Cultural History of the Ottomans by Suraiya Faroqhi

Author:Suraiya Faroqhi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857729804
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

CHAPTER 6

EATING AND DRINKING, MOSTLY FROM PRECIOUS OBJECTS

The chase after an elusive authenticity

Given the culture of nostalgia which, in the last few decades, has become part of official and semi-official ideology in Turkey, there have been many attempts to recreate Ottoman elite cuisine, considered the acme of gracious living.1 In response, a growing number of scholars are also becoming interested in food culture. Apart from edibles and beverages, interest has focused on plates, coffee cups and trays.2 However, research on all aspects of Ottoman cuisine is quite difficult: before the mid nineteenth century, cookbooks with recipes of one sort or another are few and far between; and the often fragile dishes, bowls and trays used in serving quality meals have also had a rather low survival rate.

Moreover, even if the ingredients of a given dish have been described, most authors of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuals have not quantified the ingredients which the cook would need to use. Fortunately, a few exceptions do exist: thus the text describing the 1539 festivities in honour of the circumcisions of Princes Bayezid (1525–61) and Cihangir (d. 1552), younger sons of Sultan Süleyman, does contain the amounts of rice, sugar, milk, and fat required for the dishes listed.3 But normally, whenever present-day cooks attempt to prepare a dish described in an Ottoman text, they have to interpret the information given; and frequently it is impossible to come up with a preparation reasonably close to the sixteenth- or eighteenth-century ‘original’.4

Matters are further complicated by the fact that consumers of the 1600s or even the late nineteenth century had preferences differing sharply from those of our own time. This situation is most apparent when it comes to edible fats: today much cooking is done with vegetable oil; and olive oil is very much a favourite. However, sixteenth-century consumers in Istanbul seem to have preferred clarified butter.5 Olive oil by contrast was in demand mainly for lighting and also for soap manufacture. Nor do we have good data permitting us to chart the growing consumption of olives as a foodstuff, perhaps from the 1800s. Less privileged people probably pressed whatever seeds were locally available; and as older idiomatic expressions indicate, fatty foods were considered desirable. A fifteenth-century author when describing a dish made of coarsely ground wheat suggested the use of sheep-tail fat, presumably from the Karaman sheep especially bred for their heavy fatty tails.6 Presumably present-day cooks would prefer different fats when preparing this dish for an elite clientele; and, as a result, all ‘Ottoman’ dishes cooked today are of necessity adaptations, as modern experts on Ottoman cuisine have been the first to emphasize.7

In addition, Ottoman food culture did not remain static even before the great changes of the later 1800s. Thus plants from the Americas entered Ottoman kitchen gardens from the 1600s onward, although nomenclature does not always permit us to follow their progress in an unambiguous manner. Quite commonly the names of these ‘immigrant’ plants differed from one region to the next, and may also have varied over time, as happened in the case of Indian corn or maize.

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