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.
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.
Mushroom soup
Mushrooms taste of something once they have browned. Dropped straight into water they give a soup colour and no flavour.
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.
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.
Chicken sauté
Chicken breast is done at 65 °C and dry at 72. Those seven degrees are the whole recipe.
Sautéed mushrooms
Mushrooms are wiped, not washed. And the salt goes in last: early salt draws their water out and makes browning impossible.