loukoumades

Ancient Athenians made honey-soaked fried cakes for festivals, a practice described by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae as common at Athenian religious celebrations citing earlier sources. These ancient cakes had no fixed name that survived into the modern language, and the word loukoumades arrived much later. The Turkish word lokma, from Arabic luqma meaning a morsel, entered Greek as loukoumas during five centuries of Ottoman rule, giving an old practice a new name. The ancient food and the Ottoman word met in the same kitchen.

Greek absorbed lokma as loukoumas (singular) and loukoumades (plural), the -ades suffix being a standard Greek masculine plural formation. The convergence of two nearly identical traditions reinforced rather than displaced the existing practice, and the result is a dessert whose name is bilingual even if the food looks like one thing. Sufi lodges in Ottoman Istanbul distributed lokma as ritual charity, and Greek communities observed this too. The fritter carried both a culinary and a devotional meaning into Greek.

By the nineteenth century, loukoumades were street food in Athens and Piraeus, sold from small carts by vendors who fried to order over charcoal. European travelers arriving after Greek independence in 1829 noted them as cheap and everywhere, a sweet fried ball soaked in honey that cost almost nothing and appeared on every corner. The food survived Ottoman departure, independence, the World Wars, and the junta. It is one of the few Greek sweets that remained continuously street-sold rather than migrating to pastry shops.

Modern loukoumades vendors in Athens still fry in public, though the charcoal has been replaced by gas and the honey sometimes by chocolate sauce or Nutella. In Melbourne, Sydney, and Chicago, Greek-Australian and Greek-American vendors sell them at community festivals under the same name, spelled loukoumades on English menus. The word has traveled far enough that it now appears in English dictionaries as an English food word. That crossing is one very few Greek pastry names have made.