Turkish Cuisine : Most of What We Know As Middle Eastern Food Originated In Istanbul

What do Americans know about Turkish cuisine? Practically nothing. In the film “Midnight Express,” a character described the local food he’d eaten in Istanbul as “crap,” and American audiences didn’t laugh the movie off the screen.

They would have if they’d ever actually been in Istanbul. The former capital of the Ottoman Empire is remarkable for the high standard of its restaurant food. Istanbul happens to be a city where you’d actually have to work to find a bad meal.

It has always been a home of sophisticated dining. For nearly 500 years it was the capital of the vast Ottoman Empire, and for more than 1,000 years before that the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The finest ingredients of an empire always flowed there. Even today, an Istanbul shop owner would never dare insult his customers by offering produce out of season or any but the freshest fish, and a little hole-in-the-wall delicatessen may stock 15 or 20 varieties of Turkish honey, bottled and in the comb, often identified by the villages it came from.

In terms of refinement of cooking technique, there are those who rank Turkish cuisine with French and Chinese. Before World War I, any self-respecting great house in Istanbul employed not one but two specialists to made the pastry we call filo. One made it only for the miniature pies called borek ; the other made only a more delicate variety suitable for baklava.

The Turks are, in fact, a food-obsessed people. Their most famous mystical poet, the founder of the Mevlevi Dervishes, mentions scores of dishes in his works (including the eggplant dish imam bayildi). A Mevlevi postulant was required to spend three days in the kitchen of a tekke (Sufi monastery), observing the disciplined workings of the kitchen staff from a cubbyhole, before he could be considered for initiation into the order.

Most of what we know as Middle Eastern food originated in Istanbul: the elaborate shish kebab repertoire, the stuffed vegetables ( dolmas ), complicated eggplant dishes such as musakka , filo pastries . It is fitting that Turkish dishes are held in common by Arabs, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Armenians, because these dishes were invented by a cosmopolitan society.

When Sultan Mehmet I conquered Constantinople in 1453, he saw it as the future capital of a world empire and decided to repopulate it accordingly. Half the population of the metropolis would be Turks; the rest would be people of other nationalities. That is, people from nations either already ruled by the Ottoman Turks or, as Mehmet saw it, destined to be.

He offered them the chance to rise with the new world capital, he lured them in with free land and tax breaks, and when that wasn’t enough he simply had people kidnaped to fulfill the quota. Within a couple of years, the streets of the newly renamed city of Istanbul were thronged with Turks, Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Circassians, Armenians and many more--even Russians, Italians and Frenchmen. Numbers of Spanish Jews, fleeing the Inquisition, made their new home in Istanbul.

Nations that had scarcely heard of each other were in daily contact now. It was probably the greatest experience of culture shock before our century. Within a generation, a distinct new Ottoman style had arisen in all the decorative arts. At the same time, a new cuisine was invented at the royal palace in Istanbul, one that had absorbed literally countless elements from other cultures.

Everyone who visits the Topkapi Palace gets a glimpse of its 10 large kitchens. They employed so many hundreds of men that the confectioners had their own mosque, separate from the mosque used by the cooks. It was probably in these kitchens that some forgotten pastry chef came up with the idea of taking yufka , the traditional tortilla of the nomadic Central Asian Turks, and stretching it paper-thin, thereby inventing filo.

We still enjoy the blessings of those vast palace kitchens, because 80% of the chefs in Istanbul are descended from palace chefs. What you eat in Istanbul today is an unbroken tradition from the cookery of the sultans. That’s what people should have been shouting at the screen during “Midnight Express.”