Jalebi Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Present-day jalebi is a sweet made by piping a wheat-flour batter into hot oil in a spiral, frying it, and then steeping it in sugar syrup. Centered on North India, it has long been served at festivals and religious occasions and enjoyed as a street sweet. In the record, the confection settles into India in the medieval period — around the fifteenth century.

The ingredients themselves are old. Wheat and sugar are both long-established Old World foods, on hand early in the kitchens of North India. What binds these ingredients into a sweet is the sequence of piping the batter into a spiral, frying it, and steeping it in syrup.

The sweet did not arise in India on its own; it was carried in from West Asia. The prototype was a fried sweet known in the medieval Islamic world as zalabiya or zolbiya, brought to the Indian subcontinent along with Persian culture. It took hold amid the cultural traffic from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal era, and the name jalebi itself derives from the Arabic zulabiya and the Persian zolbiya.

Jalebi's history comes into focus by following the oldest records. The fried sweet that was its forerunner appears as zalabiya in the tenth-century Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. This is the earliest known record of it.

After that the trail breaks off: through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the link between tenth-century West Asia and fifteenth-century India has yet to turn up. A cookbook of the same title compiled in Baghdad in 1226, the Kitab al-Tabikh of al-Baghdadi, is often offered as the piece that closes the gap, but A. J. Arberry's complete translation of that book carries no entry for zalabiya. The English-language Wikipedia article 'Zalabiyeh' places recipes for zalabiya in two forms, plain and latticed (zalabiya mushabbaka), in al-Warraq's tenth-century book, and says the batter was originally poured through a coconut shell.

In India, the Priyamkara-nrpa-katha of around 1450, by Jinasura, carries one of the earliest mentions of jalebi, and the Gunyagunabodhini, a Sanskrit cookbook written before 1600, sets down the same ingredients and method as present-day jalebi. The glossary Hobson-Jobson (1903) traces the name jalebi to the Arabic zulabiya and the Persian zolbiya. The first record lies in tenth-century Baghdad, the Indian record begins some five centuries later, and the name itself was borrowed from Arabic and Persian: the sweet travelled from west to east.

Some hold that jalebi is a native Indian sweet, descended from ancient Indian spiral sweets called kundalika and jalavallika. The text in which those two names appear, however, is not ancient. As the Indian food historian P. K. Gode showed in a 1943 paper, both names occur in that same Sanskrit cookbook, the Gunyagunabodhini (its surviving manuscript is dated 1678): after describing how jalebi is made, it adds that the sweet goes by the name kundalika, and in some places jalavallika. Both are other names for jalebi itself. Gode read jalavallika as a Sanskritized form of jalebi, a word that comes from the Arabic zalābiya, and wrote that he knew of no earlier description of the dish in any Sanskrit treatise. He also pointed out that jilabi is absent from a thirteenth-century list of foods from Maharashtra. No source has been put forward that records either name as an ancient sweet, and Gode's findings rule out the idea that these were jalebi's ancient forerunners. They do not touch the age of fried sweets as a genre in India.

Another claim makes jalebi Turkish in origin. It spread in recent years from a spoken remark by a diplomat, with no historical source attached. The oldest record lies in the tenth-century Arabic cookbook from Baghdad, and no source or material evidence shows the sweet being made in Turkey before then. Turkey is one of the lands into which zalabiya spread, and there is no ground for treating it as a separate birthplace.