Sebze: Vegetarian Recipes from My Turkish Kitchen
Hardie Grant Books, 2024, RRP $65.
By Özlem Warren
If ever there was a subject close to our hearts, it’s Türkiye and Turkish cuisine. One of our team spent time there, falling for it hard. The food is a flavouricious ride that’s fascinatingly varied among regions – the Black Sea area champions cornmeal and anchovies; in the South the fare is influenced by bordering Syria, with pistachios, pomegranate molasses, spices like cumin and isot (smoky Urfa chilli pepper) essential flavours. The Aegean coast throws up peerless olive oil, abundant vegetables, foraged greens and fresh-flavoured dishes, while Anatolian heartlands are fuelled by hearty dishes containing barley, legumes and wheat. In far-flung villages they still bake bread using tandoor-style ovens and flavour home-made cheese with foraged herbs. Even in large cities there’s still a reliance on local food markets for fresh produce, cheeses, nuts, pulses and the like, and the variety is mind-bending. If it grows, you can bet it grows somewhere in Türkiye. The cuisine deserves more than our generalised characterisation here –we’re just trying to quickly paint a picture. Who better to teach us than the delightful food writer Özlem Warren, native to Antakya in southern Türkiye and now based in London? We love that her latest book, called Sebze (which means ‘vegetable’ in Turkish), is a compilation of vegetarian dishes causing anyone who thinks Turkish food is only about meaty kebabs to think again.
A hallmark of Turkish food is that it’s by-and-large simple, some types of baklava, manti (tiny dumplings), künefe and dishes like su böreği (a type of pie you need skill and special equipment to cook) notwithstanding. Sebze is filled with delicious, rustic dishes you can easily replicate; Garlicky Courgettes and Carrots with Walnuts in Yogurt (a sumptuously chunky meze that looks SO good you just want to dive into a plate of it), Beetroot and Walnuts with Pomegranate Molasses, Turkish Garlicky Mashed Potatoes, and Chard Cooked in Olive Oil with Onion, Peppers and Rice, for example. Already-fans of Turkish cuisine will be pleased to see recipes for classics like çılbır (poached eggs in yoghurt), muhummara (walnut and red capsicum dip spiked with pomegranate molasses), fasulye piyazi (bean salad with boiled eggs and tahini dressing) and kisir, a wholesome, spicy bulgur salad flavoured with Turkish pepper paste, pul biber, and pomegranate. Sweet lovers will rightly go bananas over the dessert chapter where goodies like kuru kayisi tatlisi (poached dried apricots stuffed with clotted cream and doused in syrup) and şöbiyet (baklava triangles with semolina cream and pistachio) tempt. YUM.
Özlem’s voice prefaces the recipes and 11 chapters, building a picture of how she specifically, and Turks generally, like to cook and eat. Chapters are divided among themes like Bread and Savoury Bakes, All-Day Breakfast, Soups, Salads, Casseroles, Stews and Pasta, Pickles, Condiments and Sauces and – our favourite – Vegetables Cooked in Olive Oil. Called zeytinyağlı, dishes cooked in olive oil comprise a distinct category in Turkish cookery. As Özlem explains, “We favour simplicity, letting the flavours of the vegetables speak for themselves with no-fuss techniques. One such approach is zeytinyağlı – vegetables cooked in olive oil and a little water flavoured with lemon juice, herbs and spices.” It sounds ridiculously simple and it is, but the end-results are spectacular. If you want to make vegetables taste like themselves but to the power of a gazillion, cook them this way!
Sam A. Harris has done a superb job of the food photography, and the location photos give insight into Turkish streets, markets, and Özlem’s own life with food. We appreciate that she opens the book with an overview of Turkish cuisine, a list of essential ingredients and a ‘What to Expect in Sebze’ two-pager. She makes Turkish vegetarian dishes approachable without dumbing them down, providing all the right culinary, cultural and personal context without over-burdening the 85 recipes with information. They say that on average, a recipe book contains just three recipes that the user will cook; we reckon this is a book to completely defy that tired statistic.
