Talk:Lokma

Size

Size? --Menchi (Talk)â 03:44, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

you choose the size. not smaller than 4-5 cm. Optim 04:02, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Origin

I am pretty sure that this is a Turkish sweet (although it may well be available in Greece as well). Can anyone confirm this?

As with many aspects of shared Greek/Turkish culture, it depends on who you ask. It seems to have already been common in both Greek and Turkish communities under the Ottomans, so people argue about which community invented it, or whether it already existed in Byzantine times, or whether it was borrowed from the Arabs instead, etc., etc. --Delirium 06:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

The Oxford Companion to Food discusses lokma/loukouma in its jalebi article. They are also known in Iran as zulabiya and are given to poor people at Ramadan (a custom that also exists in Turkey for Lokma -- is there anything parallel in Greece? I don't know). The name lokma itself, as documented in the article, is Arabic, and the OCF reports that "some believe that the somewhat similar [to jalebi] Arabic luqmat el qadi... may be the original version". The name jalebi also apparently ultimately comes from Arabic zalabiya, but my Arabic dictionary lists zalaabiyah as just 'a kind of doughnut' and doesn't refer it to an Arabic root. This, then, is one of those foods found all the way from the Balkans to India (documented in 1450) via Anatolia, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent (al-Baghdadi describes them in the 13th century), and Iran. As a guess, I'd think its origins are probably somewhere in the central area (Levant or Persia), but I don't have any sources supporting that. Then there are sfingi and zeppole.... --Macrakis 14:40, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

--I don't know who does the thinking or research for these kinds of articles but obviously you need to up your game. These pastries were served as a prize for ancient Olympians, the rough translation is honey tokens, which is where the English born Cypriots and Greek derived the name honey balls . Considering the ancient origin, Turks were not around yet and were still Mongols. The Origin is clearly from ancient Greece. You can research Callimachus, a Greek poet who details this in some text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.8.224.245 (talk) 17:43, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

This may be true but needs a reliable source -- can you cite the passage in Callimachus and ideally a secondary source confirming the interpretation? What name did he use? Surely not "loukoumades". And what Greek name means "honey balls"? Are you perhaps conflating loukoumades with melomakarona? (though "makarona" doesn't mean balls, either). --Macrakis (talk) 19:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

I have cited the relevant passage from Callimachus. Frankly, I find the cake he mentions less-promising as a candidate than enkris, for which I have also added quotations and references, but to avoid WP:No Original Research, I have avoided making any claims to that effect, because I can't find it stated in any secondary sources. Jpbrenna (talk) 19:40, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

Sfingi and zeppole

Resolved

The redirect from sfinges comes here. Shouldn't go to zeppole? I don't know how to change it, or I would. 76.215.2.140 23:51, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

According to a quick google search I would say you are correct. I'll fix the redirect. Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 13:54, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Issues

This page is sort of all over the place. The reader is bombarded with tons of different spellings and other language equivalents so it is hard to distinguish what they are. I think the article should be "Loukoumades" since that is the most common English name. Before I edited it a little, it had a definite Turkish pov, that hopefully I made more neutral. What do people think? Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 20:24, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

I seriously disagree with the title of the article. Although it is good that you removed the Turkish bias while reediting it, the title now shows Greek bias. We have to find a solution for that, and I propose a return to "Lokma". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.104.147.59 (talk) 12:21, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

There cannot be a return to "Lokma" because the page was never named that. It was originally "Loukoumas" the singular of "Loukoumades", but moved to "Loukoumades" since that is the most common name in English, not a Greek bias. Grk1011/Stephen (talk) 12:25, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Well a "kabob" is more common in English than a Kebab as well, I do not think that constitutes a valid pretext. --Emir Ali Enç (talk) 12:28, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, general Wikipedia policy is to use the most common English name, but that is hard to determine. Sometimes it is possible to use Google or Google Books to help with things like this, but that's always a delicate exercise. I really don't care what the article is called.... The "pox on both your houses" solution is to merge with jalebi, and normally I would advocate mergers like this -- indeed the Oxford Companion to Food puts them all under jalebi -- but I think the South Asian jalebi is too different from the Ottoman-world lokma/loukouma/zalabiya/etc. --macrakis (talk) 04:23, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes I gotta agree with that one. According to my researches Jalebi is the ancestor behind all of them... Have you heard about the dessert in Turkey and Syria named "Zülbiye" (Zelbiyyé) may be realso related to Zelabia (all of them fried) in the Maghreb... ARGH... NAMES!! :D --Emir Ali Enç (talk) 14:16, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Transliteration

I moved the page to Lukumades but this was undone (as some other pages) by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dr.K. .

Even in the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Greek it states the following. Loukoumades is not the right way to write it, it just reinforces the wrong transliteration and spelling and also pronounciation (people pronounce it always wrong with the form Loukoumades (because this is not a scientific article, the form Lukumades should be used instead of the wrong form Loukoumades).

I feel bad because Dr. K doesn't understand this, even though he should.GreekAlex (talk) 07:23, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Biblical Reference

The book of Exodus and Numbers are written in Biblical Hebrew, not Modern Greek. The references here are to manna, not fried dough. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.229.243.132 (talk) 19:54, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Old page history

Some old page history that used to be at the title "Lokma" is now at Talk:Lokma/Old history. Graham87 16:20, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

9th Century

The article currently states "Lokma is first described as part of Turkish cuisine in the 9th century Kara-Khanid Khanate" and references "Ahmed Cavid, Tercüme-i Kenzü'l-İştiha, eds. Seyit Ali Kahraman, Priscilla Mary Işın, İstanbul:Kitap Yayınevi, 2006, 22, 98". I don't have access to that source, but I find this statement dubious, as one of those authors, Priscilla Mary Işın, contradicts this here [1]. Also, Nisanyan gives the 16th century as the earliest attestation in Turkish, [2]. Unless someone can provide an insight to the source, or some other explanation, I plan to revise the article accordingly. --IamNotU (talk) 01:45, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Awameh

Fyi, I've done a WP:BLANKANDREDIRECT from the article Awameh ([3]) to this one per the talk page discussion Talk:Awameh#Proposed merge with Lokma. It seems uncontroversial since it's just another word for the same food, is already described in this article, and the other article was a stub. None of its contents were copied here. --IamNotU (talk) 15:49, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Callimachus, "honey tokens", and the Olympics

I've removed yet again some content (and copyright violations) added by 67.85.246.66 (talk) from Brooklyn, and reinstated by 2a02:587:4418:4e70:7902:91d0:fb5:1231 (talk) from Athens with different sources. It talks about loukoumades being the earliest pastries ever written about, and being awarded as prizes to the victors of the first Olympic games, supposedly based on a description by Callimachus of charisioi or so-called "honey tokens". This story can be found on a number of dubious blogs, bakery websites, and similar places. This may be in part Wikipedia's fault, since it has been added to (and removed from) this article repeatedly over more than a decade (see e.g. this 2008 edit: [4] by a Toronto IP, a day after this unsourced Toronto blog post: [5]). However, I'm not able to find any scholarly reliable source that supports this assertion.

I removed one citation of a translation of writings attributed to Catullus and Tibullus, who are not the same person as Callimachus. I also removed a citation (and copypaste) of a 1995 recipe article by Vicki C. Glaros, published in the Washington Post: [6] that made these claims, and seems likely to be the source of many similar ones. Although the Washington Post is usually considered a reliable source, there are so many problems with that article that it clearly can't be considered reliable. They include:

• The author, Glaros, isn't an authority or expert on food history – or, it would seem, on anything at all. I can find no other evidence of her writing any other published material.
• I can find no evidence that Callimachus wrote about charisioi or their purported use in the Olympics. There is one fragment of his writing, a sentence that refers to some type of cake of grain sweetened with honey, that was sacrificed to the gods: ἐν δὲ θεοῖσιν ἐπὶ φλογὶ καιέμεν ὄμπας en dé theoísin epí flogí kaiémen ómpas [7], but nothing about the Olympics, charisioi, awards, nor anything that could be translated as "honey tokens".
• I can find no evidence (online) of any use of the phrase "honey token" in this sense, prior to the publication of the Washington Post article.
• I can find no evidence that Callimachus wrote anything refered to as "The Vigil", though it's possible I missed something. There is "The Vigil of Venus" (in the cited translation: [8]), which is often attributed to Cattulus (not Callimachus), but I can find nothing in it that refers to honey, pastries, etc. In that same source, in a section on the writing of Tibullus, there is on page 126 a reference to "cates (delicacies) sweetened with Arcadian honey", but again, nothing about prizes in the Olympics, etc.
• There are ancient references to charisioi (Χαρίσια) cakes, also known as niketeria for example by Athenaeus, who cites Eubulus, describing some sort of cake that was given as an award to people who participated in an all-night dance ritual: [9], and notes that "the winners were glad to get them" ([10]]), which would seem to be the source that Glaros misquotes as "the athletes were delighted to get them" and mis-attributes to Callimachus.

Above all, the combination of grain and honey has been known since prehistoric times, with literally thousands of different traditions, preparations, and recipes. I can see no reasonable direct connection to be made between vague mentions of such foods in ancient texts and the dish named luqmat al-qādi, yeast-leavened deep-fried balls of dough with honey, that appears in the historical record sometime between the 10th and 13th centuries. --IamNotU (talk) 02:29, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Pinging Macrakis, who was the first to revert speculation about charisioi / χαρίσιοι being the same thing as loukoumades, oh-so-many years ago: [11]. The Athens IP who is citing all the blogs doesn't seem to get WP:BRD, may need some help here... --IamNotU (talk) 03:44, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Lokma

It is known as kaimati in East Africa especially in Kenya and Tanzania. Shape and texture are largely the same. More information about the East African "kaimati" can be added or had from the internet. There is much information under kaimati. 2400:2411:81C2:A600:6410:CAC3:9CA4:AE67 (talk) 06:18, 24 June 2023 (UTC)