The Sweet Life : The Palace Confectioners

The Turks have a saying about themselves: “Say hello to the Turk, and don’t worry about what you’re going to eat” ( Turke bir selam ver , yiyecegini dusunme ).

This refers to hospitality, of course--the whole Near East is devoted to showering the guest with food--but it also refers to the high quality of Turkish cookery. It may be immodest of the Turks to point this out, but nearly everything they cook they do outstandingly well. I’ve traveled in half a dozen Near Eastern countries, and while they all had delightful cuisines, only in Turkey were people truly persnickety about food.

Just catch sight of a big-time Istanbul chef and you’ll get an idea of what’s going on. They’re like battlefield commanders--they have the most impressive bearing and wear the tallest toques of any chefs in the world. If you were working for one of these guys, you really wouldn’t want to make a mistake.

Their traditions go back to the court of the Ottoman Empire, because more than half the chefs in Istanbul restaurants are descended from palace chefs. The Ottoman court was single-mindedly dedicated to eating well. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Topkapi Palace employed literally hundreds of cooks in its 10 double kitchens. Two of the kitchens made nothing but confectionery.

There were so many palace confectioners, in fact, and their position was so distinguished, that they had their own mosque. They wore a special uniform that included a roughly conical white hat. Appropriately, it looked just like a sugar loaf, the form in which sugar was sold until the invention of granulated sugar.

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Some of the sweets they made were Ottoman interpretations of old Near Eastern standards, such as the saffron-tinted Persian rice dish zerde . Most, however, were new creations, reflecting the cultural richness of the melting pot that was 16th-Century Istanbul, where, by design, half the inhabitants were representatives of the non-Turkish groups living in the Ottoman Empire. These new sweets can often be recognized by their whimsical names, such as dilber dudagi (“lips of the heart-breaker”).

As in Europe, the cookery of the court influenced the whole country. Turkish aristocrats tried to play in the same leagues as the palace so that they might be able to invite members of the court, or even the sultan himself, to dinner. Of course, they had to impress everybody else they had over to dinner too, and gradually Turkish dishes such as baklava spread throughout the empire.

But the center of gastronomy was always Istanbul. Even as late as 80 years ago, when the Ottoman Empire was the exhausted “Sick Man of Europe,” the great houses of Istanbul typically employed two specialists in the kitchen who did nothing but make filo dough. One made filo only for the little pies called boreks , and the other made an ever-so-slightly different variety for baklava.

That’s persnickety, and that’s the attitude that has made Turkey a paradise for sweets-lovers.