Muhallebi (milk pudding)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

   Greetings from New York City...There's a new video screen (news, trivia,
ads) above baggage claim at JFK airport.  Under New York City trivia, it said
that "the Big Apple" was little used before it was popularized by Charles
Gillett in 1970.  (Note to Jesse Sheidlower: I wrote several letters to the
NY Times about Gillett's shameful 1995 obituary.  There was no correction.
Ask the obituary writer James Barron if he has a single citation where Damon
Runyon popularized/used "Big Apple.")
   Upon further review, neither "meyhanes" (Turkish "tavernas") nor "menemen"
is in the OED...That Turkish keyboard kept changing on me.

MUHALLEBI (MILK PUDDING)
   OED has no entry for "muhallebi."  The revised OED has "milk pudding" from
only  1865.
   I picked up CORNUCOPIA (TURKEY FOR CONNOISSEURS), Issue 26, Volume 5 2002,
pg. 101:

_THE MILKY WAY_
SIMPLE, SMOOTH AND SOOTHING, THEY SATISFY THE CHILD IN EVERYONE.  BUT MILK
PUDDINGS CAN ALSO BE GORGEOUSLY SOPHISTICATED.  BERRIN TOROLSAN REVIVES THE
STARS OF ISTANBUL'S VANISHING PUDDING SHOPS
 (Photo caption--ed.) WATER MUHALLEBI LIBERRALLY SPRINKLED WITH ROSEWATER AND
ICING SUGAR

Pg. 102, col. 1:
   In a way these shops are as much a part of Istanbul life as cafes are in
Vienna, though the food and the concepts are entirely different, and there is
not the same panache, of course.  These simple shops offer only one
specialty: milk puddings.  Called _muhallebici_, they are pudding shops--milk
parlours, if you like--and they operate quite separately from restaurants and
patisseries.
   _Muhallebi_ is a sweet, milk-based cream, thickened only with starch
(unlike custards and creme patissiere, it contains no eggs), and it is a
familiar dish from the Crimea to North Africa, from the Balkans to India.
Even the name varies little from place to place.  Only in Europe is it
unknown, or perhaps forgotten.
   In Turkey _muhallebi_ forms part of everyone's diet, from babies to
grandmothers, for it is wonderfully nourishing.

Pg. 102, col. 2:
   The first mention of the dish as a dessert dates from 1473, when the
imperial kitchen accounts of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror record
that he and his retinue were served _muhallebi_.  This is the very same dish
that we know today.  But _muhallebi_ was not always such a simple affair.
Medieval Arab cookery books give recipes for a dish of the same name that was
a complicated confection of milk, rice, almonds, saffron and chicken breast
or other meat.  This bears a striking resemblance tp the medieval English
_blancmanger_.