Scaled to however many of you there are.
Change the headcount and the amounts follow. Salt and spice do not scale in a straight line, and we account for that.
A recipe is how you make a thing: the amounts, the order, the timing and where it goes wrong. The dish pages explain what that thing is — where it comes from, the mechanism behind it, and why skipping one step makes it something else. One stays open in the kitchen; the other is read when you wonder.
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Menemen
Pepper, tomato and egg. Know the order and the heat and it takes fifteen minutes; miss them and you get a watery omelette.
Ezogelin soup
The lentil soup’s cousin, with bulgur, tomato paste and mint. The difference is one step: the paste is fried in the fat.
Tarhana soup
A yoghurt-and-vegetable mixture fermented through a summer, dried and powdered. Ten minutes to a soup — at the end of a year’s work.
Tomato soup
The taste of this soup is the taste of the tomato, which means a bad tomato cannot make a good one. In winter use paste and wait for the season.
Vegetable soup
Throwing everything in at once is easy and wrong. These vegetables differ twofold in cooking time, and knowing the order is the only skill involved.
Vermicelli soup
A childhood soup and a fifteen-minute rescue. Toasting the vermicelli is the whole recipe.
Çiğ köfte, without meat
The name says raw, but the bulgur is not: bulgur is wheat that has already been boiled, and here it is only soaked.
İmam bayıldı
Karnıyarık’s sibling: no meat, olive oil, eaten cold. The quantity of onion is not excessive — this is a dish about onion.
Spinach with rice
A kilo of spinach cooks down to a handful, which is why the size of the pan is part of the recipe.
Okra in olive oil
Okra goes slimy for one reason: it was cut. Cooked without breaching the pod, it does not go slimy at all.
Türlü
The name means "all sorts" and the recipe means it: whatever is in the house goes in. The one rule is the order they cook in.
Fried aubergine
An aubergine can take up a third of its own weight in oil. Salted water halves that.
Chickpea stew
Dried chickpeas, tomato paste and olive oil — and a pinch of bicarbonate that halves the cooking time.
Borlotti bean pilaki
A pilaki is eaten cold, and that is why there is sugar in it: perception of sweetness drops as food cools, so what tastes right hot tastes flat cold.
White bean salad
The dressing goes on while the beans are HOT. A cold bean takes nothing up; a hot one draws the dressing into its starch.
Red lentil patties
The bulgur goes onto the lentils while they are HOT, under a lid. Added to cold lentils it never swells and the patty falls apart.
Black-eyed pea salad
The one dried pulse that needs no soak: its skin is thin and it softens in twenty-five minutes.
Green lentil stew
A green lentil keeps its skin and holds its shape; a red one is already skinned and split, so it collapses. The same plant, two different dishes.
Red lentil dal
Twenty minutes of boiling lentils tastes of very little; almost all of the flavour is made in the last forty-five seconds, in hot fat.
Spinach with chickpeas
Under a lid, spinach turns olive-drab in its own acid. With the lid off, the colour and the taste both stay where they were.
Black-eyed pea stew
The one common dried pulse that needs no soaking: its coat is thin and permeable, so it goes from dry seed to tender in twenty-five minutes.
Green lentil salad
A lentil goes on cooking in its own heat for three or four minutes after the pan comes off. The eighteen minutes in this recipe already has those minutes counted in.
Bulgur pilaf
Bulgur does not cook, it takes up water. It is wheat that has already been boiled, so what matters is not the time on the flame but the time under the lid.
Bulgur pilaf with lentils
Two grains, two rules: the lentils must boil, the bulgur only absorbs. Put them in together and one collapses while the other stays hard.
Tomato bulgur pilaf
The acid in tomato slows how fast bulgur takes up water. The answer is not more water but putting the tomato in after the bulgur has swollen.
Kısır
It never meets a flame: fine bulgur swells by itself in boiling water. The pomegranate molasses and lemon go in after the swelling is over.
Tabbouleh
Tabbouleh is not a bulgur salad but a parsley salad: the bulgur is under a tenth of the whole. And what swells it is not water but the juice of the tomato.
Green beans in olive oil
A classic that cooks in the vegetable’s own water, with none added. The secret is patience and a low flame: the beans sweat, they never boil.