Cuisine

Turkish

Türk mutfağı

A Turkish breakfast can last until lunch because it is a spread, not a plated course: cheese, olives, egg, bread, tomato, honey. The rest of the day is wheat, grill and yoghurt. Adana kebab is hand-minced, chilli-seasoned lamb on a wide skewer, grilled over charcoal so the fat drips and flares. Baklava is phyllo, nuts and a syrup that should soak without turning the pastry soggy. Cacık is yoghurt, cucumber, garlic and mint or dill. Ezme is a sharp, fine chop of tomato, pepper and chilli.

Central Asian nomadic grilling and dairy, Byzantine vegetable and bread work, Armenian, Kurdish, Greek, Arab and Ottoman palace kitchens all feed the modern table. National Turkish restaurant food abroad often means Adana or döner plus baklava. Inland Anatolian cooking — pulses, peppers, wheat dumplings, slow meat — is a related regional kitchen that does not map cleanly onto a flag. Menemen, lahmacun, mantı and imam bayıldı are widely cooked and widely argued. The country is large enough that Black Sea corn bread and southeastern chilli-and-pomegranate cooking do not taste like the same dinner.

Ocakbaşı grilling is live fire and minced or cubed meat. Yoghurt cools and salts. Eggplant is fried, stuffed or stewed. Pide and lahmacun are doughs baked with topping, not interchangeable pizzas. Adana kebab should taste of lamb and chilli, not of a generic mixed-grill spice. Baklava wants thin layers and a clean syrup. Turkish cooking overlaps Levantine mezze and Greek oil-and-yoghurt plates. Anatolian inland pulses are not a rural footnote to Istanbul restaurant grill.