Ottoman cuisine

Ottoman cuisine is the cuisine of the Ottoman Empire and its continuation in the cuisines of Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and parts of the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

It is clear that Ottoman cuisine was unified and refined in imperial Istanbul, but the ultimate origins of many of its component parts are less clear.

It is a matter of mere speculation whether the origins of this imperial culinary legacy are to be traced back to Greek antiquity, the Byzantine heritage, or the Turkish and Arab nations, not forgetting Phoenician traditions; nowadays you may find support for any of these claims in various countries in the Balkans and the Near East.

Near Eastern specialist Maxime Rodinson notes as a rule of thumb that "despite everything, Latin Europe on the one side and Islam and the Byzantine Empire on the other were heirs of the civilizations of antiquity. Muslim culture, after all, developed from a base of eastern Hellenism. Thus, when we see a general similarity between dishes served in both East and West we need to show that they do not have a common, parallel origin in Graeco-Roman cooking before we adduce any oriental influence." Needless to say, determining the antiquity of a dish, which ones were widespread due to their presence in Hellenistic, Roman or Eastern Roman (Byzantine) times, and which became widespread later, within the roughly coextensive Ottoman empire, can be difficult. The food historian, Iranologist and Ottomanologist Bert Fragner emphasizes the importance of New World foodstuffs in particular in defining sui generis Ottoman cuisine, as it adopted them more rapidly than France, Italy, and northern Europe.

As with the earlier Byzantine cuisine, the center of Ottoman cuisine was in Istanbul, the capital, where the imperial courts and the metropolitan elites had established a refined culinary tradition bringing together elements of regional cuisines from across the empires:

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