Ottoman cuisine is the cuisine of the Ottoman Empire and its continuation in the cuisines of Turkey, the Balkans (including Hungary, Romania and Moldova), the Caucasus, the Middle East and Northern Africa.
Sources The Ottoman palace kitchen registers (matbah-i amire defterleri) are important primary sources for studies of early modern Ottoman cuisine containing information on ingredients and names of food dishes cooked by the palace kitchens.
Many cookbooks were published beginning in the 19th century reflecting the cultural fusions that characterized the rich cuisine of Istanbul's elites in the Late Ottoman period as new ingredients like tomatoes became widely available. There are few extant recipe collections before this era.
The earliest Ottoman cookbook is credited to Muhammad Shirvânî's 15th-century expansion of the earlier Arabic Kitab al-Tabikh by Muhammad bin Hasan al-Baghdadi.
Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, the earliest comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages, is frequently used as a source for early Turkic food terminology and culinary practices, although such evidence must be interpreted cautiously when applied to later and geographically distant contexts.
History
Development Ottoman cuisine developed through long-term interaction among culinary traditions associated with Central Asia, the Persian and Arab region, Byzantine, and the empire's Balkan and Anatolian territories. Scholars of Ottoman food history have emphasized exchange, adaptation, and regional variation rather than a single line of culinary influence. After 1492, Ottoman foodways were also affected by the gradual adoption of ingredients that spread through the Columbian Exchange. Maxime Rodinson argued that, when similar dishes appear in both eastern and western traditions, historians must first determine whether they may share "a common, parallel origin in Graeco-Roman cooking" before attributing them to one-way oriental influence, since, according to Rodinson, Latin Europe, Islam and the Byzantine Empire all shared elements inherited from antiquity.Rodinson, Maxime. "Venice and the Spice Trade," in Rodinson, Maxime, and Charles Perry. Medieval Arab Cookery: Papers by Maxime Rodinson and Charles Perry with a Reprint of a Baghdad Cookery Book (2006). p. 204 This type of "mutual exchange and enrichment" is a typical feature of culinary history.Fragner, 3
The Seljuk-era foodways of the Turkic tribes were influenced by the cultures they had encountered during their migrations from the Altay Mountains to Anatolia, including Persian cuisine.
New ingredients Ottoman trade introduced new ingredients to the empire's regional cuisines, contributing to the evolving, unique character of Ottoman foodways. Levantine cuisine was enriched by the new ingredients from Asia and the Americas. Fernand Braudel credits the Ottomans with introducing rice, sesame and maize to the region.
Although tomatoes had entered the cuisine by the 1690s, they are not found in the few recipe manuscripts that survive from the 18th century. Ayşe Fahriye has recipes for both green tomatoes (kavata) and red tomatoes (domates) in Ev Kadını. Some of the recipes like tomato pilaf and dolma are still common in modern Turkish cuisine. Fahriye's 1882 cookbook is the last mention of green tomatoes in Ottoman cooking. Mehmet Kamil's influential 1844 manuscript includes recipes for tomato stew, stuffed tomato dolma and tomato pilaf.
Diffusion The court cuisine was diffused through the provinces by Ottoman officials.
The influence of Ottoman cuisine in Europe beginning in the early 16th century is seen in dishes like sharbat, which spread first to Italy after Franceso I de'Medici requested a recipe for "Turkish sorbette" in 1577. Rice pudding, described in contemporaneous sources as "Turkish-style rice", was served at the wedding of Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara in 1529. Similar to the Western-style confection nougat, koz halva is found in the cuisines of Central Europe, where it is called ('Turkish honey') in Hungarian, and in Austria and southern Germany.
Characteristics
The Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, representing a wide range of climate zones and flora and fauna, and so the cuisine includes not only the cuisine of the Ottoman palace, but a rich diversity of regional specialties.
Böreks and pastries The iconic Ottoman stuffed pastry börek may be related to the triangular sanbusak pastries of Safavid cuisine. The cognate term senbuse appears in Turkish sources as early as the 13th century, becoming corrupted as samsa (Samsa are often associated with Uzbek cuisine.).
The term "börek" does not appear in Kashgari's dictionary but two recipes for pirak are recorded in the 14th-century Yinshan Zhengyao, a Chinese cookery manuscript from the Mongol Yuan era. The description of Danishmend Gazi's wedding feast in Danishmendname mentions both samsa and "well-buttered böreks".
Ottoman banquets in the 19th century served a mix of alafranga and alaturca foods. At these dinners, börek was sometimes replaced by the similar French pastry, or .
The pastry boyoz (etymologically linked to the Spanish bollos meaning "small loaves") may date to the arrival of Sephardic Jews in 1492. In modern times the pastry is found mainly in the city of Izmir where it represents the cultural heritage and contributions of Ottoman Jews.
Bread
Bread was made with wheat and classified according to the quality and origin of the flour. Istanbul's demand for grain could not be met by local production alone and it received shipments from the Thracian coastlands, western Anatolia, Dobruja, Macedonia and Thessaly.
Many types of bread were baked in the palace kitchens—flat white bread (), loaves of good quality whole wheat () and white bread () and filo (). The addition of seeds like sesame and aniseed, or spices like cloves, was considered a luxury. Evliya Çelebi noted "the fine white Mudejar francala bread", referring to the European-style bread baked by the Mudéjar in Galata.
Lapa, keşkek and other Ottoman porridge dishes were less expensive alternatives to white bread.
Desserts
Sugar was still prohibitively costly in the 17th century; far more common were honey and syrups like pekmez, made with grapes.
The wheat berry pudding aşure, in modern times a part of the Islamic holy day Ashura, has roots in the harvest rituals of the Neolithic period, since which time domesticated wheat is known to have been cultivated at Karaca Dağ.
There are multiple competing theories of the origin of baklava, variously ascribing it to the Ancient Roman placenta cake, Persian lauzinaj or the influence of Central Asian desserts, found also in the milky layered dessert güllaç. Dernschwam describes a baklava-like dish made by cooking thin wafers of starch flour and egg white, then filling with layers of sugared nuts with rosewater and nutmeg to create a dessert about as thick as a finger.
Dernschwam describes zerde as rice pudding that is cooked in honeyed water and colored with saffron, garnished with toasted almonds and served with fruits. Muhallebi is also listed among the foods Dernschwam encountered on his travels.
Visiting Europeans noted with interest the Ottoman manner of serving sweet dishes between other courses, instead of at the end of the meal as the custom was in France and other European countries. German army officer Helmuth von Moltke whilst serving in the Ottoman Empire noted the unusual presentation of courses with the sweet courses served between roasts and other savory dishes. Edward Lear's account of a banquet in Ottoman Albania similarly notes the unexpected order of courses, roast meats followed by honeyed pastries, fruits followed by shellfish, savory and salted meats and stews followed by chocolate, and so on, he says, innumerable courses were served in confounding permutations of sweet, sour and salty combinations.
Dolma
Dolma were made by stuffing whole fruits and vegetables, or by wrapping leaves around a filling, either minced meat or spiced pilaf.
Dernschwam described a stuffed vegetable dish of young gourds and aubergines (which he calls ), stuffed with cubed mutton and garlic filling, and served with yogurt. He also describes the dish called sarma as stuffed vine leaves cooked with lamb and sour plums.
Drinks
Coffeehouses developed first in the Ottoman Empire and spread to Italy, then across Europe. There were coffeehouses, sharbat shops and bozahanes around the port of Galata where imported coffee, sugar and other colonial goods arrived to Istanbul in the 18th century. Bozahanes were one of the most popular public hangouts in 15th- and 16th-century Bursa until overshadowed by the coffeehouses in the 17th centuries. These were lucrative businesses that generated tax revenue and rent.
Thomas Smith mentions boza in the 17th-century Epistola de moribus ac institutis Tucarum: "They also have other liquors peculiar to them of which I shall only mention Bozza made from millet."
Fish
Jean de Thévenot described the fish market of Galata in the 17th century:
The most beautiful fish market in the world is located on the marina, on a street where fish shops occupy both sides, offering large quantities of fish of all varieties...The Greeks run many taverns/cabarets in Galata, where they attract many rascals...
Anchovies were a favorite in the coastal city of Trabzon. One of the many dishes recorded by Evliya Çelebi in his Book of Travels (Seyahatnâme) is an anchovy dish from Trebizond. Cooked in a stoneware pan, the anchovies are arranged in rows and covered with a cinnamon and black pepper scented mixture of leeks, celery, parsley and onions. The vegetable and fish layers alternate to fill up the pan, and olive oil is poured over the top. Çelebi described the dish as "like congealed light, and one who eats it is full of light ... This fish is indeed a table from heaven".
Fruits, nuts and seeds
Many different fruits and nuts are recorded in the palace records.These are pistachios, hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, almonds, pine nuts, cherries, raisins, figs, plums, grapes, apricots, lemons, oranges, citron, tangerines, apples, pomegranates, pears, red currants, dates, peaches, melons, strawberries, watermelons, figs Pomegranates were sourced from villages around the Marmara Sea. Üsküdar's fields and meadows had been converted to vineyards by the end of the 16th century. Oranges were not introduced until the 18th century, tangerines even later. Bananas, pineapples and other tropical fruits are not mentioned in any known records from the 19th-century imperial kitchens.
Fruits were used to make sharbat and compotes. Sugar was too expensive for all but the wealthiest members of Ottoman society, and desserts, compotes and sharbat were more likely to be sweetened with dry fruits, molasses or honey. There were hundreds of shops in 17th-century Istanbul specializing in preparations of the Ottoman-style compote hoşaf, often taken at the end of a meal.
Cakes and bread with poppy seed filling had been consumed in Byzantium since Roman times, a tradition that continued under the Ottoman Turks, entering Central European cuisine and the related culinary culture of Ashkenazi Jews.
Meat dishes
Kebabs, mantı, köfte, pastırma and yahni are types of meat dishes associated with Ottoman cuisine. Evliya Çelebi describes shish kebab on skewers and meat slow-cooked in tandoor ovens. He says there were hundreds of stalls in the city of Istanbul selling kebabs and kofta.
Ottoman kebabs were slow-cooked in their own juices in earthenware casseroles (çömlek) or tandoor ovens. The recipe named "as the Turk likes it" from Hungarian noblewoman Anna Bornemisza's collection uses this technique: