Mysteries of Ottoman Cuisine

OTTOMAN MEALS 

Until the reign of Emporer Murat II, father of Mohammed the Conqueror, the meals were simple and varieties were rare in both the imperial and popular tables. The development of the Ottoman cuisine actually began when Murat II ascended to the throne.

The Ottoman meals are known to begin always with a broth. Deemed to be healthy foods the broths were concocted with beef or chicken stock, yoghurt, fish stock, to which were added rice, parched wheat, ground minestrone, dried or fresh vegetables and roots. As such, the stomach was being conditioned for the courses to follow.

The wedding, yoghurt, minestrone and vegetable soups were considered as premium components particularly of the brunches.

Since the broths and bread were the mainstays of the table, taste in the former was perforce a precondition.

When mention is made of soups, it is not easy to put an end to it. The industrious ladies of those days easily exceed a hundred when they begin to cite the names of various soups.

One evidence of the soup’s importance among Ottoman of the may be found in the worries of mothers and grandmothers for not being able to marry away the family’s young daughter “who couldn’t cook a decent soup”. The advice given to the daughters who did not share this belief was:

What good to a dumb bead the words do, what good to a plain soup the spices do, what good to the family a spinster does.

MEAT COURSES

Red meats like mutton, lamb and veal, white ones like fish and fowl were the building blocks of the homemade meals. Some of these meats, seasoned with tomato paste, onions and garlic, were cooked for a long time over a slow fire while the kebabs and meatballs were prepared in pans or grills and consumed together with pastes of local vegetables, pickles, green salads and yoghurt. Eggplant salad, fried potatoes, shish kebab and swirling kebab were definitely brought to the table together with tomatoes and peppers.

The meats cooked in a brazier, terracotta bowl or jug and in a pit filled with hot ashes were followed according to the general practice by a pilaf.

Importance of dishes of fowl and game should not be minimised. Among the ambroses of the dinner invitations were the circassian chicken and filled Turkey.

Bluefish, pelamide, mullet, plaice, sole, mackerel and bream caught in the Marmara Sea, turbot from the Black Sea and anchovies which are prepared in an untold number of ways plus chippers from the Aegean were among the elites of the sea foods.

The fish in fried, grilled, boiled, smoked, baker and steamed forms were among the much appreciated health foods and much sought- after by the gourmet. They were frequently demanded also by the Ottoman emperors. As for the read meats, the kebabs of Mara?, Adana and Urfa origin had later penetrated into the entire country. Such new dishes as pureed eggplant royal, imam’s, choice, priest’s kebab, circassian chicken and lady’s thing had begun to embellish the tables and those that seek the excellence in life had developed a preference for tastier foods. Thus grew the fame of the Ottoman kitchen.

Naturally, the dishes that I cited above are but a fraction of what this kitchen had up in its sleeve. Various local dishes of seafood also joined the long list. Fish and other products from lakes and rivers were hot late in joining the bandwagon.

The part of the geography, seasons and climate of this country may certainly not be denied in this culinary wealth.

Shrimps in their pane, salad, pilaf and grilled forms are still among us.

Yet everyone knows that the anchovy, fish with which are infatuated the Black Sea people, outdistanced all other fish species with its fried, grilled, baked, souped, stewed, steamed, smoked and salted versions.

AS FOR THE PILAFS

The pilaf types, accompanying majority of meat dishes and such dried vegetable as white beans, were made of rice, parched wheat and couscous. It comes in plain, tomatoed, almonded, pistachioed, raisined, chicpeaed, eggplanted and chickened versions.

These dishes originated from the Ottoman, and particularly from the palace kitchen. The rice pilafs changed according to the rice species and were offered in the wedding ceremonies together with safflower dessert.

Pilaf is an indispensable food not only of the Ottomans, but also of the entire Turkish world.

The adept Ottoman women were brewing 27 different types of pilafs in their kitchens. The wedding, betrothal and noodle pilafs are but a few that jump into the mind just to begin.

VEGETABLES

The Ottoman tables bore an incredible wealth in hot and cold vegetable dishes. Beans to the list, followed by eggplants with its more than 40 varieties. Tomatoes, bell peppers, cabbage, okra, squash, marshmallow, artichoke, carrot, spinach, cauliflower, celery, asparagus, purslane, artichoke, leek… There probably many others that I forgot.

Among the dried vegetables were the broad beans, okras, speckled and white beans, lentils, peas and chickpeas.

Those cooked with meats of these vegetables used to come to the table first while their brethren with olive oil awaited their turn in the fly-netted kitchen cupboards.

PASTAS

The pastas of the Ottoman cuisine, an unfathomable subject to study, may be divided into doughs, fritters and sweets. The first two are generally warm dishes, baked either in an oven or on a frying pan. Between the leaves of dough are spread ground meat, various cheeses or spinach. They were among the indispensable foods of Rhamadan tables. The dough leaves were used to be prepared in those day at homes with the help of thin wooden rollers. The trays of fritters were used to be sent to a local bakery if there was not an oven in the house.

The best of frying pan pastas was the so-called cigarette rolls, with a scraped cheddar fill. They were much appreciated, especially in the drinking tables.

The fritters with cheese, spinach, ground meat and milk were used even as the sole dish, but then always with a diluted yoghurt beverage.

The syruped fruits or cider, a wonderful beverage made at home from the juices of several fruits, were frequently encountered in the Rhamadan tables to accompany the pastas.

AND OTTOMAN DESSERTS

The Ottoman had three different types of sweets: pastries, milked custards and fruit desserts plus the baklava.Basic ingredients of the latter were the wafer-thin leaves of dough, butter, sugar and honey together with cream and any of the crushed hazelnuts, walnuts or pistachios.

All baklava sorts are oven-baked. Women from the Black Sea region offer baklava instead of candies to you during your holiday greeting visit and whisper to you while pushing the baklava platter toward you that she had prepared it from sixty leaves of dough. Imagine that this figure may go up to as high seventy or eighty.

The milky sweets are plain milk custard, oven-baked milk custard, milk custard with rice, milk custard with rice flour, custard with chicken and attared rice-flour dish.

Milk custard with rice flour preceded the dessert procession in the special dinner tables as its oven-baked version and custard with chicken were made for a long time by confectionaries. The attared rice-flour dish is the chief dessert during Rhamadan. Its ingredients came from local shops and the housewives cooked it in milk and served it with cream atop. It’s debatable to say know how many people are still able to prepare it today.

Yet the gourmets are still unable to resist to milk custard with rice flour. It was the most favoured dessert of late Vehbi Ko? and my father, two of the last true Ottomans. Unfortunately, all these dishes gradually go into oblivion since our tables have begun to reflect the menus of foreign restaurants and the famous meatbread of Konya converted itself into Italy’s pizza.

The most renowned dessert of the Ottoman tables was, however, the a?ure, that we may literally render into decachyle. It was a ceremonial dessert, generally prepared between the tenth and twentieth days of Muharrem, the first month of the lunar year. It is also claimed that this time bracket has to do with the Kerbela incident.

Rumour has it that the last meal concocted in the Noah’s Ark at the end of the flood contained forty different ingredients that were the last remnants of the supplies. The same forty ingredients are known to be put into the huge saucepans of the Ottoman houses while verses from Koran were chanted.

A part of the end-product was then distributed to neighbours.

There are other histories regarding this brew. The tenth day of Muharrem is said to be the day when Adam and Eve had met and the first a?ure was cooked to commemorate this day.

There are those that deny it and say that it was a dessert designed to express the gratitude of Adam and Eve to God that had later forgiven them after their dispatch to the Earth because of Adam’s unpermitted presentation of the famous apple to Eve,

We like, however, this delicious but difficult-to-make dish as the dessert par excellence rather than an amnestic. Concoction. May God benedict he who engineered the recipe.

HALVAS

The basic ingredients of halvas are flour or semolina, fat, sugar, milk and cream.

The Ottoman house used to prepare one of the halva varieties and distribute it to relatives, acquaintances and neighbours when a birth or death occurred in the house, a male went off for military duty, someone returned from pilgrimage, a child began to go to school, upon graduation, during the udolithanies, in the yoghurt festivities (when lambs are weaned) and during saffron celebrations (when the first saffron appears in springtime.)

COFFEE RITUAL

No matter which meal was involved, coffee constituted an indispensable finish. It had a certain importance also in the daily life and had their own anecdotes, expressions and traditions.

Coffee fad, coffee peddlar, divination in coffee dregs, coffee cup and the dicton of “one cup of coffee entails forty years of affinity.”

The types of coffee were bitter, sweet, medium-sugared-quasi-sugared.

Depending on the time of the day, brewing was different. The morning coffee had two forms. The first was the one taken as soon as one got up in the morning and the other followed the brunch. Sometimes milk was added to them.

A cup of coffee go get rid of the fatigue, to divine from the dregs, to help gossiping among the women, to accompany the breaks in the work and to act as the final of a dinner.

In the Turkish traditions, one would normally extend the invitation for a meal by saying: “Please come and have a cup of coffee with us.” The occasional get-togethers of coffee fads produced slogans such as “tobacco with the coffee, a mixture pleasing thee.”

Let’s not forget, however, those preferring tea to coffee following a meal:The tea a very wise man discovered, two in the morning, one before the bed.”

BREAD AND YONDER

The bread was a bliss formerly baked at home ovens in cooperation with the neighbouring ladies in certain days of the week. It is certain that a meal without bread in an Ottoman table was imagined.

It use to be concocted with wheat, rye or maize flour or bran and acquired such forms as loaf, pitta, pumpernickel, flatbread, roll and muffin.

The cornflour bread of the Black Sea region and the baguettes of Istanbul were deemed to be the refined types. Needless to say, the time plays around with our bread and changes its shape and content. For example, the pitta is something we see only during the Rhamadan.

When the Ottoman began to become influenced by the Western life, changes occurred also in baking the bread and the bakery bread gradually replaced its home-baked counterpart.

The former was first not appreciated by the women. They even scorned it at first and disdained those buying bakery bread during their coffeeklatsches.

Ladies switching to bakery bread expressed their joy by these verses:

Barns became now palaces, now same are all classes. Gone to grocer’s shop now the bread is, Hunger’s grip will now all of us squeeze.

Of course, the hunger will not do anything of this sort to us. Being an indispensable foodstuff the bread will surely and certainly continue embellishing our tables with all its taste and grace.

Therefore, let’s place the sliced bread piles on the table, and go on with our chat regarding the Ottoman kitchen.