Turkey
An empire's worth of cooking on one table — meze by the Bosphorus, kebabs off the coals, endless breakfast.
Start with breakfast, because in Turkey it's a banquet: a table crowded edge to edge with white cheese and olives, honey still on the comb, tomatoes and cucumber, warm bread and endless tulip-shaped glasses of tea. Nobody rushes. Later, in a Bosphorus meyhane, the meze arrive the same way — a slow parade of small cold plates, stuffed vine leaves, smoky aubergine, white beans in oil — chased with aniseed rakı as the ferries slide past.
Then there's the fire. Down south in Gaziantep and Adana the kebab is a serious craft, minced lamb pressed onto flat skewers and grilled over charcoal, eaten with blistered peppers and a fold of bread. This is a country that ran an empire on its cooking and never lost the recipes — pistachio-layered baklava, yoghurt stirred into everything, the cart selling warm simit at dawn. Eat slowly, order too much, and let someone press one more thing on you.
- Adana kebab
- meze
- pide (Turkish flatbread)
- mantı (lamb dumplings)
- baklava
- Turkish breakfast (kahvaltı)