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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Eggs with sucuk
Crack the eggs before the sucuk has released its fat and you get dry sausage and lean eggs. The order is not a preference, it is the recipe.
Eggs with pastırma
Pastırma is warmed rather than cooked. More than thirty seconds in the pan and the fenugreek crust turns bitter while the meat turns to leather.
Kaygana
The Black Sea’s herb omelette, bound with flour. The flour holds the egg into a sheet that folds instead of breaking.
Cheese omelette
The colour of an omelette is a choice: pale means a low flame and brown means a high one, and the second is an accident.
Mıhlama
Cornmeal, butter and a cheese that stretches. The stretch is not a knack but a temperature: past 70 °C it stops stretching and splits.
Eggy bread
The best use there is for stale bread. Fresh bread is no good here — it collapses before it has absorbed anything.
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.
Crêpes
Flour, egg, milk. The one condition for crêpes that do not tear is half an hour of rest.
Mushroom soup
Mushrooms taste of something once they have browned. Dropped straight into water they give a soup colour and no flavour.
Pan-fried meatballs
A meatball holds together because it rested, not because of what went into it. Kneaded mince does not meet the pan without half an hour in the fridge.
Musakka
Turkish musakka has no béchamel: aubergine, mince and tomato in one pan. Confusing it with the Greek version is a common mistake.
Saç kavurma
High heat, small pieces, an uncrowded pan. Miss any one of the three and it is not a sauté but a stew.
Kadınbudu köfte
Half the mince is cooked and half is raw. The cooked half stops it collapsing and the raw half is what binds it.
Albanian liver
Liver must not meet salt before the pan, and must meet flour a minute before it. Two rules, two minutes.
Beef sauté
A meat dish finished in fifteen minutes, on one condition: the pan is genuinely hot. In a warm pan this recipe does not work.
İçli köfte
Whether the shell thins without splitting depends on its temperature: cold bulgur cracks and warm bulgur stretches.
Pan-seared steak
Thickness decides the cooking time, not weight. A 2 cm steak always takes the same time whatever it weighs.
Chicken sauté
Chicken breast is done at 65 °C and dry at 72. Those seven degrees are the whole recipe.
Chicken schnitzel
Beating the meat thin is a requirement rather than a shortcut: a 1 cm breast cannot cook before the coating burns.
Fried anchovies
Cornmeal is not flour: its coarse grains fry into a glassy crust, and the anchovy steams inside it.
Fried squid
Squid has two cooking times and nothing between them: under two minutes or over thirty.
Courgette fritters
A mücver made without squeezing the courgette falls apart. One courgette gives up half a glass of water, and with that water in the batter nothing binds.
Fried courgette
Salt the slices and wait twenty minutes: the water that comes out is the only reason a fried slice spits and goes soft.
Fried aubergine
An aubergine can take up a third of its own weight in oil. Salted water halves that.
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.
Falafel
The chickpeas are never boiled, only soaked. Falafel made with cooked chickpeas disintegrates in the oil, and nothing rescues it.
White bean patties
There is no protein network here to bind the patty. What takes its place is gelatinised starch, which firms as it cools: the fridge is what holds these together.