Baked Spring Rolls with Spiced Honey Nut Filling

Don't call these honey-nut rolls "easy" baklava, or, worse, "cheater's" baklava, because, really, they're not. Calling them baklava creates an expectation which cannot, and is not supposed to, be met. These rolls aren't as heavily filled with nuts as baklava; nor are they nearly as sweet and sticky. They're meant to be light, delicate, flaky, nutty, mildly sweet, and with just a tinge of warm cinnamon scent. When you bite into one, the crispy skin is shattered into shards like a brittle ancient parchment scroll in the hands of a clumsy archaeologist.

I came up with this snack on the fly years ago when finding myself in a situation wherein I needed to make a tea snack for a very culturally diverse group of 14 guests in less than an hour with nothing but what I had in the refrigerator and pantry that day. With Murphy's Law in full effect, the refrigerator at that time was, of course, as sparse as the brain cells of an average Thai soap character. I had nothing on hand but a package of popiah skins and a few things in the pantry, namely nuts, seeds, dried spices, and honey. The fact that unleavened pastry, nuts, honey, and spices hardly offend anyone regardless of their culture or faith led me to believe that this ensemble might work.


As is the case with most ad-libbed dishes, there's not an exact recipe for this. I will, however, retrace my steps for you. This snack is so easy to make that you have to really, really put in an all-out effort to destroy it in order for it to fail. Here's what I did:

While waiting for the oven to heat up to 350° F. I melted 2 sticks of salted butter and separated the stack of 5"x5" popiah skins (about 50) from each other and arranged them in a single layer on buttered cookie sheets. More melted butter was brushed on the spring roll skins. About 1 tablespoon of a mixture of 50% almond meal and 50% white sesame seeds with just a bit of ground cinnamon was sprinkled all over the surface of the buttered popiah skins. I drizzled about 2 tablespoons' worth of honey across the besprinkled wrappers and rolled up each one as tightly as I could. The scrolls are arranged, seam-side down and half an inch apart from one another, on the buttered cookie sheets. More melted butter was brushed on the tops and sides of the filled "scrolls" before they were baked for 15 minutes or until golden brown. The rolls were left to cool completely on a cooling rack, generally dusted with powdered sugar, and served.


The guests loved them. At least, the fact that these rolls were greedily consumed with nary a crumb left gave me that impression.

Well, as a risk of being self-congratulatory, I love them too.

Sure, the fact that these honey-nut rolls are delicious, well-liked by adults and kids, easy and quick to make, and stay crispy for almost a week when stored in an airtight container is already a big factor. But personally, as a philologist, the fact that these rolls resemble ancient papyrus or parchment scrolls is a much bigger factor. When I first realized what these rolls looked like, they had won me over even before I took a first bite.

Not many things in life make my heart throb like ancient writings. The Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular, hold a very special place in the seat of my soul. If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you know how much I love studying "dead" languages, especially ancient Semitic writings. You could ask me why or how this Thai girl fell breathlessly in love with languages in that family, but I would have no reasons to give you. I just love them. And precisely because I don't have a reason for loving them, there has never been a reason to fall out of love for them. Love is mysterious like that sometimes.

Personal sentiment aside, the use of honey as the main sweetener in this favorite snack of mine is also representative of something quite close to my heart, namely the studies of languages and cultures. Intercultural studies cover more ground than ancient Semitic philology. They address not merely how to reconstruct the syntax of a dead language, but also how people of different cultures and language groups relate to one another.

Uh, really? Honey? You get all that from honey?


Well, yeah. You see, at a risk of generalization, honey, a main ingredient in these crispy rolls, is one of those things that are universally adored. So it's not too much of a stretch to say that this sweet, sticky substance is what figuratively binds us together and shows us all the common threads that run through the various cultures and language groups, across geographical locations, and throughout history. While things are not always interpreted the same way universally by people from different cultures, honey is something that has a positive connotation in every culture and language group in both the literal sense and the figurative sense. Wherever flowers grow, honey is used. And though the uses may vary greatly, honey is universally considered a food item prized for its sweetening property and medicinal virtue.

According to the Hebrew sacred writings, the Israelites were led out of Egypt towards "a land flowing with milk and honey." As it is reported in said writings, the promise of the land abundant in milk and honey was reiterated all through the four decades of the Israelites schlepping stuff around in the wilderness as the Hebrews sometimes questioned whether the departure from Egypt was such a smart thing to do.

Now, lactose-intolerant individuals from non-Semitic cultures, such as many of my Thai ancestors who weren't weaned on dairy, would have a bit of a hard time understanding how a land with an abundant supply of something that could trigger gastro-intestinal distress like milk is a good thing. Had there been a deity who promised them a land flowing with animals' milk, they would probably give him/her a blank stare and perhaps a few sarcastic comments. But no, not when it comes to honey; the promise of honey they would readily understand. The love of honey and the recognition of its value, I believe, transcend cultures and times.


This has brought me to the point which I was fumbling around trying to make earlier: when I look at these honey rolls, strangely I am reminded of how years of studying different languages -- both ones that are still in use and those that have fallen out of use -- have opened my eyes to see how similar we all actually are. Ironically, it takes the studies of the linguistic and cultural differences to show me the sameness of humanity. Believe me. It makes sense.

When you set out to learn a new language, even the most linguistically-inclined among us can't help but feel intimidated by the foreignness of the script. When you look at an unfamiliar script for the first time, you swear you see nothing but a scattered bunch of disoriented bean sprouts wrestling with an army of drunk earthworms as a group of indifferent protozoa apathetically look on. Then after a few days, weeks, months, things start to make sense little by little. Soon you're no longer looking at lines, strokes, dots, and curves; you're looking at a touching poem written in Aramaic, an impassioned plea written in a cuneiform script for divine protection as a great enemy approaches the city wall, or a song of victory after a great persecution written in Paleo-Hebrew.

In much the same way, when you find yourself in a foreign country, everything looks new, different, strange, and intimidating. You sometimes feel like you're never going to understand, much less appreciate, these people and their way of thinking. But after a few days, months, years of living among them, you come to see that the sameness far exceeds the difference.

Languages and customs are man-made tools that are used as vehicles for human emotions, human stories, human thoughts, etc. The vehicles look different, but what they carry are essentially the same. Somewhere in the world, sometime in the past, a Phoenician mother sang her baby to sleep just like some mothers in Boise, Idaho, will be doing tonight. Somewhere in the world, sometime in the past, a war-bound Babylonian father whispered heart-wrenching farewell words to the family he was leaving behind just like some recently-deployed fathers from El Paso, Texas, have done. The words may have sounded different and been strung together under different grammatical rules. They may be written in different scripts. But the meanings they carry come from the same place you and I know so very intimately.

The more I study different languages and travel to different places in the world, the more I've come to see that sameness and that, despite all the external differences, it's not "you" and "I," but "we." In the midst of wiggly lines and curves of a foreign language, there's a "we" to be seen.

And that's what comes to mind when I look at these crispy honey-nut rolls.

I'd like to dedicate this post to my parents and grandparents whose love for me and whose passion for foreign languages and intercultural studies have been such a huge influence in my life.

You know how you don't have any role in choosing the people whose involvement in your childhood ends up forming the foundation of who you are and what your heart yearns for in life? I certainly didn't have any say in any of that, but somehow, I won a huge situational lottery and landed -- screaming, butt-ugly, and naked-- in the loving and welcoming arms of some of the best people who have ever graced the face of the earth, especially when it comes to language learning.

I cooed, rolled over, grew baby teeth, crawled, cruised, and was potty-trained in the home where great love for each other, insatiable curiosity about languages/cultures, and books were found in abundant plenitude. Language learning and attempts to understand the different cultures were always encouraged through different means. Resources were also generously invested -- at times at the cost of personal sacrifices -- in activities related to these things. I don't remember a time in my life when my pursuit of obscure academic fields was met with resistance or any of those study-something-useful-like-medicine-or-engineering-or-law-for-crying-out-loud! comments from my family.

What a privilege that is. I certainly didn't earn any of that. But, oh, I've never taken it for granted.


This post has been submitted to Eating Your Words hosted by Tangled Noodle and Savor the Thyme. Thanks, ladies, for creating such a fun activity!