Meze

i.The Spirit of the Table

Despite Islam's prohibition against alcohol, Türkiye has a rich and old culture of drinking — at the family table, in the meyhane, on the seaside terrace under a vine. What the meal asks for, in those settings, is not a single dish but a long sequence of them, and that sequence is meze. Like Spanish tapas, meze is a category rather than a recipe: small plates set out at the start of an evening, eaten slowly across two or three hours, and accompanied — most often — by rakı, the anise-flavoured national spirit that turns milky-white when water is added. Turks call it aslan sütü, lion's milk. The meze course continues, dish by dish, until the main course is finally brought.

The meze table is not the food before the meal. It is the meal — the slow, conversational meal — and what arrives later is its punctuation.

ii.For a Seafood Evening

The simplest meze for rakı is a plate of honeydew melon and creamy white cheese — beyaz peynir — with fresh bread torn at the table. From that bare minimum a seafood spread builds outward: dried or marinated mackerel; fresh greens drawn through a thick garlic-yogurt sauce; an assortment of cold vegetable dishes cooked in olive oil; crisp savoury börek; deep-fried mussels and calamari with a dipping sauce; tomato-and-cucumber salad cut fine; tarama, the pale-pink fish-roe spread eaten with bread. The main course that follows, when it comes, is grilled fish.

iii.For a Kebap Evening

When the night is built around kebap, the meze spread changes character. Plates of finely chopped salad greens with tomato in spicy olive oil — some bound with yogurt or with cheese — replace the cold seafood of the coast. There is hummus, chickpeas blended smooth with tahini; kısır, bulgur kneaded with red lentils; çiğ köfte, the fierce raw-bulgur patties, traditionally made with raw meat and now most often vegan; marinated stuffed eggplant; long peppers filled with spiced nuts; a bowl or two of pickles, sharp and bright, to cut through the heavier plates that will follow.

iv.The Pace of the Evening

What is being practised at a meze table is, finally, a way of eating that resists hurry. The plates arrive when they arrive. The glass is refilled slowly. The conversation that begins with the first slice of melon is the same conversation that closes, much later, on the last sip of coffee. The meal is, in the old phrase, keyifli — pleasurable, unforced, dignified. Rakı is the lever that opens the evening and keeps it open, and the rich literature around the spirit — its history, its etiquette, its great houses — has its own home at Rakı.com.

v.Related Reading