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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Çılbır
Poached eggs on garlicky yoghurt, finished with butter sizzled with chilli. Three temperatures stacked: warm yoghurt, running yolk, scalding fat.
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.
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.
Yoghurt and rice soup
Every yoghurt soup has the same single problem: splitting. The answer is not the flour and the egg but the way the temperature is raised.
Wedding soup
Lamb broth, a liaison, and red pepper butter over the top: yayla soup’s richer cousin, built on stock instead of water.
Tripe soup
Three hours of simmering and a liaison. What decides the smell is not the recipe but how well the tripe was cleaned.
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.
İzmir meatballs
Searing the meatballs and then baking them in sauce is two dishes in one: the crust stays outside while the inside drinks the sauce.
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.
Hasanpaşa köfte
The purée on top is a lid rather than a decoration: in the oven it keeps the meat’s juice in.
Chicken schnitzel
Beating the meat thin is a requirement rather than a shortcut: a 1 cm breast cannot cook before the coating burns.
Home-made chicken nuggets
Half the meat in a shop nugget is skin, cartilage and water. At home you know what is in it, and the difference shows up in the salt.
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.
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.
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.