Aşçı Başı (Head Cook CookBook)

Cooking and discovering new dishes is a passion. This is, of course, not a newly emerging passion. Cooking, discovering new dishes and writing down those discovered dishes were a great passion in the 19th century just as much as today.

One of the most concrete examples of this passion is the book Aşçı Başı (“Head Cook” in English) written by Mahmut Nedim and published in 1900, the beginning of the 20th century. Mahmut Nedim, a young military officer in Bulanık district of Muş, put together a cookbook so that the soldiers who were bachelors like him could benefit from it while doing their military service in Eastern Anatolia. He became interested in Anatolian food and wrote a book in which he blended Anatolian cuisine and the cuisine of his homeland Crete. After a hundred and twenty years, that book is still remembered with great enthusiasm.

We believe that our library and archive are much more meaningful and rich with such books. We are very happy that we have this collection and we can share this passion with you directly from the original copies and pages.

Aşçı Başı, the only book written by Mahmut Nedim, contains 254 pages and 315 recipes. Compared to the other cookbooks written up to that time, the language used in Aşçı Başı is simpler. It is a very special book as it contains more recipes from Anatolian cuisine compared to Istanbul cuisine. The book contains recipes from Bitlis, Muş, Erzurum, Harput Elazığ, Dersim, Çemişgezek, Tunceli, Diyarbakır, Kars etc.

Mahmut Nedim has wonderful observations about Anatolian food culture; Mahmut Nedim says that “in Tunceli he once cooked beans the size of one archine, the carrot was called ‘pörçüklü’ in the Harput province, he never saw a tandoor being used in Rumelia, and the “piryan” kebab prepared in Bitlis and Muş provinces was very tasty.”