THE FOOD

From the research and reading we did before our trip, and from the places we visited on our travels through Turkey, we found that there’s a definite tendency to divide Turkish food into two camps: Ottoman and Anatolian. In other words, a distinction between the food of the urban rich and the food of the rural poor. The reality, of course, is far more complicated. Turkish cooking today is an interweaving of many different but complementary strands that together create a gorgeous and vibrant culinary tapestry.

Both rural Anatolian and sophisticated Ottoman cuisines are a legacy of the country’s rich and varied history; the complex interchange and cross-fertilisation of culinary traditions and influences that have washed through the country down the centuries. Their ingredients and recipes are drawn from such diverse parts of the world as Central and Far East Asia, Persia, Arabia, the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

Irrespective of the origin of a dish, the same principles of respect and enjoyment apply to cooking and eating. As is the custom in most countries around the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, Turks enjoy taking time over their food. Families eat together rather than in shifts, as is so often the case in Western countries. Meal times are for togetherness and sharing, not for eating with one eye on the television. Food is on the table to be savoured and lingered over, rather than rushed through. And even in big, modern cities like Istanbul this attitude is still present more often than not.

Growers, sellers and consumers all share a respect for the food they eat. Turks are fussy about the quality of their food and demand that it be the best, the freshest, the most intensely flavoured. This means that produce markets are almost always limited to what is seasonally available – you won’t find expensive strawberries in Turkish market stalls in the middle of winter.

And when it comes to food preparation, the same respectful approach applies. As one Turkish food writer told us: Turkish food is not about experimentation, it is about technique – about cooking a particular dish in the time-honoured way, in the very best way you can.

Turks have no fear of simplicity either, and many dishes are pleasingly unfussy. Some of the best meals we ate on our travels were the simplest: a spanking fresh piece of turbot hot from the pan and topped with a wedge of lemon; a cold salad of wild greens braised in olive oil; a piece of white cheese accompanied by a little cube of honeycomb. In Turkey, eating is about enjoying the essential nature of an ingredient, rather than masking it with fancy sauces or garnishes. Which is not to say that Turks don’t make good use of fresh herbs and spices – but they are used judiciously, to enhance rather than overwhelm.

This simplicity is perhaps the hallmark of what we in the West know as cucina povera – the cooking of the poor. It’s a style of cooking and eating that makes the most of very little, and is typical of village – Anatolian – cooking. Until the last ten years or so, regional dishes were virtually unknown outside their place of origin, but with the constant daily influx of rural Turks into the big cities (as many as a thousand people are said to move to the capital every day) regional dishes are becoming better known. And there are increasing numbers of chefs, such as Musa Dadeverin from Istanbul’s Çiya restaurant, who recognise the importance of preserving these ancient cooking traditions in the face of the inevitable Westernisation of the food industry.

Part of the pleasure of eating in a country with a genuinely seasonal kitchen is the discovery of the different regional ingredients and dishes. Turks respect that food follows the natural rhythm of the seasons and the expectation is that produce will have been grown or reared within a few hundred metres (or at the most a kilometre or so) of their own kitchen. So it’s not unusual to find dishes that vary widely from region to region: in south-eastern Anatolia they make pilav from bulgur wheat rather than rice; along the Aegean coast baklava is made using olive oil, rather than the traditional clarified butter; and near the Black Sea bread is made from corn, rather than wheat.

As well as broad-brush regional variations, there are also endless variations from village to village. On our travels we tasted dishes in central Anatolia and in Gaziantep that our Istanbul friends had never heard of, let alone tasted. Musa Dadeverin, who travels the length and breadth of the country sourcing and recording traditional dishes, has an ever-increasing repertoire of more than a thousand recipes drawn from his research. It is said that you’re unlikely to eat the same dish in his restaurant twice in one year.

While it’s likely that some Turkish dishes can trace their origins back to the pastoral nomads that roamed the mountains and valleys of Anatolia thousands of years ago, many more have been brought to the country by successive waves of occupiers. The famous Turkish dumplings known as manti, for instance, are believed to have been brought to Turkey by the Uyghur Turks, who ventured into Anatolia in the eighth century from their kingdom, in what is now Xingjiang, northern China. The predilection for stuffing vegetables as well as pasta is a widespread feature in both cuisines today. Another shared invention was the concave iron cooking pan that the Chinese call a wok and which is known in Turkey as a çin tavasi.

Another group of Turks to bring their culinary habits to Anatolia were the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia. They were horse-riding nomads who enjoyed a meat-heavy diet of game animals such as hare and rabbit, deer, horse and camel, as well as sheep. It’s generally believed that methods of spicing, pressing and then air-drying lumps of meat hung from saddles originated with these Turks, as did the method of spearing small morsels of meat on any kind of makeshift skewer and cooking it quickly over a fierce open fire.

Fermented dairy products, such as yoghurt and cheeses, were also believed to have been brought to Anatolia by the Seljuks, as were flat breads and bulgur wheat dishes. When the ambitious Seljuks reached Persia in the eleventh century, they encountered another highly sophisticated culture and cuisine. From the Persians they learnt about combining fruit with meat – a method that survives in many Turkish yahni (stews) to this day. The Seljuks also learnt how to cultivate rice, offering the Persians bulgur wheat by way of exchange.

On their travels westward, the Seljuks took with them all the culinary lessons learnt along the way. And in Anatolia they experienced yet another new range of ingredients, such as seafood, olive oil, herbs, fruits and vegetables, quickly making them their own. This was a time of great creativity in the kitchen, producing a varied and increasingly complex cuisine.

It was a few hundred years later, though, that things really began to get interesting on the Turkish food scene – when another tribe of nomadic Turks, the Ottomans, captured Constantinople and established the most powerful and successful Islamic empire the world had ever seen. From the beginning it was clear that food was important to the Ottomans. The conquering sultan, Mehmet II, had a massive four-domed kitchen installed in his new Topkapi Palace, which was gradually extended over successive centuries to form the complex that remains today.

As well as feeding the sultan and his family, the Topkapi kitchens fed the government and cabinet ministers, foreign ambassadors and the Janissary Corps, all of whom lived within the palace grounds. On average this amounted to 5000 hungry people every day. The quantities of food prepared were staggering. Meticulously maintained kitchen records list items like ‘60,000 sheep’, ‘100,000 pigeons’, ‘2000 pounds of cloves and nutmeg’ and ‘206 pounds saffron’ – all of which were simply gathered in from the provinces by imperial command.

It hardly seems surprising that the palace kitchens were run with ruthless efficiency. At its largest, there was a team of almost 1400 specialist cooks and assistants, and specialist cooking guilds emerged, each highly protective of their own particular trade and craft.

The Ottoman Empire was vast, spanning at its height three continents, and the chefs in the palace kitchens were the beneficiaries of exciting foodstuffs that flooded into the capital every day from all corners of the empire. In what was surely a forerunner to today’s ‘fusion’ cooking, hundreds of new and exotic dishes were created in the palace kitchens, many with equally exotic names, such as Sultan’s Delight, the Imam Fainted, Ladies’ Thighs, Harem Navels and Nightingale Nests. Some were inspired by cultures that had been absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, such as Arabic and Persian; others were a legacy of the previous Seljuk reign, while others still emerged from the great melting pot of peoples that was Constantinople in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Feasts at the palace were famously lavish and extravagant. Visitors to the court would be overwhelmed by the feasting. As many as 300 dishes were presented upon exquisitely embroidered cloths and eaten from silver dishes; meals would be eaten against a background of music by the light of a thousand flickering candles. Indeed, the rituals surrounding the meal, the manner of presentation and the surroundings were almost as important as the food itself. This style of banqueting was about total surrender to sensual pleasures.

As the Roman Empire had discovered to its cost several hundred years earlier, this sort of over-indulgence can only lead to trouble in the end. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Ottoman Empire slowly declined, amid stories of madness, murder and mayhem within the palace and a gradual fragmentation of its territories.

From the nineteenth century onwards, the increasingly corrupt and inefficient Ottoman government earned itself the title ‘Sick Man of Europe’, and within the country pressure grew to implement Western-style economic and political reform. What this meant for the food scene, in the cities, at least, was the emergence of a new ‘restaurant’ culture, something almost unheard of in traditional Ottoman society. With this ‘Westernisation’, neighbourhoods such as Pera (now Beyolu) and Galata came into their own. Pera, which had always been home to the city’s minority communities and European merchant classes, now began to attract even more foreign travellers, as well as the city’s Ottoman elite who flocked there in droves to patronise new European-style cafés and eating houses. The Turkish word for restaurant, lokanta, came into use around this time, taken from the Italian word locanda, meaning inn.

Outside influence on the food itself, though, remained very limited, apart from a bit of ‘Frenchification’. When Atatürk began his reforms of the new Turkish Republic in the 1920s, the emphasis shifted back towards unification and nationalisation and ‘foreign’ foods were very definitely off the menu. To this day Turks are famously conservative in their eating habits and deeply resistant to any messing around with their traditional dishes. And who can blame them when so much of it is so good? There has been some inevitable Westernising of Turkish restaurant menus, of course; in recent times returning emigrants and new ‘workers’ in the country have brought with them their favourite items. Italian gelati, German schnitzel and the ubiquitous French fries are all commonplace now, but, thankfully, the ‘Golden Arches’ have yet to make a significant impact on the Turkish culinary landscape.

While Turks may well be determined to preserve and protect their food traditions, it seems that it is not entirely at the expense of innovation. The winds of change do seem to be blowing – or at least wafting gently – through the country’s food scene. In recent years, for instance, a small number of passionate chefs have been introducing Istanbullus to the pleasures of rural ‘peasant’ food, while still others have taken the first tentative steps towards experimenting with classic dishes and ingredients. There will always be purists who are horrified by this sort of ‘messing around’ with traditional dishes, of course, but we are all for progress and evolution in the kitchen. And, in the end, perhaps the most important culinary legacy that the Ottomans left to modern-day Turkey is the importance of taking risks and a willingness to experiment. After all, has it not been demonstrated that out of such boldness and creativity, greatness has come?