THE EVOLUTION OF THE SEPHARDIC CUISINE IN TURKEY

A culture's culinary 'repertoire' is influenced by its values, its religious structure, its socio- economic levels as well as the country s climate and geography. The Sephardic Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 settled in the Ottoman Empire and brought with them a food culture that was influenced by their Spanish heritage. Today, they continue to keep alive their home-style cooking made up of natural, healthy and colorful dishes under the influence of the Mediterranean climate. The purpose of this book is to analyze the evolution of the Turkish Sephardic cuisine, in conjunction with the history of the Jews residing in Turkey. The book compares the Sephardic and Ottoman cuisines in order to show how both contributed to and enthusiastically embraced each other s culture. The analysis should be especially useful to professionals or anyone who may be interested to understand how a 'community cuisine' has survived for more than five centuries, and to provide some direction for the study of how it can continue to live on as an expression of the identity of an ethnic group in today s world of globalization.