Ottoman Cuisine: Palace Kitchens, Feasting, Sweets, and Beverages

Ottoman cuisine was one of the great syntheses of early modern cooking. It drew on the Persian, Arab, Byzantine, Balkan, and Central Asian traditions brought by the dynasty’s Turkish-speaking founders, on the produce of the lands they conquered, and on a sophisticated imperial kitchen that set the standard for the whole empire. For the better part of six centuries, Ottoman food was considered among the most refined in the eastern Mediterranean, and many of its dishes are still eaten across the Middle East, the Balkans, and Turkey today. The recipes themselves are surveyed in the companion article on traditional Ottoman dishes; this one is about the structure of the kitchen.

Key dates

1453 — Mehmed II takes the Byzantine palace and converts the kitchens of the old Topkapı into the imperial kitchen.
16th c. — Major Persian and Arab cookbooks are translated and adapted into Ottoman; the Matbah-ı Âmire reaches its classical form under Süleyman I.
1599 — Mustafa Âli’s Mevaidü’n-Nefais fi Kavaidi’l-Mecalis (Table of Delicacies and Rules of Gatherings), the most important Ottoman work on food and table manners.
1582, 1720 — The great imperial circumcision feasts of Murad III’s son Mehmed and Ahmed III’s sons, the largest culinary events of Ottoman history.
1764 — The Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn of Mehmed Şemseddin Karahisari, the first substantial Ottoman cookbook in the modern sense.
c. 1898 — The Aşçı Risalesi of Turhan Bey, the last of the great palace cookbooks.

The imperial kitchen

The most important institution in the history of Ottoman cuisine was the Matbah-ı Âmire, the imperial kitchen of Topkapı Palace. From the conquest of 1453 to the end of the empire, this vast establishment fed the sultan, his household, the divan, the palace staff, and the visitors and pilgrims who passed through the gates. At its 17th-century peak it employed more than a thousand people, organized into a series of highly specialized workshops each headed by a master chef.

Priscilla Mary Işın’s Bountiful Empire (2018) is now the standard English account of the kitchen, and the best short treatment of the question. The kitchen’s organization is sometimes summarized as “ten classes of cooks,” a reconstruction the culinary historian Ayla Algar traces to the Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn. I find the “ten classes” useful as a teaching device but misleading as a description of the 17th-century kitchen, which had a different and more fluid division of labor. The principal permanent offices were:

the pilavcılar, the rice cooks, who prepared the elaborate pilavs of the palace;
the aşçılar, the stew and kebab cooks;
the börekçiler, the pastry cooks, who produced dozens of varieties of börek;
the tatlıcılar, the dessert and pastry cooks;
the şerbetçiler, the sherbet makers;
the helvacılar, the makers of the various helva puddings;
and a number of subordinate offices for butchery, bread, fruit, the salaş (cold-meat and meze service), and the coffee and tobacco service of the kahvecibaşı.

The kitchen had its own gardens, fish ponds, bakeries, and warehouses, and the daily provisioning of the palace was a major economic activity. The records of the kitchen, preserved in the Ottoman archives in Başbakanlık, remain an essential source for the study of food history.

The meal pattern of the elite household

In a wealthy household of the 17th or 18th century, the principal meal was the midday meal, the taam, served on a low round table (the sofra) at which the men of the household sat on cushions. It began with a series of cold dishes — the soğuk başlangıç — followed by the main courses, the pilav, and the dessert. The women ate separately, generally in the harem, and the children with their mothers.

Soup was a regular part of the meal: lentil soup, yogurt soup, tripe soup, and a rich meat broth with lemon. Pilav was a constant, and the palace cook produced it in dozens of varieties — plain butter pilav, rice with currants and pine nuts, rice with chicken, rice with chestnuts, and the famous sütlü pilav with milk and sugar. The kebab was the other staple. After the main course, the table was set with desserts — fresh fruit, compotes, milk puddings, baklava, and the various helvalar — and the meal ended with coffee and a glass of water, in that order.

Mustafa Âli’s Mevaidü’n-Nefais, written in 1599 for the grandees of Istanbul, is the single most important Ottoman text on how an elite meal should be conducted — the seating, the order of dishes, the etiquette of serving, the proper conversation at table. It is to Ottoman cuisine what Cesare Ripa is to painting: a manual of decorum in which a great deal of practical information sits.

“A well-set table should have on it first a pilav, then a soup, then the cooked vegetables in olive oil, then the stew, then the kebab, then the cold dishes and the salads, and at the end the fruit and the sweetmeats. The host should not press food on a guest, but the guest should not refuse what is set before him; and at every dish the name of God should be spoken.” — Mustafa Âli, Mevaidü’n-Nefais fi Kavaidi’l-Mecalis (1599), on the order of a proper Ottoman meal

Breakfast and the everyday meal

For most Ottomans, breakfast was a simple meal of bread, cheese, olives, eggs, yogurt, cucumber, and tomato, accompanied by tea or coffee. The elaborate kahvaltı of the modern Turkish table — with its dozens of small plates of cheese, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, honey, cream, and jam — is a development of the 19th-century Levantine households of Istanbul and Smyrna, not a relic of the classical period; the roots in the simple country breakfast of bread and dairy are, however, clear.

The main meal of the working-class family was the akşam yemeği, the evening meal of soup, pilav, a vegetable dish, and bread. Meat was a luxury, eaten once or twice a week or reserved for a religious holiday, and a great deal of the everyday Ottoman kitchen was built around vegetables in olive oil, yogurt, and bread.

The sofra was the central piece of household furniture, and the etiquette of the table was a serious matter. The diners washed their hands before and after the meal, ate with the right hand only, and began with besmele and ended with praise of God. Bread was treated with great respect: to throw bread away was a sin, and stale bread was collected, dried, and given to the animals or to the poor.

Feasting and festival food

The festive cuisine was a major elaboration of the everyday kitchen. The Ramadan iftar was the central culinary event of the year. The fast was broken with a date and a glass of water or şerbet, followed by soup, a series of small dishes, a main course, the pilav, the dessert, and the coffee. The streets of the empire’s cities were lined with the iftar tables of the mosques, the imarets, and the wealthy.

The Kurban Bayramı, the Festival of the Sacrifice, was the second great culinary event, marked by the ritual slaughter of a sheep or a cow, the division of the meat into thirds for the family, the relatives, and the poor, and a series of festive meals. The imperial sünnet düğünü — the circumcision feasts of the princes, especially those of 1582 for Murad III’s son Mehmed and of 1720 for Ahmed III’s sons — were the largest events of the kind in Ottoman history. They lasted for days, involved thousands of guests, and required months of preparation. The düğün, the wedding, was the other principal festive occasion.

New World crops and the late-Ottoman kitchen

It is easy to forget, in reading the cookbooks, how much the late-Ottoman kitchen was transformed by New World crops. The word mısır (maize) is itself the Turkish word for Egypt — the route by which the grain first reached the empire. The tomato (domates), the pepper (biber), the potato (patates), and the bean (fasulye) all entered the Ottoman repertoire in the 17th and 18th centuries and changed the everyday kitchen of the eastern Mediterranean more profoundly than any imperial edict. By the 19th century, dishes that the 16th-century palace would not have recognized — the stuffed peppers of the southeast, the tomato-based pilavs of the Aegean, the dried-bean soups of the Balkans — were the everyday fare of the population.

The food classes

The 19th-century Ottoman cookbooks divided the empire’s dishes into a set of food classes — a tradition that goes back to the Persian cookbooks of the Timurid court. The principal classes were the pilavlar (rice dishes), the aşlar (stews), the kebaplar (grilled and stewed meat), the börekler (pastries), the dolmalar (stuffed vegetables), the sütlü tatlılar (milk-based desserts), the şerbet tatlıları (syrup-based desserts), the hoşaflar (fruit compotes), the salatalar (salads), the çorbalar (soups), and the turşular (pickles). This classification is still the basis of the modern Turkish kitchen, and many of the dishes listed in the earliest Ottoman cookbooks are still in daily use: the lamb and eggplant Hünkar Beğendi, the cherry-stuffed dolma, the Yayla çorbası, the sugar-syrup baklava of Gaziantep.

Sweets

The sweet tradition is a defining element of the repertoire. The most famous Ottoman sweet is the baklava — layered phyllo, nuts, and syrup — now a dessert of the entire eastern Mediterranean. The palace developed the burma baklava rolled into a tube, the havuç dilimi cut into a lozenge, the fıstıklı baklava of Gaziantep made with pistachio. The künefe is a cheese pastry soaked in syrup, an Ottoman sweet of the southern provinces. The milk desserts of the palace include the sütlaç (rice pudding), the kazandibi (caramelized rice pudding), the tavuk göğsü (chicken-breast pudding, thickened with rice flour and sugar), the muhallebi (milk pudding), and the keşkül (almond pudding). The helvalar — dense puddings of flour or semolina, butter, and sugar — and the lokum (Turkish delight) and the akide şekeri (rock candy) round out the sweet tradition. The standard Hünkar Beğendi story — that the dish was invented for a sultan who liked it so much that he fainted — is apocryphal, as Priscilla Mary Işın has noted; the dish appears in the 19th-century cookbooks, and the name is best read as “the thing the sultan liked.”

Beverages

The Ottoman repertoire of beverages was one of the broadest in the early modern world. The most important were water (from the public fountains and the aqueducts), şerbet (the sweet fruit, flower, or spice drink made by boiling the fruit with sugar and water, with rose, tamarind, sour cherry, and licorice the most popular flavors), ayran (salted yogurt), boza (the fermented drink of millet, served in the winter), salep (the hot drink of orchid flour, milk, sugar, and cinnamon), coffee (the imported hot drink of Ethiopia and Yemen, central to Ottoman social life — see Ottoman coffee culture), tea (which became common only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), wine (the best Ottoman wines were of Bozcaada, Rhodes, and Cyprus), and raki (the anise-flavored grape spirit, served with the meze course). For an extended discussion of coffee and the coffeehouse, see the article on Ottoman coffee culture; the principal dishes themselves are surveyed in the article on traditional Ottoman dishes.

The cookbooks

The earliest Ottoman cookbooks were translations and adaptations of Persian and Arabic originals, but from the 15th century a distinctly Ottoman tradition emerged. The most important surviving works are the Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn of Mehmed Şemseddin Karahisari (1764), the Aşçıbaşı of the same author, the Nimetü’l-İrfan of Ahmet Cavid (late 18th c.), the Sofra-i Tenvir of Hüseyin Şükrü (19th c.), the Aşçı Risalesi of Turhan Bey (1898), and the cookery sections of the encyclopedic works of Katip Çelebi and Evliya Çelebi. They describe hundreds of dishes in great detail, and they remain an invaluable source.

Regional cuisines

The imperial cuisine of Istanbul set the standard, but every region had its own tradition. The Aegean kitchen was known for its use of olive oil and herbs, the Black Sea for its fish, cornbread, and anchovies, the Southeast for its kebabs and its pistachio and lamb dishes, the Eastern Mediterranean for its meze and its olive oil, the Balkans for its pastries, dairy, and grilled meats. The meyhane tradition of the taverns of Istanbul, of the Aegean ports, and of the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city produced a different kind of cooking, centered on the meze — hummus, haydari, acılı ezme, tarator, sarma, dolma — served with raki or wine.