History And Thought
Pepper In Ottoman Cooking: The Page Opened By Arnavut Biberi
Recipes and records tell us more about red pepper in Ottoman cooking than a single “arrival date.” Özge Samancı identifies an eighteenth-century pickle recipe and the name Arnavut biberi in the 1844 Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn; wider use during the nineteenth century is a different question from those early traces.
How We Prepare These Articles
1844: The Ingredient Vocabulary Of A Printed Kitchen
Mehmed Kâmil’s Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn, the Refuge of Cooks, is studied as the first printed Turkish cookbook, published in 1844. A printed book allows recipes to circulate through copies and new editions as well as through kitchen practice.
Samancı’s 2019 article explicitly identifies occasional use of powdered red pepper under the name Arnavut biberi in that book. This is an attributed finding from her historical research. Quoting a particular recipe would additionally require its own text, edition and page.
How Should We Read Biber In An Old Recipe?
Black pepper and Capsicum peppers are different plants; identifying an ingredient behind a historical name requires context. Qualifiers describing colour, form and origin are therefore valuable. A name such as Arnavut biberi offers a more specific reading than biber alone.
Dates need the same care. Samancı associates red pepper with an eighteenth-century pickle record while describing wider adoption of new ingredients in Istanbul and palace cooking especially during the nineteenth century. Presence in a recipe does not establish equal use throughout a city.
Sources For This Section
A Library Record And A Production Document Ask Different Questions
A cookbook’s bibliographic record establishes who published it and when. A geographical-indication document describes the place, characteristics and production framework of a named contemporary product. Reading them together can reveal change over time without inserting an unproved continuous tradition between them.
The registration document for Şanlıurfa Biberi, number 33, records a product and its processing. Here it serves as a document rather than a home recipe or storage instruction. Its interest lies in how a place name and production knowledge become a formal record.
Three Scales For Reading One Ingredient
A recipe makes a particular dish visible; historical research follows changes across records; a registration document defines a named product. Pepper history is therefore larger than the question of when it entered a kitchen. Naming, use in particular dishes and the transmission of production knowledge also belong to that history. A pepper name on a hot-sauce bottle can carry curiosity from the present to the page of an old recipe. The question there remains concrete: what does that name mean in that dish?
Sources And Further Reading
- Acar Tek and Sürücüoğlu · The first printed Turkish cookbook, Melceü't-Tabbâhîn, 2014
Reading area: Identity of the book and the 1260/1844 printing.
Accessed:
- Özge Samancı · New World flavours in Istanbul cuisine: tomato, pepper, 2019
Reading area: Samancı 2019, pp.88–89: eighteenth-century red-pepper pickle record; Arnavut biberi in the 1844 cookbook; nineteenth-century adoption. Attributed historical findings rather than direct inspection of the recipe text.
Accessed:
- TÜRKPATENT · Şanlıurfa Biberi registration certificate (No. 33), 2001
Reading area: Şanlıurfa Biberi registration document: number 33, designation of origin, 29 April 2001; Biber (isot) and production framework.
Accessed: