Tradition · sweet
Jalebi
/dʒəleːbiː/
Also known as Jalēbī, Jilebi, Jilapi, Jalabi, Zalabiya, Zulbia, Zoolbia, Jerry
Jalebi is fermented flour batter piped in loops into hot fat and soaked in syrup, sold at almost every halwai's counter and eaten with rabri or curd. Its name and form descend from zalabiya, whose recipes appear in Baghdad cookbooks of the tenth and thirteenth centuries, and Hobson-Jobson derived the word from Arabic zulabiya or Persian zolbiya. It was naturalised early: a rich merchant's dinner in the Jain author Jinasura's Priyamkaranrpakatha, composed about 1450, already includes it.
- Date
- 1450–None
- Function
- Trade & production
- Material
- fermented flour batter, ghee, sugar syrup, saffron
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Norman Chevers's A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for India (1870) records 'jelabees' among the means used to poison prisoners in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit work from before 1600, the Gunyagunabodhini, gives ingredients identical to the modern recipe.
Wikipedia's article is tagged for original research. Some writers (Deccan Herald, 2013) claim an ancient Indian origin under the names kundalika or jal-vallika, reversing the direction of borrowing; Hobson-Jobson (1903) and the Arabic cookbook evidence point the other way.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueImarti
Imarti and jalebi are the same idea in different materials. Both are batter piped into hot fat and dropped into syrup, but jalebi uses refined flour and is laid down as a continuous chain of loops, while imarti uses fermented urad dal with a little rice flour and is made as single flowers, a ring with a scalloped border piped over it. Northern imartis are drained and drier. Sangeeta Khanna argues the pulse batter marks imarti as Indian in origin, unlike the jalebi from West Asia.
- TransmissionBaghdad
The earliest known recipes for jalebi's ancestor come from Baghdad. Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, a Baghdad author, compiled the tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh, the earliest known Arabic cookbook, which describes zalabiya mushabbaka as latticed fritters in discs, balls and squares, dipped in clarified honey perfumed with rose water, musk and camphor. Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi's Abbasid cookbook of 1226 has a similar dish. By about 1450 the sweet is served at a merchant's dinner in a Jain Sanskrit story written in India.
- AnalogueSamosa
Samosa and jalebi came by the same route and now travel together. Both appear in the same Baghdad book, Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq's tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh, as sanbusaj and zalabiya, and both names are Persian or Arabic. In India they became a pair: Pushpesh Pant writes that in many small towns the samosa-jalebi combination means jalapana or kaleva, breakfast or tiffin on the go, and in Pakistan jalebis are eaten with evening tea, sometimes alongside samosas.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Jalebi", "Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq" and "Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi". Henry Yule, Hobson-Jobson (ed. William Crooke, 1903), "Jelaubee". Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (2014). Dileep Padgaonkar, "Journey of the jalebi", Times of India (15 March 2010).
Open Jalebi in the repository →