The Ottoman Kitchen: Modern Recipes from Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Lebanon, Syria and beyond

by Sarah Woodward, Jan Baldwin (Illustrator)

Nowhere has there ever been a city more famous for its bazaars than Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey. Standing at the gateway from Europe to the East, the once-fabled Byzantine capital became the center of the vast Ottoman Empire, which at the height of its glory spread East–West from Baghdad to Tripoli and North–South from Budapest to Cairo. Every Ottoman city was a shopping center, and as early as the sixteenth century Western travelers wrote of the glories of the bazaars across the Eastern Mediterranean and from beyond. The Ottoman Kitchen explores the culinary traditions of the region, and offers a collection of practical recipes for up-to-date versions of classic dishes. Interwoven with illuminating tales of history and culture, over 100 photographs are featured—stunning recipe pictures and evocative location shots of modern-day life. Much-traveled recipes include the luscious pastry baklava from Armenia; the egg and lemon sauce known to the Greeks as avgolémono, with its Byzantine origin; and the boregs or pastries for which the Turks have long been famous, modeled on the dumplings of Mongolia and China from where the Turkic tribes came west. Then there are the dishes, such as Circassian chickena and Albanian liver, whose very names denote their origins. This is food that was brought together in the bazaar and perfected and refined in the palace kitchens of the Ottoman sultans. One of the earliest exponents of fusion cooking, the Ottomans elaborated and refined the culinary traditions of the entire Eastern Mediterranean region to create one of the world’s greatest, and most eclectic, cuisines.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Food

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Marleene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall, this was a bit if a disappointment despite the fabulous photographs which generously illustrate the text.
The recipes seemed well selected, but lost some authenticity with instructions to use "1 lb canned cannelloni beans" for example, in a recipe called "Beans with Sesame". I would have preferred to see the author encourage cooking from dried beans with a note that one could use the canned variety with a sacrifice in flavor.
I would have also liked to see the Turkish names (or Greek, Arabic etc) consistently presented with the English titles, which is useful if one wants to cross reference or actually travels to the country of origin.
The bread chapter was very stingy and gave only two recipes - "lahmacun" and "gozleme". Surely there are more breads than these two throughout the Ottoman region, especially as the author reminds the reader to soak up the sauce with bread.
And while it is certainly not the author's fault, the general page layout and font used by the publisher left the reader struggling to separate ingredients, instructions, and personal introductions from each other. It all seemed to just run together.

[Farah · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked the brief history in the beginning of the book about the ottoman empire and the food. when i first seen the title i was thinking there will be recipes from the ottoman empire with modern twist, but i was surprised by the author saying that she is not sure whether the recipes were made like this during that time but she tried her best to get the authentic recipes made by regions that were under the ottoman rules.
i liked the recipes. yogurt and dried mint are used alot