Ottoman Food, Cooking and Meals

Food changed with region, wealth and the institution preparing it. A household meal, the Topkapı Palace kitchens’ daily service and bread issued by a charitable foundation had different cooks, supplies and recipients. Records from fifteenth-century Istanbul, Turkey, through nineteenth-century cookbooks and soup-kitchen registers show what people prepared, how meals were served, and which groups an institution was meant to feed.

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Bread, soup and shared dishes

Bread and grain dishes provided everyday nourishment. Topkapı Palace bakers used has flour, the finest grade, and fodula, the standard flour. Fodula itself came in medium-grade meyane and lower-grade harci flour. Palace records distinguish three bread grades: high-quality has bread, medium-quality bread, and lower-quality harcî. Has bread went to the sultan (the Ottoman ruler), court and household officials, while fodula and harcî bread reached a wider palace population, from sultanas to conscript pages. Outside the palace, bakers supplied city households; milling, kneading and baking in ovens stood between grain and a loaf on the table.

Sixteenth-century Ottoman tablewares and written descriptions point to soups made with pulses and tarhana, a fermented grain-and-yogurt mixture dried for storage. A large dish could be placed in the middle of diners seated around a low tray, with spoons used for soup and hands for other food. Archaeologist Joanita Vroom describes multipurpose household rooms used for meals, while elite homes used servants to bring dishes in covered vessels.

Kitchens and the work of cooking

At Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, the imperial kitchen developed a formal administration under Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan (ruler), in the fifteenth century. Its superintendent calculated quantities, ordered provisions, arranged purchases and recorded expenses. Some supplies came from Istanbul markets; staple goods such as rice and sugar were ordered from provincial towns and shipped to the capital. Storehouse clerks tracked goods in and out, while a chief cook supervised staff and the preparation of meals.

Cooks worked in ranks, from apprentices to master cooks, and specialist confectioners prepared sweets, pickles and drinks. Palace kitchens roasted birds on spits and cooked meat as kebabs or stews. Recipes also combined fruit and meat: plum stews and stuffed apples appear among the dishes, while honey and vinegar could season the same dish. The seasonal menu for palace workers, thought to date to the sixteenth century, includes boiled-wheat pudding, thick soup with flour, butter and sugar, noodles, and meat-filled pasta. Some dishes used kavurma: cooks simmered meat in a little water until the water evaporated, then fried and browned it in the fat rendered from the meat. Soup appeared in every season.

Meals, service and feasting

Palace household records describe two daily meals, one in midmorning and another after midafternoon prayer. Diners sat on the floor around low tables. Before and after eating, attendants poured water over diners’ hands into a basin and offered towels.

A circumcision celebration for Prince Mehmed, son of Murad III, in 1582 brought a very different scale of cooking: records describe five hundred cooks preparing noon and evening banquets each day. The chronicler Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli reports nine courses for lower-ranking guests and twelve for higher-ranking guests, followed by sweets. Another palace expense account for a 1539 circumcision feast records fifty-three kinds of dessert at twenty tables. These occasions required temporary mass cooking and ranked guests by the service they received.

Bread charity and Ramadan

A waqf, or charitable endowment, could fund an imaret, a public kitchen that baked and distributed food to specified recipients. The Hamidiye imaret in Istanbul, founded in the late eighteenth century, baked fodula, a bread issued alongside salaries or allowances. Its surviving register for 1823–1903 records more than a thousand loaves distributed each day to the foundation’s employees, residents of religious schools and dervish lodges (Sufi religious communities), designated prayer reciters, and poor people. The register shows how the endowment’s rules defined who received a daily ration.

Ramadan shifted meals to before dawn and after sunset for Muslims who fasted. Palace accounts show a public form of provision: from the reign of Süleyman I until 1826, layered pastry called baklava was distributed to the city’s Janissary garrisons, the empire’s elite infantry corps, on the fifteenth day of the month. After the festival prayer at the end of Ramadan, separate banquets were held for the sultan, viziers (senior ministers) and Janissaries in different palace spaces.

Pickles, preserves and printed recipes

At Topkapı, the confectionery kitchen produced pickles and fruit preserves as well as sweets. Palace cooks pickled cabbage and other vegetables with the yellow vinegar of Bursa, in western Turkey; the stored pickles were kept through the year. A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Ottoman recipe manuscript directs cooks to put pickled zucchini, turnips and mint in a martabani, a glazed ceramic jar.

Historian Arif Bilgin describes two thick fruit preserves, rub and murabba: cooks extracted fruit sap, boiled it until it thickened, then dried it in the sun to make fruit pulp.

In 1844, Mehmed Kâmil published Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn in Istanbul, the first printed Turkish cookbook. Its 284 recipes were arranged in chapters for soups, kebabs, stews, fried dishes, pastries, sweets, stuffed vegetables, pilafs, compotes and drinks. One recipe title uses istofato, from Italian stufato, for meat cooked slowly in a covered vessel without added water. The book also includes tomato dishes, documenting a crop that had entered Ottoman cultivation by the later eighteenth century.