I once had a friend who was Armenian. By faith, she was an Armenian Orthodox but, there being none of those churches in our corner of Western Washington, she settled for the Episcopal Church. And that is how I came to know her.

For potlucks, she would prepare a wonderful dish of nuts and walnuts and sugar and way too much better, nestled between sheets of fillo dough. She insisted, in her staunch Armenian way, that this was "paklava" and defended that pronunciation against those foolish enough to suggest that she had made "baklava" -- which, she explained patiently, was a poor Greek imitation of the original Armenian dish.

What reminded me of her was the dish I prepared earlier this week -- Mughlai Murg Dum Biryani. As I told (bragged to) people about this dish, some lucky recipient of my culinary bulletin told me that this is a Persian (Iranian) dish. "Whoa," sez I, "I am working on expanding my East Indian cooking skills, not my (nonexistent) Persian ones."

Sure enough! The word "biryani" is of Persian origin, meaning something like "fried", and apparently migrated to India ... or was it the other way around? Or is this just another Armenian dish about which my friend forgot to tell me?