Simply a simple salad
There is nothing like a refreshing cold salad made simply with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and onions on a hot summer day. Either doused with spiky vinegar or fresh lemon juice, a mixed salad of all kitchen garden goodies is the most reviving and rewarding. Tomatoes are at their best, tasty and meaty, cucumbers are at their juiciest, long green peppers are addictively crunchy, blended perfectly with raw onions, the salad becomes like a perfect meal in itself, if you dunk your bread to mop up all the juices. “Çoban Salatası” in Turkish, translated as "Shepherd's salad," is undoubtedly the centerpiece of summer tables
So how long has shepherd's salad been in our kitchen? Not as long as we think. Because even though cucumbers and onions are native to Anatolia since ancient times, tomatoes and green peppers are comparatively new entries to our tables, way after the discovery of America. When tomatoes and green peppers arrived in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, it took a long time for them to become widespread in our kitchens. The introduction of tomatoes into home kitchens does not go back more than a century, so it is unlikely that shepherd's salad existed before that. But of course, having a green salad along with warm meals has been around since the early Ottoman period. So, when those new world tastes became widespread, it was inevitable to come up with a medley of fresh ingredients from the garden. That is how it is born, but tagging the name with the name “Çoban” aka “Shepherd” must be the invention of some chefs in the early years of the republic. Here, the term “Çoban” must refer to its simplicity and low-cost character. At around the turn of the century, a cookbook written by Mahmud Nedim bin Tosun features such a low-cost salad made only with tomatoes, calling it “Fukara Salatası” namely, “Poor Man’s Salad.” Interestingly, the tomatoes are grilled instead of being raw. Another recipe in the same book makes a salad of tomatoes with “Frenk Patlıcanı” literally “French Eggplants,” a name given to green peppers or any kind of peppers at the time. Anything foreign, unknown, or a novelty coming from the West would be called French those days. That salad also adds raw onions rubbed with salt, finely chopped parsley and tops the salad with a few green and black olives. As seen, cucumbers are not featured in these recipes, yet they make refreshing salads on their own, with a walnut tarator sauce or yogurt. It seems that eventually these salads were combined to make one iconic salad, today’s Çoban Salatası, ubiquitous to all eateries and home tables.
Another question would be “Is shepherd's salad unique to our cuisine?” Not at all. On the contrary, our neighbors all around us have made salads similar to shepherd's salad regard it as the crown jewel in their cuisines, almost a flag. Its counterparts in neighboring countries are almost a national dish. The most famous salad similar to shepherd's salad is known as "Greek Salad" in Greece. The difference from our humble shepherd's salad is that it is topped with a large slice of feta cheese, which is identical to Turkish “Beyaz Peynir” aka white cheese, and often with a few plump Kalamata olives. The ingredients in Greek salad are chopped rather coarsely compared to the Turkish version, and often the herb used would be wild thyme or oregano, with good cold-pressed olive oil, one feels that you are undoubtedly in Greece. Actually, such salads are quite common in all Balkan countries. In Bulgaria, "Šopska Salat" is almost like the flag of Bulgarian cuisine, and it was created for such a purpose, its colors are red, green and white, just like the Bulgarian flag. Even though it is not traditional, it has become such an important symbol of Bulgaria that it is the subject of envy in neighboring countries. Serbia and Macedonia also claim ownership of the salad.
The story of how the salad, which is very similar to its Greek or Turkish counterparts, and how it became a flagship dish of Bulgaria is really fun to discover. I first heard the story of "Šopska Salat" at the University of Giessen at a symposium on food culture in the Balkans in the late Ottoman period organized by the distinguished Ottoman historian Soraiya Faroqhi. It was presented by Bulgarian historian Stefan Detchev with brilliantly compiled examples; we were all thoroughly entertained by the story of the inevitable rise of Šopska Salat in a country where salads were regarded as invalid food. The birth of the salad begins with the foundation of the state enterprise Balkantourist, established in 1948 to make Bulgaria, especially the Black Sea coast as a tourist destination for the countries behind the Iron Curtain under communism. A series of recipes were tested by chefs to compile a standard menu for hotels and restaurants, and one of them was this salad. The name was pinned by Petar Doychev, the doyen of Bulgarian tourism, who chose to name the salad after the people living in the mountainous region of Shopluk in the far west of Bulgaria, called Shopi. Funnily it was created on the other side of the country, at the Chernomorets restaurant in the town of Druzhba near Varna, on the Black Sea coast, and had nothing to do with the Shopi people. It was only in the 1970s that it became an obligatory rule to grate the white cheese that completes the white color of the Bulgarian flag, after the red of tomatoes and green of cucumbers.
When we go from the Balkans to the Middle East, things get a bit more complicated. In South East Türkiye we have “Kaşık Salatası” meaning literally “Spoon Salad” to be eaten with a spoon as the ingredients are chopped very finely. When you go to Iran, there is "Shirazi salad," which is more like our spoon salad, with no peppers but with fresh mint leaves, but ours seem to be juicier as there is a copious amount of pomegranate molasses. A very similar salad is known as Israeli salad in Israel. Gil Marks, a food writer and culinary historian who is the author of “The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food” says that this is actually a Palestinian-Arab salad. Some say the significance of Israeli salad is the cucumber used, the Beit Alpha variety of cucumber, which was developed in the Beit Alpha Kibbutz in the 1930s, and it is interestingly the most common type of cucumber sold in our country.
In short, from the Balkans to the Middle East, all countries have a similar simple summer salad, simply compiled by the season’s best tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers and onions, sometimes with slight differences in herbs, sometimes with cheese and olives. I like mine with vinegar, and as I am constantly on a diet, I cannot mop the juices with good crusty bread, instead, I gulp down the salad juices as if a cold soup, or more likely, sipping a Virgin Mary mocktail, so refreshing!
