'THE WHOLE MARA LEAVENED'

Mara was in fact a kind of pastry baked in Strasbourg. Its recipe has long been forgotten in modern Alsace, but the memory of it lives on in Bulgaria, albeit in a modified form.

In the 17th century French travellers passed through the Bulgarian lands on their way to Constantinople. They had a few portions of mara with them to present to the sultan in the hope he would grant them permission to cross the Ottoman Empire and reach India.

The French stopped at Plovdiv. They liked it so much that they decided to abandon the idea of the Far East and settle in the Bulgarian lands. The first people they met were Bulgarian patisseriers, and a rapid professional exchange followed.

The Bulgarian büreks, banichki, and baklavichki were not bad, but came nowhere near the Alsatian mara. This is why the Bulgarians asked the French to share the recipe for that fine French pastry with them, and the Frenchmen gladly did.

However, with telltale Gallic duplicity, they "omitted" the most important instruction: that for a mara to be really good, it had to be well leavened. As a result, the mara the Bulgarian patisseriers made was a failure, and no different to the usual marmalade roll. Subsequently, it would die away (some linguists suggest that another idiom "to make a fool of one's self like a marmalade roll baker" is related to the mara incident, but this is a topic for another discussion).

At present, "the whole mara leavened" means that contrary to expectations, nothing is in order. It can be translated in English as "to put the cart in front of the horse" or "to be all dressed up and have no place to go."