The Story Behind
the Spices

I was born and raised in Ankara, in a neighbourhood where the smell of simmering lentil soup and freshly baked simit bread drifted through every open window each morning. Our family home was not large, but the kitchen was its heart — a warm, flour-dusted room where the day truly began and ended. My mother worked long hours, so it was my grandmother, Büyükannem Hatice, who presided over that kitchen with quiet authority and an instinct for flavour that no cookbook could have taught her.

From the age of seven I was perched on a wooden stool beside her, watching her hands move through gestures that seemed as natural as breathing — rolling out yufka pastry on the big round tabla, stirring a pot of tarhana by feel alone, pressing her thumb into the centre of a köfte with exactly the right pressure. She never measured anything. She spoke about cooking in the language of seasons and memory: "This pepper smells like August," she would say, or "Add enough pomegranate molasses until it reminds you of your grandfather's orchard." I wrote nothing down then. I simply absorbed.

It was not until I was in my late thirties, long after my grandmother had passed and my own children were growing up with very different kitchens around them, that I understood what had been quietly slipping away. Turkey's culinary map is extraordinarily diverse — from the butter-rich stews of the Black Sea coast to the lamb and sumac traditions of the southeast, from the olive-dressed mezes of the Aegean to the Central Anatolian winter dishes that my grandmother carried in her hands. Yet so many of these recipes exist only in the muscle memory of elderly women in small towns, in torn notebooks kept in dresser drawers, in the half-remembered instructions passed down at a kitchen table. When those women are gone, the recipes go with them.

I started sevgi-eren — which in Turkish carries the meaning of one who loves and cherishes — because I wanted to bring these recipes out of those dresser drawers and into living kitchens around the world. Not as museum pieces or nostalgic curiosities, but as living, cookable, shareable food. Each recipe I publish here is tested in my own home, written with full context about its region and tradition, and accompanied by the story of the person or community who first shared it with me. I believe that to cook a dish is to honour the person who created it. And I believe it is not too late to remember.