Cheese-filled knafeh is much younger than its thousand-year legend suggests
A popular tale says knafeh was invented to fill the stomachs of fasting caliphs during Ramadan, a story written down as early as the 10th century. Yet the melting-cheese version now famous across the Levant leaves no trace in the records before the 19th century. Earlier recipes were stuffed with nuts.
Knafeh is a dessert of spun or semolina pastry layered with cheese and drenched in sugar syrup, loved across Egypt and the Levant and often eaten on holidays and during Ramadan. The word's origin is argued over: it might come from a Coptic term for a bread or cake, or from an Arabic root meaning to flank or enclose. It turns up early in One Thousand and One Nights.
The legend is set either in Fatimid Egypt or in Umayyad Damascus, where confectioners supposedly made it for the caliph Mu'awiya I. A 10th-century cookbook of Abbasid court dishes never mentions it, though a 13th-century Andalusian and Maghrebi collection describes knafeh as a pancake thinner than qatayif, sometimes layered with fresh cheese and finished with honey and rose syrup. In Mamluk Damascus a market inspector rode the streets at night checking the quality of Ramadan sweets. Later cooks learned to drip batter through a perforated container onto hot metal, producing the familiar hair-thin strands.
Historian Mary Isin notes that 18th-century Turkish and Damascene recipes used nuts as filling. Food historian Daniel Newman points to an 1885 Beirut cookbook by Khalil Khattar Sarkis as the earliest documented cheese-filled version, one of four knafeh recipes it gives. The Palestinian city of Nablus later became the dish's capital: knafeh Nabulseyeh uses the city's firm, salty white cheese under a single layer of pastry, is cooked upside down and flipped, and is often eaten in pita for breakfast.
Variants abound. Gaza's version swaps cheese for nutmeg, cinnamon and nuts; Turkey's Hatay künefe gained protected status from the EU in 2012; and the viral Dubai chocolate bar, filled with kadayif and pistachio, was first sold under the pun Can't Get Knafeh Of It. In 2009 Nablus set a Guinness record with a knafeh 74 metres long weighing 1,765 kg.
Source: Knafeh
