The city's table
What to eat in Amasya?
Seven hundred years ago Ibn Battuta described this city by its gardens. The garden is still on the table: broad beans, aubergines, quinces, sour cherries, misket apples. What follows is not a menu — it is an inventory of memory, written down in the city's own names.
Instead, we give you the names of the dishes. Knowing the name when you ask is the difference between being a stranger in a city and being its guest. Let us say it at the outset: most of what follows is home and ceremonial food; you may not find every dish on a counter. If you are looking for the recipes, our source is the book Amasya Mutfağı; they are all there, and the book has an English text as well.
The esteemed guest's table: six dishes
In Amasya a guest who comes from elsewhere, and who usually stays the night, is called an “ağır misafir” — literally a “weighty guest”, an esteemed guest. At such a guest's table there are always six dishes, and these six hardly ever change. Their order is fixed, too:1
- Toyka çorbası (toyka soup)The meal opens with soup.
- Bütün et (literally “whole meat”)In summer its place is taken by patlıcan pehlisi (aubergine pehli).
- Pirinç pilavı (rice pilaf)
- Sinisu böreği (sinisu pastry)Amasya's very own börek.
- Bamya (okra)
- Tatlı (dessert)One of tırtıl baklava, kuymak or gömlek kadayıfı.
The book describes the hospitality of the people of Amasya like this: if there is no guest at the table at a meal, the host invites a poor person and shares the food with them. “In Amasya, being the guest is a greater honor than being the host.”1 (This sentence is quoted from the book's own English text.)
Food has its ceremonies too
Some dishes are not just a plate but a ceremony. When they are served, to whom, and on which tray, is fixed.1
The velime meal
Popularly called “guya önü” — a corruption of güvey önü, “before the groom”.
It is for the couple on their wedding night. A single tray holds three dishes: whole meat, pilaf and tırtıl baklava. The dishes may vary, but the way they are served does not: before the groom goes in, the tray is handed to the bride at the door of the bridal chamber.
The wedding meal
Especially at village weddings.
At the wedding house, cauldrons of keşkek, pilaf, meat and halva are set to boil. Tables are laid out on the flat roofs of the houses and in the courtyards. Because finding and handing out spoons used to be difficult, guests came with a wooden spoon tucked into their belt and sat down with it. The meal is eaten together, to the sound of the davul drum and the zurna pipe.
The bride's bath meal
The meal of the bathhouse ceremony at which the bride is introduced to the family's relatives. Guests are invited to the hamam by the “okuyucu kadın”, the woman sent round with the invitations.
By name
The book has eighty recipes. Below are their names. Some of them you cannot work out even when you hear them — sakala çarpan çorba, eli böğründe, unutma beni — and that is exactly where their charm lies.1 (Literally: “the soup that hits the beard”, “hand on its side” and “forget me not”.) We have kept the names in Turkish: they are the words you will need when you ask.
🥣 Soups 9
🍖 Meat dishes 9
🍆 Vegetable dishes 17
🥟 Pastries 19
🍚 Rice dishes (pilav) 6
🍮 Desserts 15
✨ Specialities 5
A section the book sets apart on its own.
The stories of four dishes
These are stories the book tells. They are accounts, not documents — and we say so as we pass them on.
Vişneli Ekmek · sour-cherry bread
Dessert · page 76
According to the book, this dessert is what the cream cake eaten in the princes' palace became in the hands of a poor family: the home version of a palace sweet.
Unutma Beni · forget me not
Dessert · page 80
Its name sounds like a farewell, but its story is one of thrift: a dessert made so that stale bread is not thrown away. Proof that what best describes a city's cooking is not its feasts but what it does with the leftovers.
Bakla Dolması · broad-bean rolls
Vegetable dish · page 26
Dried broad beans are hard and not much to look at. The book describes mixing those hard beans with various ingredients, combining them with meat and rolling them one by one. In other words, the real ingredient of this dish is patience.
Keşkek
Meat dish · page 17
One of the staple dishes of the Turks of Central Asia, and made in many parts of Anatolia too. The book gives Amasya's keşkek a place of its own and passes on the city's own claim:
By season
The table changes with the season. In summer, patlıcan pehlisi (aubergine pehli) takes the place of the whole meat at the esteemed guest's table.1 The city's apples go into dessert as well: the recipe for elma tatlısı (apple dessert) is made with misket apples, a small local variety1 — so the orchards Ibn Battuta saw in the 14th century are still on the plate. What the travellers said →
Sources
Every piece of information on this page rests on the source below. Its title is given in the original so that it can be found; quotations from it are our translations, except where we say that the book's own English is quoted.
- H. Harun Yörgüç (ed.), Amasya Mutfağı / Amasya Cuisine, 2. Basım (Amasya: Amasya Valiliği, 2010), 6, 8-87. — Page 6 (“Amasya Yemekleri Tarihçesi”): the six dishes of the esteemed guest's table and their order, the velime meal (“guya önü”), the wedding and bride's bath meals; what is said about vişneli ekmek, unutma beni, bakla dolması and keşkek. Pages 8-87: all the dish names; the recipe on page 75 in which elma tatlısı is made with misket apples.
The book is a publication of the Governorship of Amasya (Publication No. 42). The recipes were compiled with contributions from vocational high-school teachers, master instructors, cooks and housewives. In other words, the names you read here rest on a compilation, not on hearsay.
There are names here, not recipes. The names of the dishes and the order of the table are taken from the book; the recipes will be dealt with separately. Other products of the city, such as the Amasya apple and silk-worm breeding, are also waiting for sections of their own.