A pinch from the Aegean - Paperback

by Erdem Yalçın (Photographer), Melih Ugras Erol (Author)

In the Aegean, the passion of eating and drinking is inseparable. The abundance of food in Aegean, which is delicious and healthy, never exhausts. The secret of the Aegean tables is the endless greenery in the mountains, the fishy Aegean Sea, the productivity of plains, sincerity, and competence of the Aegean people. With such an inspiration, this work is a story that revolves around Aegean. This is a food and drink adventure of eating and drinking inspired by Aegean's few points, ingredients, and recipes. The adventure of eating and drinking in this work starts with olives and figs, continues from tarhana soup to fish mezes, from green herbaceous salads to stews, and a great story from sweets to drinks. In Aegean, cultures and cuisines are not stratified; they shall indeed identified together. Of course, it is impossible to mention the numerous methods and recipes in this few pages, however, in this book we inspired from couple of recipes and ingredients that you can hear if you visit neighbourhoods of Aegean. In fact, Aegean has coasts, actually not opposite but coasts that live shoulder to shoulder. Aegean hosted lots of civilisations that had lived over its lands. The closest friend of Aegean region is undoubtedly Greece and Turkey. The closeness of their cuisines is like lifetime friendship.This friendship even can be witnessed in names of foods. For instance, eggplant called "patlıcan" in Turkish becomes "melitzána" in Greek; while in Turkish parsley is "maydanoz" Greeks call it "maïntanós" and so on. All these examples are just some pieces of evidence that shows how close are cuisines in Aegean. In fact, the similarity between the recipes is close and sometimes only the differences are on the used spices or kind of meat. Irreplaceable things underlie all of our shared values in Aegean. I inspired all of my recipes from the Aegean cuisine. Since I do not believe that any flavor occurs by itself, I do not also think that these recipes solely belong to me. You will see that these flavors benefit from the inheritance of the people living in Aegean land, who put various ingredients together to make delicious foods for centuries. Consequently, by feeling that these flavors and ingredients are in my genetic codes and the self-confidence of being from the Aegean region encouraged me to get into the kitchen.