When most people think of Turkish cuisine, what comes to mind is Bursa's İskender, Adana's kebap, and Gaziantep's baklava. But beyond this familiar canon, hundreds of dishes are still being cooked in Anatolia's small towns and villages, and each year a few names disappear from the list. These recipes, alive in the memory of grandmothers, are slowly fading under rural-to-urban migration, fast-food culture, and the standardising pressure of supermarket chains.
This article aims to bring a portion of that list back into the light. Some were a week away from total disappearance; others are being revived through small community efforts.
Slow Food and Türkiye: the Ark of Taste list
The Slow Food movement's Ark of Taste, based in Italy, catalogues traditional foods at risk of extinction across different regions of the world. Three criteria define eligibility: sustainable production, distinctive flavour, and rooted in a specific eco-region.
Türkiye is represented on the list by 76 products. The regional spread is uneven: 20 from the Aegean, 17 from Marmara, 14 from the Mediterranean, fewer from the rest. Some entries are still widely available, Boğatepe gruyère, İsot pepper, Afyon kaymak, İzmir boyoz, Şile chestnut honey. Others like Korkuteli's smoked ice cream or Van keledoş are flavours most people have never even heard of.
Eastern Anatolia: Van, Erzurum, Iğdır
This region holds Türkiye's richest pool of forgotten dishes. High altitude, harsh climate, and exchange with neighbouring geographies have all left their mark on the cuisine.
Keledoş (Van): a thick soup-stew of lentils, bulgur, yogurt, and roasted meat. For the last 40 years it has barely been cooked outside Van. It is on the Ark of Taste list, and even in local restaurants it appears on menus only rarely.
Sour çılbır (Van/Bitlis): the eastern version of the classic çılbır, made with sour yogurt. Butter, vinegar or lemon juice, raw egg combined with boiled egg.
Dry kaymak (Nevşehir, Erzurum, Sivas, Malatya): a high-calorie dairy product produced for winter. Cooked slowly over coal on a copper tray, the kaymak takes on a porous cake-like form. There is no industrial equivalent; the process is entirely a matter of craft. One kilogram of dry kaymak requires 20 to 25 kilograms of milk.
Perverde (Erzurum): an old morning food made from roasted wheat flour, dipped into honey or grape molasses (pekmez) and served. It was a child's first breakfast in winter months; now it is almost gone outside the rural household kitchen.
Kavut (Erzurum, Van): a thick sweet purée made by grinding roasted wheat. Mixed with honey, pekmez, or butter and eaten. It can serve as breakfast or as a dessert.
Central Anatolia: Sivas, Konya, Kayseri
Madımak (Sivas): a wild herb. Outside Sivas it is almost unknown; inside Sivas it is the classic spring dish. Cooked with ground meat, with yogurt, or with olive oil as a pan dish. Seasonal, a local-market product rather than supermarket stock.
Afyon kaymak: the soft version of dry kaymak. A summer specialty in Afyonkarahisar, served with bread and sugar. It is on the Slow Food list, but production volume is very low.
Cüvariş (Ottoman court): a dish of cabbage, ground meat, and vinegar. It lived in the sultan's kitchen but never crossed over to the popular cuisine, and was forgotten.
Fake semolina halva (Yalancı irmik helvası): alongside the urban dessert tradition, villages made a quick sweet from flour, butter, and pekmez. It is called "fake" because flour is used instead of semolina.
Aegean: İzmir, Aydın, Denizli, Muğla
The Aegean region has the most entries on the Türkiye Ark of Taste list.
Smoked ice cream (Korkuteli, Antalya): technically an Antalya district close to the Aegean border. Made from goat milk produced by goats grazing on wild thyme, with sahlep added, the ice cream develops a characteristic smoky and slightly bitter note. According to Daily Sabah's report, production is sustained year after year by a handful of families on the Korkuteli plain.
İzmir boyoz: a legacy of Sephardic Jewish cuisine. Made with thin oily dough, plain or filled with kaşar cheese. Common in İzmir, but the home version takes a refined skill; industrial boyoz is a different product. Listed on the Ark of Taste.
Denizli Babadağ tandır: lamb cooked in an underground oven for many hours. A festival dish, not part of everyday home cooking.
Arap kızı salad (Aegean): roasted eggplant, tomato, onion, garlic, pomegranate molasses. Not a place name, just a flavour name. Common as a summer salad in Aegean villages, but it has rarely crossed onto urban tables.
Marmara: Balıkesir, Edirne, Sakarya
Edremit milk-poached fish: anchovy or sardine cooked in milk. A forgotten dish of the northern Aegean; the fish lipids emulsify with the milk and produce a characteristic soft texture. Almost no one cooks it outside Edremit any more.
Edirne fried liver: lamb liver dredged in flour and egg and pan-fried. Specific to Edirne; while a "Arnavut ciğeri" (Albanian liver) variation exists elsewhere, Edirne's version has its own refinement.
Sakarya keşkek: a wedding dish with different versions across Giresun, Çanakkale, and Sakarya. Wheat and lamb pounded together for hours. Production frequency has fallen as traditional wedding customs have receded.
Black Sea: Trabzon, Sinop, Rize
Islama (Sinop): stale bread soaked in meat broth, layered with kaşar cheese and meat pieces, then baked. Sinop's signature dish, virtually unknown elsewhere in Türkiye.
Chickpea chicken (Sinop): a distant cousin of the Greek chicken-chickpea dish, but specific to Sinop. Long slow cooking with a lemon and olive oil base.
Laz börek (Rize): a sweet pastry filled with kaymak and muhallebi. A classic Black Sea reading of the milk-pastry tradition.
Kuymak (Trabzon/Rize): a breakfast dish similar to a fondue, made with cornmeal, butter, and fresh cheese. Common across Black Sea home kitchens but rarely seen beyond the region.
Southeast: Gaziantep, Mardin, Diyarbakır
İsot pepper (Urfa): the traditional hot pepper of Şanlıurfa. Listed on the Ark of Taste. Slowly dried under sun, the pepper offers medium heat and deep aroma, a wholly different product from ordinary red pepper flakes.
Kadesürk (Urfa/Mardin): a dessert made from grape molasses, flour, and walnut kernels. A wedding dish in Mardin, a morning snack in Urfa. Every household has its own recipe.
Kibe (Mardin): bulgur dumplings filled with ground meat, brought across from Arab cuisine. A classic in Mardin, almost unknown in the rest of Türkiye. A cousin to the Lebanese kibbeh.
Gaziantep Ali Nazik: roasted eggplant, yogurt, sautéed meat. Popular in the region, but the home-cooked details (the way the eggplant is charred, the temperature of the yogurt) have not fully translated to urban restaurants.
Why should they not disappear?
A recipe disappearing is not just the loss of a flavour, it is the erasure of a community's history. Keledoş is a slice of Van's shared Kurdish-Turkish-Armenian culinary heritage. Perverde was an Erzurum peasant's winter resistance strategy. Kadesürk is the sweet transformation of Mardin's Arab-Turkish trade culture.
These dishes offer three things industrial food systems cannot match:
Local biodiversity: madımak grows only in the mountains around Sivas, İsot pepper cannot be the same without Urfa's soil and sun. Keeping a dish alive is keeping an ecology alive.
Human skill: hammering dry kaymak on a copper tray, simmering keledoş for four hours, roasting the wheat for kavut to the right shade, these are crafts no machine can reproduce. The skill passes from father to daughter, mother to daughter-in-law.
Community bond: a madımak pan in Sivas is the signal that spring has arrived; keledoş in Van is the table before a wedding; kuymak in a Rize village is the first dish served to a guest. Food is not just flavour, it is the symbol of a particular moment and place.
Steps to start at home
The first step in keeping a forgotten dish alive is bringing it to the home table.
Pick one dish. From the list above, the one closest to your region or the one that intrigues you most. Do not try to learn ten at once; cook one for months.
Find the real recipe. Locally written cookbooks, academic gastronomy research, the memory of older relatives. Standard recipe sites usually carry modernised versions; the original may be different.
Try to source local ingredients. İsot pepper, madımak herb, Korkuteli's thyme-fed goat milk and similar local products are not the same without their origin. On a trip, pick them up from a local market; or order from small-producer online shops.
Slow down the process. Most of these dishes call for 2 to 4 hours of cooking. Stop trying to make sped-up versions, accept the time discipline of the original.
Share it. After you learn the recipe, pass it to friends and family, photograph and write about it, send it like a postcard to another household. That is how a recipe's life is extended.
A final word
Anatolian cuisine is far broader than people assume. The twenty or thirty widely known dishes are only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. Beneath the surface there are hundreds of dishes, each one carrying the story of a community, a climate, a slice of history. Rescuing a recipe is like rescuing a book; as long as enough people read it and tell it, it does not go out.
Related Posts
- : a taste map of the seven regions.
- : traditional cauldron and communal cooking.
- : the historical legacy of Turkish sweets.
Sources
- Slow Food Foundation, "Ark of Taste": international catalogue of traditional foods at risk of extinction worldwide.
- Daily Sabah, "Turkey's legacy in Slow Foods Ark of Taste": 76 products from Türkiye, regional distribution, and the detail on Korkuteli smoked ice cream.
- Hürriyet Daily News, "Anatolian delicacies on Slow Food's list": dry kaymak and tarhana in the broader Turkish gastronomic heritage.
- Hürriyet Lezizz, "Lezzetleri gün yüzüne çıkardılar": regional distribution of dishes like keledoş, sour çılbır, and perverde.
- Wikipedia, "Ark of Taste": Slow Food's catalogue programme, definition and criteria.
- ScienceDirect, "Historical background of Turkish gastronomy from ancient times until today": an academic survey of the historical evolution of Turkish cuisine.