteenth century, the Arabs calling it by an old flatbread name, kunāfa, and the Persians, Turks, and Greeks by forms of qaṭā’if (respectively ghatāyef, kadayif, and kadaïfi).
Today, both the half-cooked crepes and the vermicelli-like product are usually bought from pastry shops and stuffed at home. The usual filling for both is sweetened ground nuts, but clotted cream and white cheese are also used. When the filling is cheese, the Turks refer to the vermicelli-like version as künefe, a form of the Arabic name kunāfa.
See also middle east; nuts; pancake; persia; and turkey.