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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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Çılbır
Poached eggs on garlicky yoghurt, finished with butter sizzled with chilli. Three temperatures stacked: warm yoghurt, running yolk, scalding fat.
Kaygana
The Black Sea’s herb omelette, bound with flour. The flour holds the egg into a sheet that folds instead of breaking.
Eggy bread
The best use there is for stale bread. Fresh bread is no good here — it collapses before it has absorbed anything.
Porridge
Five minutes, of which the first one decides everything: the oats go into cold liquid, never into boiling.
Menemen
Pepper, tomato and egg. Know the order and the heat and it takes fifteen minutes; miss them and you get a watery omelette.
Fried eggs in butter
Eight minutes and one number: the butter must not pass 150 °C.
Spinach and eggs
Crack the eggs before the spinach has given up its water and a green puddle collects on the plate.
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.
Broccoli soup
One rule for keeping it green: no lid, and not a minute over eight.
Vermicelli soup
A childhood soup and a fifteen-minute rescue. Toasting the vermicelli is the whole recipe.
Flour soup
Three ingredients — flour, butter, water — and all of the flavour is in how long the flour is toasted.
Sautéed mushrooms
Mushrooms are wiped, not washed. And the salt goes in last: early salt draws their water out and makes browning impossible.
Garlic-sautéed broccoli
The broccoli is blanched two minutes and dropped into iced water. That shock locks the green in, and the sauté cannot take it back out.
Tahini and honey bowl
Two ingredients, five minutes. It seizes as you stir; keep going and it loosens.