Revisiting the past
Is Ottomania over, or is it still holding strong? The widespread nostalgia, romanticization and fascination with the imperial past were initially ignited by the historical television show “Magnificent Century,” sparking a deep yearning for the days of the mighty Ottoman Empire. When it comes to food, interest in Ottoman-era cuisine dates back to the 1990s, when restaurants like Tuğra and Asitane started to recreate long-lost recipes from the archives. TV shows may have riveted crowds to the screen for a long time, but the craze seems to be pretty subdued now. Interest in all things Ottoman seems to reawaken only during Ramadan, but only in terms of food. Ottoman-tagged sherbets and dishes with strange Ottoman Turkish names parade on iftar tables, but that is it.
How to define Ottoman cuisine?What was food like back in the Ottoman era? Was it very different from what we eat now? Recently I had to rethink of these issues because of a foreign friend visiting Türkiye who came to Istanbul to write an article on Ottoman cuisine. When we’re talking of a past era, we usually think of bygone times and, in the case of cooking, dishes that are long forgotten usually with intricate cooking techniques. However, there is always a certain continuity and most of the time, we find that history still lives with us. Today, when we talk about Ottoman cuisine, we tend to think of dishes with unusual taste combinations to today’s palate, such as savory meat stews with sweet, dried fruits, which usually have odd names in Ottoman Turkish. Nevertheless, Turkish culinary classics such as stews, stuffed dishes, pilafs, and böreks are all flavors that have maintained continuity from the Ottoman era to the present day. As we delved into the question of what we mean by “Ottoman cuisine,” I realized that all the dishes we define as classic Turkish cuisine today actually stem from a continuity dating back to the Ottoman period.
