Dip your spoon in to Om Ali—a golden, bread pudding-like dessert, lush and creamy with warm milk, and studded with golden raisins and pistachios—in any restaurant or cafe in Doha, Qatar, and you might not stop to think anything besides this is possibly one of the best desserts in existence. The recipe could not be more simple, nor more perfect. Puff pastry, milk, sugar, cream, and a smattering of nuts and raisins and/or other dried fruits are thrown into an oven and served golden brown.

Qatar, one of the smallest countries of the Gulf States, shares dessert traditions with the rest of the Arabic countries of the region. Even as the country of Qatar rushes headlong into futuristic green energy architecture and planning, this ancient dessert hailing from lower Egypt can be found at cafes and fancy hotels. Q-explorer Qatari guide Abdullah Mohammed told me “you can even eat it for breakfast.”

But, like many famous dishes, the conception of the recipe is hotly disputed—and uncovering the over-the-top true crime element of one of the three competing origin stories is a real thrill ride. All three stories refer back to the name of the dish—“mother” (om) of Ali, her son. (Thanks to the patriarchy, the woman who created the dessert never gets her full name written down in the annals of history.)

One tale follows a humble path of an old lady (who happens to have a son named Ali) in a poor village in the Nile Delta, where a sultan in the 13th century with obvious imperiousness asked for something to eat when he passed through this particular village while on a hunt. Scrambling for something worthy of a sultan, the old lady mixed together whatever she had on hand, and the sultan found it as melt-in-the-mouth delicious as the current day versions, and made it famous upon his return to the city—naming it after the mother of Ali.

When she allegedly murdered her second husband for taking another wife, his first wife—the purported Om Ali of dessert fame, who was thrown over at Al-Durr's behest—allegedly bribed some maids to murder her in the hammam by beating her to death with their shoes.

A more Ceirsei Lannister-bent story, with more windy plot twists than an episode of Game of Thrones, also lays claim to the dessert's origin story: Life and death stakes combined with a Great British Bake Off turn.