Istanbul Borek

Boreks are a family of Near Eastern filled pastries, so popular that at one time in Istanbul there were thousands of borek shops—many more than there were bakeries. The name seems to derive from the Turkish bobreg, meaning “kidney,” a possible reference to one of the shapes of this pastry. Another indication of the importance of this pastry is a fourteenth-century Persian poem by Boshaq al Atameh, which describes a battle between the borek and the pilaf, personified as two