The palace kitchen and the soup kitchen

Mehmed II built the palace after he took Constantinople in 1453, and the kitchens went in along the south-eastern side of the second court, where the visitor sees them today. A fire destroyed them in 1574 and Sinan, the court architect, rebuilt them as a long range of domed rooms, each with its own hearth and its own chimney. Some cooked for the sultan, some for his mother and the harem, some for the pages of the inner palace, some for the officials of the council and the guards.

There was a separate kitchen for sweets, the helvahane, and its staff made more than sweets. They boiled the syrups for sherbet, made jams and preserves, candied fruit and flowers, and turned out the medicinal pastes the palace doctors prescribed. The line between confectioner and apothecary was thin.

The staff grew with the household. By the seventeenth century the kitchens and their storerooms employed well over a thousand people, organised like everything else in the palace into ranks with a head cook, master cooks, journeymen and apprentices.

What they cooked is known from the account books, the matbah-i amire defterleri, which Arif Bilgin and others have worked through. They record rice from Egypt and from Plovdiv, clarified butter from the Crimea and Moldavia, honey from Wallachia, sugar from Egypt, lemons from the Aegean, and sheep driven in from the Balkans. A large part of the empire’s trade in foodstuffs ended in that courtyard. How the state made sure the capital was fed at all is told on the page on provisioning, and the grain of Egypt on its own page.

The sultan ate alone. Dishes went up from the kitchens on trays, covered, and were tasted on the way. He ate seated on cushions from a low round tray, from dishes that by the sixteenth century were often Chinese porcelain. Topkapi still holds more than ten thousand pieces, one of the largest collections of Chinese porcelain anywhere, and much of it was kitchen and table stock.

The food itself was the cuisine that later spread across the Balkans and the Middle East. Pilaf of rice in clarified butter, which was the dish of status, since rice was dearer than wheat. Soups of lentils, wheat or tripe. Kebabs, meat stewed with fruit, stuffed vegetables, borek in thin layered pastry, yoghurt with almost everything. Then the sweets, which were the palace’s real pride: helva in many kinds, baklava, zerde of rice coloured with saffron, and sherbets of fruit and flowers cooled with snow brought down from the mountains.

Baklava had a ceremony of its own. In Ramadan the palace sent trays of it to the janissaries, and the procession of the trays from the kitchens to the barracks was a public event.

Ottoman cooks did not write their recipes down for a long time, and it is one of the oddities of the subject that the best-documented kitchen in the early modern world left almost no cookbooks. The account books say what was bought. They do not say what was done with it.

The one early exception looks backwards. In the fifteenth century a physician called Muhammad ibn Mahmud Shirvani translated the Baghdad cookbook of 1226 into Ottoman Turkish for the court of Murad II and added about eighty recipes of his own. So the first Ottoman cookbook is in large part an Abbasid one, and the sour stews and almond sweets of caliphal Baghdad, reached the Ottoman kitchen in writing as well as by habit.

After that there is a long gap filled by manuscript notebooks, recipe lists in miscellanies and the observations of foreign guests. The first printed Ottoman cookbook appeared only in 1844. By then the kitchen had taken in the American crops. Maize had come early and spread through the Balkans and along the Black Sea, where it became the peasant’s bread. Peppers, tomatoes and beans came slowly, and much of what is now thought of as classic Turkish cooking, with its tomato sauces and stuffed peppers, belongs to the last century of the empire, not the first.

The janissaries are the clearest case of food as politics. The corps was divided into ortas, and the orta’s great copper cauldron, the kazan, was its emblem. Its officers had kitchen titles. The colonel was the corbaci, the soup-maker. Other ranks were the head cook and the water carrier.

When a foreign ambassador was received, it was usually on a janissary pay day, and he was seated in the council hall and fed in the sultan’s name. Out in the courtyard the janissaries were served pilaf. If they ran for it, all was well. If they refused to touch it, the corps was in revolt. Overturning the kazans was the signal of mutiny, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was seen more often than the sultans liked. Who the janissaries were is told on the page on the household troops.

The imaret was the other side of the same idea. Every great foundation in the empire, a mosque with its schools, hospital, baths and caravanserai, could include a public kitchen paid for by the endowment. The deed fixed what it served, to whom and in what order.

The best documented is the one Hurrem, the wife of Suleyman, founded in Jerusalem in 1552. Amy Singer reconstructed its working from the endowment deed and the court records of Jerusalem, and the rules are exact. Twice a day the kitchen served soup, of rice or cracked wheat, and bread. The staff ate first, a ladle of soup and two loaves each. Then the guests, a ladle and one loaf. Then the poor, about four hundred of them, who got half a ladle and one loaf.

In the great Istanbul imarets the guests of rank ate better. They were served dane, mutton cooked with rice, and sometimes zerde, and the rest of the house got the same once a week. The ranking was the point. The imaret did not feed everyone equally. It fed the world in its proper order, with the sultan’s family at the top as the givers.

The kitchen in Jerusalem is still working. It hands out soup to the families of the Old City, much as the deed provided, and it is one of the oldest charitable kitchens in continuous use anywhere.

The palace fed the city in public on great occasions, and the largest was the festival of 1582 for the circumcision of Murad III’s son. It lasted the best part of two months in the Hippodrome, and the illustrated record of it, the Surname-i Humayun, is one of the richest pictures of Istanbul life there is.

The guilds paraded before the sultan one after another, each with a float showing its trade at work. The cooks cooked on theirs, the bakers baked, and the confectioners carried animals, castles and gardens made of sugar. Then food was set out for the crowd. Platters of rice and roast meat were put down in the open and the people were let loose on them, and the paintings show the scramble. A scramble for the sultan’s food was not disorder. It was the point of the exercise, a public proof that the ruler’s table reached everyone.

Against all this sits Busbecq. He spent seven years at Suleyman’s court and travelled through the Balkans and Anatolia, and what struck him about ordinary Ottoman subjects was how little they spent on food. A traveller would buy bread, cheese, yoghurt and stewed fruit at a caravanserai and be content. A soldier on campaign carried a bag of flour, a little butter and spices, and made a gruel of it once or twice a day.

There is no contradiction. The palace ate lavishly because generosity was its job. Most of the empire lived on bread, bulgur, pulses, yoghurt, cheese, onions and fruit, with meat on feast days and at weddings, and the cooking that later became famous was the palace’s. When the guilds of Istanbul paraded before Murad IV in 1638, Evliya Celebi counted bakers, butchers, cooks, sellers of tripe soup, boza makers, sherbet sellers and dozens of other food trades among them, and many of them sold food ready to eat in the street.

Coffee came from Yemen. Sufis there drank it to stay awake through their night devotions in the fifteenth century, and from them it spread to Mecca and Cairo. Mecca tried to ban it in 1511. In Istanbul, according to the historian Pecevi, two men from Aleppo and Damascus opened the first coffeehouses in the mid-1550s, and they were full at once.

That was the problem. Ralph Hattox showed that what alarmed the authorities was less the drink than the place. A coffeehouse was somewhere men met outside the mosque and the home, talked, played games, listened to storytellers and criticised the government. The jurists argued over whether roasted beans counted as charred matter and so were forbidden. The chief mufti Ebussuud gave rulings against the coffeehouses, though in the end not against the drink, and later sultans closed them more than once, Murad IV most thoroughly in the 1630s.

None of it worked for long. By the end of the seventeenth century coffee was the drink of the palace as much as the street, the palace had its own chief coffee-maker, and the coffeehouse had become the place where an Istanbul neighbourhood did its talking.

Dervish lodges went the other way and made the meal itself a rite. In the Mevlevi order the kitchen was one of the holiest rooms in the lodge, and a novice began his training there, serving a thousand and one days. Those lodges are on their own page.