Vegetables

i.The Simplest Dish

The most basic vegetable preparation is also one of the best. Slice a primary vegetable — zucchini, eggplant, whatever the garden has yielded — combine with tomatoes, green pepper, and onion, and cook slowly in butter and the vegetables' own juices. Because the produce of Türkiye is exceptional — sweet, sun-finished, often picked the same morning — a single dish like this, eaten with a generous chunk of fresh bread, is a satisfying meal in itself for many.

ii.Olive Oil Dishes

A whole class of vegetables is cooked in olive oil. In a five-course meal these come third — after the soup and a main of rice or börek with a vegetable-and-meat dish, before dessert and fruit. Practically every vegetable comes through this preparation: fresh string beans, artichokes, celery root, eggplant, pinto beans, zucchini. They are typically served at room temperature, the oil pooling slightly under the spoon, and they are a staple of the menu, varying with the season.

iii.Fried Vegetables

Then the fried plates: eggplant, peppers, zucchini, dropped into hot oil and served with a tomato or yogurt sauce. Plain in the telling. Sweet and unexpectedly delicate at the table.

iv.Dolma: The Art of Stuffing

Dolma — from the verb doldurmak, "to fill" — is the generic term for stuffed vegetables. There are two great categories. Those filled with a seasoned meat mixture are a main course, served warm under a yogurt sauce, and a very common one in the average household. Those filled with a rice mixture are cooked in olive oil and eaten at room temperature, often as part of a meze spread.

Any vegetable that can be hollowed out or wrapped around a filling is fair game: zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, cabbage, grape leaves. But the green-pepper dolma with a rice filling has to be the queen of all dolmas — a feast for the eye and the palate together, the long pepper brilliant green against the white plate.

v.The Eggplant: A Kitchen of Its Own

When talking about vegetables, the eggplant — patlıcan — holds a place of its own. This handsome vegetable, with its brown-green cap, velvety purple skin, and firm slim body, has a richer, more concentrated flavour than its relatives elsewhere. At a dinner party, a frustrating question to ask a Turkish cook is: how do you usually cook your eggplant? A proper answer would take hours.

Two preparations are non-negotiable on a first visit. The first is karnıyarık — eggplant split lengthwise and filled with a seasoned meat mixture, baked in the oven, eaten in summer with white rice pilaf. The second is hünkar beğendi, "Sultan's Delight": a refined formal dish of lamb stew served over a creamy roasted-eggplant purée enriched with béchamel. Difficult to make well, worth the effort always; the dish is said, by tradition, to have been created in honour of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, on her visit to Sultan Abdülaziz in 1869.

A frustrating question to ask a Turkish cook is: how do you usually cook your eggplant? A proper answer would take hours.

vi.The Lokanta: Where Home Cooking Lives

To eat these dishes, look for a lokanta — borrowed from the Italian locanda, this is the establishment where traditional home-style cooking is prepared, most often for the people who work in the surrounding offices and shops. Tables are covered with white linen. The menu runs to soups, traditional main dishes, simple desserts, fresh fruit. Businesspeople and politicians take lunch here. The well-known names — Borsa, Hacı Salih, and Konyalı in Istanbul; Liman and Çiftlik in Ankara — are part of the country's cultural memory.

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