Turkish cooking is one of the great cuisines and it is poorly represented abroad, where it is reduced to a doner. At home it is regional, vegetable-heavy and built on a long tradition of Ottoman palace cooking alongside village food. These are the dishes to work through.
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Eggs scrambled into tomatoes, peppers and butter, served in the pan with bread. Breakfast, and the best cheap meal in the country.
The eggs are added last and stirred only until just set, so the dish stays loose rather than becoming an omelette. Onions are a regional argument — the Aegean version usually leaves them out.
Sliced döner over torn pide bread, covered in tomato sauce and melted butter, with yoghurt on the side. From Bursa.
The bread underneath is the point: it soaks up the sauce and butter and becomes the best part. It is named after İskender Efendi, who is credited with inventing the vertical döner spit in nineteenth-century Bursa.
Grilled mackerel in a half loaf with onion, lettuce and lemon, sold from boats at Eminönü in Istanbul.
The boats are moored and rocking while they grill, and the sandwich is assembled in seconds. It is cheap, it is not refined, and it is one of the defining Istanbul experiences.
Meat and vegetables sealed inside a clay jug and cooked slowly, then cracked open at the table. A Cappadocia specialty.
The neck of the jug is sealed with dough or foil so no steam escapes, and the whole thing is cooked in a tandır oven. It is served by breaking the clay, which is theatrical but also functional — the seal is what kept it from drying out.
A thin flatbread spread with minced meat, tomato and pepper and baked fast. Squeezed with lemon and rolled up with parsley.
It is not a pizza, despite the shape — the dough is much thinner and the topping is raw when it goes in, cooking in the time it takes the base to crisp. The lemon and parsley are not optional garnish; they are what makes it work.
Thin pastry layered with cheese, spinach or meat, baked or fried. Sold by the slice from bakeries all day.
Su böreği is the boiled version, layered with cheese and butter, and it is a different food from the flaky filo kind. It is a breakfast staple, and the best is bought from a bakery in the morning while it is still warm.
Layers of filo with pistachio and syrup. Gaziantep is the reference point, and the pistachio version is the one to order.
The syrup must be poured over the pastry while one is hot and the other cold, or the layers go soft. Antep pistachios are darker and more intensely flavoured than the Iranian ones often sold abroad.
The Turkish breakfast: many small plates of cheese, olives, tomato, cucumber, honey, kaymak, eggs and endless tea.
It is a meal to sit over for a couple of hours, not a quick start to the day. Kaymak — buffalo milk clotted cream — with honey and bread is the part visitors remember, and it is hard to find outside Turkey.
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