MARKETS : Holiday Baking : Confections From the Caucasus

Village Pastry, 1414 W. Kenneth Road, Glendale, (818) 241-2521. Open Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.

You can credit Armenia’s dazzling range of pastries to the culinary borrowing that has gone on for centuries in the Near East. As armies fought to dominate the region, cooks, it would seem, were sharing recipes. Armenian bakers expanded their own delicious repertoire with such things as Turkish baklava, Persian nazuk and Russian piroshki , adapting baked goods from the invaders of their homeland and from the countries to which they later fled.

This diversity is especially evident in the Armenian bakeries that have surfaced in the past dozen years from Chatsworth to Garden Grove. Each one has built its reputation by perfecting certain specialties.

One bakery I recently visited, Village Pastry in Glendale, surprised me with an assortment of baked goods whose origins range from Iran to Russia. Village Pastry is located in the Kenneth Village shopping district in a residential community of North Glendale, and its neighbors are a small independently owned market, a butcher shop and needle work and gift boutiques. The area is a relic of small-town Americana and Village Pastry fits right in.

The bakery has installed iron ice cream parlor tables and cases filled with familiar cookies and cakes behind its ‘40s-style fieldstone facade. For nearly 14 years, since a Tehran-born baker named Artavazd Mirzayan acquired the 47-year-old bakery, Armenians have been coming in for his nazuk , chaminchov and other Armenian-style baked goods.

At 16, Mirzayan began his training at Khosrov, a shop that catered to Tehran’s Armenian community. Patrons remember its gata cakes, so delicious with morning coffee, the piroshki to accompany soups and the syrup-sweet fried pastry called zulabia , often pressed upon visitors in the rituals of Near Eastern hospitality.

For a few years after Khosrov passed away, Mirzayan had his own shop in Tehran, but the political climate soon persuaded him to move his family to New York. Working in American bakeries by day (and as a film projectionist by night), Mirzayan became familiar with American ingredients. He began to experiment with his old-country recipes, altering them to work with American products and equipment. But it wasn’t until years later that he was able to use them.

In 1978, after visiting his sons who had enrolled in Glendale College, Mirzayan realized that the Los Angeles area--which is home to the largest Armenian community outside the Armenian Republic--was a good potential market. He acquired Village Pastry and began to introduce his trademark items. Eventually his sons helped him in the business. Mirzayan died in 1989, but his wife, Janet, and son, Jon, continue to run Village Pastry as he did. Even today, the best things this bakery sells are Mirzayan’s old specialties.

SHOPPING LIST

Piroshki : These deep-fried stuffed dumplings, Russian in origin, have an unusual puffy crust that resembles an unsweetened, yeast-leavened doughnut. Village makes two piroshki fillings: one of finely diced potato and green onion and another of seasoned beef with onions and hard-cooked egg.

Gata : This flat, round Armenian coffee cake is made from two doughs. The exterior is a thin sheet of yeast-risen Danish-type pastry while the inside is sweet and cake-like.

Nazuk : Related to gata in that it uses the same two doughs, nazuk takes a very different form. The doughs are alternated in numerous layers, cut into diamond shapes and baked. The layering resembles flaky pastry--though much heavier--and the two doughs make a delicious contrast.

Badumi: Popular with Iranians as well as Armenians, badumi is made of whipped egg white, crushed almonds and a little sugar. Basically, it’s a flat almond macaroon.

Ghuraibeh : Enjoyed almost everywhere in the Near East, these melt-in-your-mouth cookies coated with powdered sugar come in a variety of shapes. The one that tastes best to me is cut on the diagonal from a log of dough and is garnished with a single pistachio nut.

Mekado : Another double-textured pastry, mekado is a lightly sweetened raisin cake sandwiched between two thin sheets of waffle cookie and cut into tiny squares.

Chaminchov : This finely textured pound cake is sparsely studded with dainty midget raisins and chopped walnuts.

Armenian-style raisin cookies: Dried fruit, especially dates and raisins, are often-used ingredients in Armenian desserts. These slightly sweet butter cookies, studded with tiny raisins almost the size of currants, are good to have on hand for unexpected visitors who, in the Middle East, would always be regaled with treats no matter how unexpected the visit.

Pashka : At Easter, Village Pastry bakes pashka , a yeast-raised sweet loaf that closely resembles panettone. Rich with eggs and baked in the shape of a cylinder with a dome-like top, pashka is flavored with orange peel that the bakery candies according to a family recipe. They decorate the bread by draping the dome with a thin sheet of marzipan or with sugar sprinkles. (A word about pashka. The Russian name for this kind of cake is kulich ; in Russia, pashka does not refer to the cake but to the sweetened fresh cheese that always accompanies it.)

Zulabia : These swirls of deep-fried yeast dough soaked in sugar syrup flavored with rose and orange-blossom water are thought to be of Persian origin. India’s jilebi is a close relative. Because Armenians are so fond of it, Village Pastry procures zulabia from another source to sell in the shop.

Bamieh : Another deep-fried Persian confection, this time in the form of syrup-soaked doughnut-like fritters. Bamieh’s shape resembles okra, from which the pastries get their name.

Persian-style baklava: Unlike the multilayered crisp Turkish or Greek-style baklava that is most familiar to Americans, the Persian rendition is a layer of chopped nuts wedged between two very thin crispy crusts and bathed in sugar syrup. The result is somewhat like a moist nut tart.

Berog: The best way to describe this Armenian pastry would be to compare it to Linzer tart. Apricot jam is spread on a rich cookie dough and topped with a lattice pattern made from the crust dough.

In addition to Village Bakery, a number of other Armenian bakeries have earned enviable reputations for their wares. Every Armenian, it seems, knows that the best, flakiest baklava comes from Panos Zetlian, whose shop in Lebanon was renowned. His Panos Pastry shops (4945 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 661-0335; 418 S. Central Ave., Glendale, (818) 502-0549) also turn out spectacular versions of the shredded-wheat-like kataif pastries rich with butter, abundant with nuts and scented with rose or orange-flower water. Chocolate is another of Panos’ passions, and his truffles and bonbons are wonderful.

Sasoun (5114 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 661-1868) excels in choereg , a yeast-raised bun that Armenians love with tea or morning coffee. Its heady perfume comes from the crushed kernels of cherry pits. Boereg , the shop’s other specialty, are triangles of perfect short pastry brimming with cheese or with lemon-and-olive-oil-seasoned spinach.

In Reseda, Avo’s Bakery (77410 Reseda Blvd., (818) 774-1053) makes exquisite Armenian cookies and is especially noted for its ghuraibeh-- a sweet, buttery cookie filled with chopped nuts and embossed with ornate designs.

Hagop Danian’s Bakery (1108 N. Kenmore St., Hollywood, (213) 664-8842) has the best Armenian-style pizza, called lahmajun . Look for the tiny building painted with the words “1 Uncle Jack’s Meat Pies.”