‘The Heritage Table'

Ebru Erke

Some dishes are not meant to be made alone. Keşkek, for instance. It is not a dish one person can prepare on their own. Someone carries the meat, someone sorts the wheat, another watches the fire, while someone else slowly stirs the pot for hours. It is a dish that can only exist through togetherness. Mantı is much the same. No one sits down alone to fold hundreds of tiny dumplings. That is why, in Anatolia, mantı is not simply a dish but also a form of gathering. Rolling out yufka, making tomato paste, cutting erişte, preparing pickles… most of these traditions belong not to an individual, but to time shared collectively. Perhaps this is why the true memory of Turkish cuisine is preserved not in recipes, but around the table itself. And that memory is carried not through written records, but through time spent in kitchens together, through gestures and instincts passed from mother to daughter.

Held for the fifth time this year under the patronage of Emine Erdoğan, the First Lady of Türkiye, Turkish Cuisine Week takes on particular significance with its theme “A Heritage at the Table.” Because this theme proposes reading Turkish cuisine not simply as a collection of rich dishes, but as a vast collective archive shaped by migration, rituals, mourning traditions, weddings, communal labor and the culture of sharing life together. One of the differences this year is that the celebration will not be limited to a single week. Throughout the year, the same narrative will continue to be represented at receptions and events hosted by Turkish embassies abroad.

Today, when we talk about gastronomy, we often focus on recipes, restaurants and chefs. Yet the true culinary culture of a society lies not only in what it cooks, but in how it shares. Some dishes are made not merely to feed people, but to keep communities together. In Anatolia, certain foods owe part of their flavor to the crowd gathered around them. Those tables are not simply places where food is prepared. They are social spaces where news is exchanged, relationships are built, disputes are settled and children grow up.

Keşkek is exactly such a dish. Its inclusion on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list is no coincidence. Across Anatolia, it sits at the center of weddings, festivals and large celebrations. Helva carries a similar meaning. In Anatolia, helva is never just a dessert. If helva is being prepared in a household, there is usually a reason behind it. Mourning, remembrance, sharing. Even its aroma can awaken memory. Because some tastes live not on the palate, but in the mind.

Mantı tells another story altogether. In every folded piece of dough lies the trace of migration routes stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia. Dolma is no different. It reflects the shared culinary language of cultures that have lived side by side on the same land for centuries. The olive oil version speaks differently from the meat-filled one. What is wrapped inside the vine leaf is not merely rice or minced meat, but layers of cultural memory. This is precisely where the strength of Turkish cuisine lies. Not in belonging to a single center or speaking in a single voice, but in having grown through migration, transitions and encounters between cultures.

What we call “Turkish cuisine” today is, in fact, the meeting point of countless local memories gathered around the same table. Kars carries one memory, Antakya another, Gaziantep another, the Black Sea region yet another. Within the same country live entirely different rituals, techniques and ingredients. Yet at the center of all this diversity stands one common idea: The table.

Some societies preserve their memory through books. Others preserve it through food. A recipe tells us more than flavor alone. It tells us about climate, agriculture, poverty, abundance, migration and seasonality. Some recipes are silent witnesses to their era. Dried vegetables speak of harsh winters, fermented foods reveal the need for preservation and large communal dishes reflect cultures built around collective living. Even the reasons why a region dries vegetables, ferments foods or relies on offal are rooted in the realities of daily life.

But are we still truly sitting around the same table today? Perhaps one of modern life’s greatest fractures lies precisely here. People living in the same house no longer eat together at the same time. Sometimes they go days without sharing a single meal at the same table. Food delivery culture is expanding, eating is becoming increasingly individual and speed dominates daily life.

The recipes may still survive, but the way of life that once sustained them is slowly disappearing. That is why the theme “A Heritage at the Table” should not be read merely as nostalgia for the past. The real issue is not romanticizing old recipes, but remembering the culture of togetherness that made those recipes possible in the first place. Because sometimes a society reveals itself most clearly through its table.

Sharing a meal is one of the oldest ways of learning how to live together. Perhaps this is why some dishes in Anatolia are still not meant for one person alone. Because their true ingredient is not simply wheat, meat or dough, but the very act of being together.