There’s a Turkish saying that goes along the lines of “don’t mix meat with milk”, meaning that it’s better to play it safe than interfere with things that may prove problematic. Kosher rules don’t apply to Turkish food, but could this be just one example of the many Sephardic traditions found in contemporary Turkish culture?

“It seems kashrut made sense to our community too,” says Aylin Öney Tan, a Turkish food historian and food writer. “Few people in Turkey know this common saying originates from the kosher rules, but it means the same thing: if you mix the meat and the milk you’ll be in trouble.”

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Turkish borekitas are a cousin of bourekas Photo: Getty Images

How did something so quintessentially Jewish make its way into modern Turkish parlance? It probably has something to do with the events that followed 1492, when Catholic zealots King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castille and Aragon exiled anyone who refused to convert to Christianity. As explained in this week’s Essay on page 23, the then Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, sent his navy across the Mediterranean to evacuate the Sephardim to his empire, where they were invited to settle.

This was not the first time Jews had emigrated to Ottoman lands, but they had never arrived en masse before. According to the Harvard Divinity School, most of the roughly 100,000 Jews that fled the 1492 Spanish expulsion were drawn to the Ottoman Empire, with 60,000 people arriving in 1492 alone.

Today, some 20,000 Jews still live in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and in Izmir, on the Mediterranean coast. Many have maintained the medieval Judeo-Spanish language Ladino and the ancient Sephardic traditions and recipes.

Elda Sasun is a writer at Şalom newspaper, a Jewish weekly published in Turkey. Her family tree on both sides can be traced back to Spain, via the Jewish communities in the Turkish cities of Edirne and Bursa, while Sasun herself was born and raised in Istanbul.

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Jewish food writer, Elda Sasun

“Growing up Jewish in Turkey, I didn’t feel different,” Sasun says. “We had wonderful relations with our neighbours and, whenever there was Christian or Jewish or Muslim holiday, we’d celebrate by eating together. It was always a festival of food.”

Her Sephardic culinary heritage was passed down from her maternal grandmother.
“At my grandmother’s house, food was very important. It was life,” Sasun recalls. “It was a mix of Jewish and Turkish with names reflecting its Spanish origins.”

She reminisces about frojalda, a kind of bread, like focaccia, but filled with feta cheese, that they used to eat on Shabbat, and patatikas kochas —a potato dish that can still be found in some parts of Spain.

Another mainstay was borekas, or borekitas — filled pastries that are part-Turkish börek and part-Spanish empanada, with a Ladino pronunciation and a Spanish word-ending. The hybrid borekita, a mainstay on the menu of popular Turkish coffee chain Kahve Dünyası, uses thicker dough, like a börek, but with a half-moon shape, like an empanada. Theirs is typically filled with spinach, cheese, aubergine, potato, or minced meat.

“The king of the vegetables was always the famous aubergine, or berencena in Ladino (derived from the Spanish berenjena),” Sasun continues. “Our meals in the summertime included aubergines in many different forms: aubergine borekas, baked aubergine with cheese, meatballs covered in fried aubergine.”

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Turkish writer Aylin Oney Tan

As for Aylin Öney Tan, Jewish recipes could also be found in her Turkish household growing up, even though she admits not having been aware of it at the time.

“Some of the dishes my mother used to make are almost identical to Jewish dishes — like her eggplant rolls or meatballs in sour sauce,” she recalls, adding that this could be because her maternal grandfather was from Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki), or she suggests, “Maybe they were conversos, or converted Jews — without knowing it.

“Some of my favourite Turkish tastes are directly descended from Sephardic tradition, like the kaşar cheese, as well as some vegetable dishes based on aubergine and artichoke,” Öney continues.

In 2009, Öney presented a paper at the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery on the theme of Food and Language, where she explained that while “food continued to serve as a marker of the distinct Jewish identity, it was also a means of communication, and in the Ottoman lands, the Jewish cuisine was a perfectly legible language”.

If there was one ingredient Sephardim and Turks both understood fluently it was the aubergine.

“When Sephardic Jews arrived in Ottoman lands, it wasn’t as if they were going to Mars. The two cultures already had a lot of food in common,” Öney explains.

Medieval Arabic and Persian cuisine are major influences on both Sephardic and Turkish food and the aubergine could be found in both. However, some techniques, like combining aubergine with cheese — something that is still common in dishes like borekitas — were introduced to Turkey by the Sephardim.

Öney also believes New World ingredients, such as the tomatoes that arrived after Columbus returned from the Americas, may have had something to do with Turkey’s Jewish communities and their international trade links.Turks and Sephardim also share an appreciation for sour flavours and ingredients such as tamarind, sumac and citrus fruits.

Some Sephardic-inspired sour dishes that can still be found in Turkey include fish or eggs in sour plum sauce, fish in egg and lemon sauce, and sour stuffed zucchini. Adding sugar or honey to savoury ingredients is another common thread in both cuisines.

Öney believes that one of the most common Turkish cheeses, kaşar, might also have a Jewish connection. It seems this cheese was brought to Turkey by the Jews from Spain, who referred to it as kaşer, Ladino for kosher. Unsurprisingly, Öney says it bears an uncanny resemblance to the most Spanish of all cheeses, Manchego.

Another Sephardic dish that is widely available in Turkey – and in Izmir in particular – is boyoz (derived from the Spanish word bollos), a popular flaky pastry typically sold as a snack in bakeries and by street vendors.

They say all food tells a story. And, like all the best ones, this one has an evil king and queen, a magnificent sultan, and a humble aubergine. The rest is history.


Food photos: Getty Images

Borekitas are a cousin of borekas

Turkish food writer Elda
Sasun

Aylin Oney Tan ate Jewish recipes growing up in her Turkish household