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Both these categories of festival, the religious and the seasonal, serve to fix the pattern of social and communal life. A third set of occasions serve as landmarks in the life of the individual and the family; their particular quality, too, is marked by appropriate gifts of food and drink.

This pertains particularly to marriage and all the carefully calibrated stages that have traditionally led up to it. In the past, when verbal agreement was made between the families of bride and groom, sherbet was served, followed by sweet coffee, lokum, and candy, the hope being that all this sweetness would somehow be reflected in the marriage-to-be. The formal announcement of engagement was similarly accompanied by much sweetness! On the night that the bride was taken to the bathhouse and the following night when she was adorned with henna, a substantial meal was served, consisting of pilaf and meat dishes, rich desserts, fruits, and roasted nuts. A similar ample repast would be prepared on the day of the wedding itself; essential elements of this feast were a meat pilaf, a warm vegetable dish, and tepsi böreği. If all went well on the wedding night, the family of the bridegroom would send a tray of desserts to the family of the bride the next day.

The procedures leading up to marriage in modern Turkey have been telescoped into a few simple stages, and not many people can afford the money and time required to provide such repeated hospitality on so lavish a scale. Nonetheless, the wedding and its preliminaries are still the occasion for much cooking, eating, and drinking.

A birth is, of course, a festive occasion, but it is not celebrated with the same ceremony as the circumcision of a male child, which traditionally takes place when the boy is at least four or five years old. Then he is dressed in a white suit and crown of velvet and gold thread, to help him forget his discomfort, and the guests are served a meal that should traditionally contain a meat pilaf, helva, and a saffron-flavored rice dessert (zerde) that is now almost entirely forgotten in Turkey.

Even death, the somber counterpart of the processes of generation and birth, has its culinary consequences. As the Turkish writer Nezihe Araz puts it with characteristic grace, human beings have never been able to accustom themselves to death, despite the grim regularity of its occurrence, and “those who seek to modify the nature of death by means of various ceremonies, to soften its impact, naturally have recourse to food in their efforts.” Even now, it is customary in Turkey for neighbors and friends to send food to a bereaved household for three days after the occurrence of death. The trays they send will always include warm soups, but never the sweets and desserts associated with joyous occasions. However, on the evening after the funeral, helva is prepared by female friends and relatives of the family, to the accompaniment of prayers, and it is then distributed in the neighborhood, with the request that everyone pray for the departed in whose name it has been prepared. Seven days after the funeral, lokma is made and similarly eaten in memory of the departed.

Many of the rich traditions described here have diminished or been forgotten in recent times. Changes in material culture, in living arrangements, and in the overall atmosphere of society have combined to make impossible the retention of the former leisurely way of life with its ornate and sumptuous celebration of special occasions. But it may be thought that the essential has been preserved: the celebration of continuity in patterns of religious devotion, in the cycle of the seasons, and in the life and death of the individual, by means of food that nurtures the heart and the spirit even more than the body.

Istanbul’s Newest Tastemaker

GISELA WILLIAMS

STYLISH DEFNE Koryürek (profiled in “Miniskirts Meet Minarets in the New Istanbul”) is one of Istanbul’s ultimate food insiders. Here she shares with writer Gisela Williams her favorite restaurants.

Kory