By Rachel Bennett ~
Aroning amidst and around kitchens old-world, around which history is the center of tables where family, memory, and taste converge, the world is being courted by Türkiye beyond hunger—she’s courting it to a tale. Daughter of geography-crafting and history-child, perfected by centuries of hand-tried Turkish cuisine, laps up its own tough world spotlight, with every kind of foodie trendy in.
Turkish cuisine dinner is a sentimental one, why?
From Empire to Plate: The Birth of Turkish Cuisine
Turkish cuisine is a luxurious brocade of Balkan, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian flavor. It owes a deep debt to the three-continent Ottoman Empire and syncretism of the other cuisines present in its palace kitchens.
It’s a hometown and restaurant institution anywhere throughout all of Türkiye, whose home cooking is as far from olive oil-soaked Aegean seaside town eating as it is from brimstone-sweltering city heat island stews throughout southeast Türkiye like Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep. Turkish food hates excess nearly as much as it hates restraint, and to novelty ingredients always are too much. And by eating it, the eater puts himself into identification with the food and the people who prepared it and with the ground on which it grew.
The Irresistible Allure of Kebab Culture
And and if that one dish to which world food glory of Türkiye can be attributed is any, then that dish is kebab. And to refer it as a “grilled meat” is injustice to world variety and culinary diversification of the dish. Crunchy little Adana kebab, Turkish in the south, calls its name, but ubiquitously found döner kebab, spit-roasted and shaved to wrap or plate, is Berlin street food to Bangkok’s.
In Turkey, the kebab is a ritual meal—a meal eaten al fresco outdoors. Women and men hunch over sputtering meat plates, black vegetables, smoldering naan bread, and pungent cacık (cucumber-and-yogurt dip). It’s food ceremony disguised as repartee, guffaws, and communing.
In order to be able to live life as such for its own sake in all its variation from inside out, however, most of them visit street-level ocakbaşı restaurants where individuals eat off brazier coal boil among them and watch their meals cooked before their very eyes—a sideshow tacked on afterward after supper.
Vegetarian Delights: A Bounty Beyond Meat
Even with hegemony of meat threatened, there remains vegetable food in Turkey. Meze culture—its entire snacking culture and sequence of miniaturized courses—is a vegetable banquet of such delicate morsels as grape leaves filled with rice (yaprak sarma), eggplant paste (baba ghanoush), and chickpea hummus.
Seasonal Mediterranean greens roasted to perfection and chilled to paradise. To be Mediterranean and the equivalent of new and strict. Smart to be vegan and veggie without extra sweetener, the dishes instill rural roots of Türkiye and strict respect for richness of country.
Sweet Symbols of Turkish Hospitality
Turkish sweets are not sweets but gestures of hospitality. You are calling a guest into someone’s home, sealing an agreement, or sealing an end-of-the-day dinner and you know you are going to get a baklava, a masterpiece of unparalleled loveliness constructed out of fried filo, pistachio dinner, and honey syrup, or lokum—or Turkish delight.
These modest offerings from family-owned businesses are no longer at the nadir of fare of senses anymore. They’re full of manners and culture, twin pillar of strength of Turkish cuisine. Turkish cities like Gaziantep cities viz., gastronomy city endorsed by UNESCO have been famous for an unbroken thousand-year-long tradition of baklava production—passed on ad infinitum from master chef to master chef all the way through to these newer times.
And the more sophisticated, aristocratic name for Turkish food, the higher the exotic credentials in the gastronomic capital of the world. The Turkish restaurant is perched at the corner of almost every London, New York, and Sydney street, and from wood-fired pide-style pizzas through slow-cooked stewing lamb and creamy buttery meze spreads to indulge in, there’s everything in between.
They employ Turkish-trained cooks or old-fashioned-trained cooks and thereby achieve an authenticity and an heritage for the served. Human beings are so drawn to such flavors not for some other purpose, but for heritage. And with food, naturally, history—and with Turkish food, every meal a page in rich, decadent history.
More Than a Meal—A Living Tradition
Turkey’s food, simple and honest, survives because it expands without losing from time. It’s bridge food, a salute to stranger of the years, a tongue in which food is something greater than the thing it is. It’s identity. It’s memory. It’s celebration.
