Lawzīnaj (Almond-Paste Pastry Lozenges)

History

*Lawzīnaj* (لوزينج) takes its name from *lawz*, the Arabic word for almond, which is the confection's defining ingredient. Al-Baghdadi's 1226 receipt rolls a very thin pastry — like the dough used for *sanbūsaj*, and the thinner the better — around a paste of ground almonds and sugar kneaded with rosewater. The sheet is folded and cut into small lozenges, fried in fresh sesame oil, *shīraj*, drenched in rosewater syrup, *julāb*, and strewn with finely ground pistachio.

That matches the sweet's wider medieval profile: ground almonds, sugar or honey, rosewater and a thin dough, often finished with pistachio. It was among the most celebrated sweets of the medieval Arab-Muslim table.

Whether it stands at the head of the baklava family is less settled than it is often made to sound. Some readers take the drenched variant, *lawzīnaj mugharraq*, as an early step toward it, while the layered filo baklava proper is generally traced to later, Ottoman kitchens rather than to al-Baghdadi's lozenges. That link is best held loosely.

Two things have been removed from this note, for different reasons. An earlier version put four praise-names for the sweet in quotation marks, with nobody credited for any of them — no speaker, no source, nothing to check against. Those are gone. It also quoted a judgement about baklava from a named living scholar; that one we could not check because the reference works carrying it are behind paywalls we could not open, and it should be restored in his own words as soon as anyone can reach them. What remains about the sweet's standing among medieval confections we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1 raṭl sugar
• 1/3 raṭl peeled almonds
• rose water
• thin rolled bread
• sesame oil
• rose-water syrup
• pistachios

Instructions

1. Grind a raṭl of sugar and a third of a raṭl of peeled almonds fine, mix, and knead into a paste with rose water.
2. Take thin rolled bread like sanbūsaj dough (the thinner the better) and spread out a round.
3. Put the almond-sugar paste on it, fold like a strap, cut into small pieces, and arrange them.
4. Pour fresh sesame oil over as needed, then flood with rose-water syrup (jullāb) enriched with rose water.
5. Strew finely pounded pistachios on top.