Title: Turkish Cuisine
Categories: Turkish Info
Yield: 1 Servings

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The Turkish cuisine owes its extraordinary diversity to the Turkish people's historical and cultural heritage. This is why it is generally acknowledged as one of the world's three greatest cuisines, along with the Chinese and French. The Turkish cuisine influenced food cultures over an area stretching from Cental Asia to Vienna, including the entire Arab world, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Regional cuisines, meanwhile, are characterised by the food products grown under different climatic conditions. This is one of the main factors distinguishing the cuisines of the Black Sea. Adana, Gaziantep and other reas of Turkey. Rumelia, or Turkey in Europe as it was known, is the area which corresponds roughly to the Balkans today. Only a small section of this region is still part of modern Turkey, but the Rumelian cuisine survives as an important subcategory of the Turkish cuisine. The Turkish word "Rumeli", literally means "Land of Rum" or "Land of the Romans", since this region was originally part of the Roman empire and its heir the Byzantine Empire. This is why in later times the word "Rum" came to refer to the Greeks.

Ramond Sokolor, the British culimary historian and writer, participates in the symposiums on world cuisines held annually in Oxford. He participated in the First Food Symposium organised in Istanbul by Fevzi Halici a few years ago and subsequently wrote an article about the influence of the Turkish cuisine on those of the Balkans. Almost all the dishes characteristic of this region, from "tel kadayif" to "borek", and regetable to meat dishes are without doubt of Turkish origin according to Sokolov. The name of Hungary's famous goulash is a corruption of the Turkish "kul asi", literally "food of soldiers". In Turkey, this dish developed literally into the more sophisticated form known as "guvec". One of the principal features of Turkish cuisine is its many ragouts, or dishes made of regetables cooked with chicken or meat to create a synthesis of two flarours.

The French gourmet, Jean-Robert Pitt, in an interwiew with Atilla Dorsay of Cumhuriyet newspaper, expressed his admiration of the Turkish cuisine and explained that the French marron glace and other confectionary were introduced from Ottoman Turkey. The Ottomans advanced westwards through the Balkans from the 14th century onwards, and sent governors to rule the Rumelian provinces. The governors took their own cooks, trained in the palace kitchens in Istanbul, with them in their retinues, and so introduced Turkishcuisine into Europe. Not only the food itself, but Turkish manners and customs too, were adopted by the local people. Of course, this was not entirely a one-way process, and a synthesis between local and Turkish dishes took place.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, many Turkish families in the Balkans migrated to Turkey, introducing the delicious Rumelian cuisine. Below are three recipes for specialities from this cuisine:

TRKNWS-L trh@aimnet.com Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish

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