In Amasya cooking, ekmek aşı usually means stale bread soaked in a hot, buttery or meaty liquid and brought to the table topped with garlic yogurt. In the region the same dish is also called papara. The Amasya Cuisine Book (Amasya Mutfağı Kitabı), published by the Amasya Governorate, lists the recipe under the heading "Papara" and explains it in a single sentence: in Amasya, papara is also called ekmek aşı. The provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism lists the dish among the pastry and dough-based foods as "ekmek aşı (papara)". The two names point to the same plate, and which one is used depends on the speaker's habit.

The most distinctive feature of the dish is that none of its ingredients is expensive or hard to find. Leftover bread, a few cloves of garlic, some fat and yogurt, and often a little minced meat or the broth of boiled meat are enough. For that reason ekmek aşı never lived on as a feast dish; it passed from generation to generation as everyday fare and as a winter-evening meal. Yet behind the dish stands a long and well-documented relationship between Amasya and its bread: the bakehouses of the public kitchens, the bread prices entered in the kadi's registers, the bitter memory of famine years and the bakeries of the market whose owners are still known by name.

The Origin and Meanings of the Name

Papara is a word that came into Turkish from outside. The dictionary of the Turkish Language Association (Türk Dil Kurumu) derives it from the Greek "papa'ra" and gives two meanings: a dish made with bread, cheese and meat broth or milk, and, figuratively, a scolding. The everyday idiom "papara yemek", literally "to eat papara", comes from the second sense; of someone who has been told off, people say "paparayı yedi", "he got his papara". The same dictionary also records, as an obsolete meaning, the shawm (zurna) played in the traditional orta oyunu theatre under the name papara. Sevan Nişanyan's etymological dictionary is more cautious. There the word is shown as cognate with the Greek papára, meaning "bread crumbled into milk", but the direction of the borrowing, that is, whether the word passed from Greek into Turkish or from Turkish into Greek, is left open.

The same dictionary also cites the earliest known written record of the word in Turkish. In Ahmed Vefik Pasha's dictionary Lehce-i Osmânî, published in 1876, papara is defined as "whey, cheese cooked in water", with the note that it was used figuratively for tastelessness. This record also explains why cheese appears in the modern dictionary definition. Amasya recipes, however, never mention cheese. The dish called papara in Amasya is closer to the meaty, yogurt-topped tirit dishes of Anatolia than to the milky or cheesy paparas of the Balkans and the Black Sea coast. Some sources describe papara as a characteristic dish of Rumelia, the Ottoman Balkans, while others trace it back to Ottoman cuisine. We have no firm document on the exact origin of either the name or the dish. And since the idea of making use of stale bread by soaking it is as old as the eating of grain itself, it is hard to tie it to a single region or period.

Respect for Bread and the Refusal to Waste

To grasp the table culture in which ekmek aşı arose, one has to look at how bread is regarded in Anatolia. In traditional rural culture bread is a blessing. Bread that falls to the ground is picked up, kissed, touched to the forehead and set down where no one will step on it. Throwing it away is considered a sin. Whether or not it is eaten, bread must be present on the table. This attitude made turning stale bread back into food as much a responsibility as a necessity. It is often said, too, that long years of war and periods of famine taught people to preserve what they had and to use it well.

The kitchen counterpart of this outlook is the tirit technique, in which a dry ingredient is soaked in a flavourful liquid. Tirit is a method associated with Central Asian culture and counted in Anatolia among the most widespread dish types after pilaf, keşkek and soup. In some places it takes its name from the meat poured over it, in others from the bread broken beneath it. Dishes made this way are known in different corners of Anatolia under names such as ekmek aşı, papara, ıslama, batırma, bandı bandı, yağlama or ovalama. Cities such as Kastamonu, Konya, Kütahya, Şanlıurfa and Kars have their own tirits. In Balıkesir, tirit is the main dish at weddings, circumcision feasts, mevlit gatherings and the send-off of pilgrims bound for Mecca. The common thread is clear: bread is softened with broth or a rich sauce and made edible again. Amasya's ekmek aşı is a regional member of this large family.

A telling reflection of the care the town of Amasya showed for bread can be found in the memoirs of Osman Fevzi Olcay. Describing a neighbour, the telegraph director known in the quarter as Baba Efendi, Olcay recalls the street dogs, never fewer than twenty, that followed him every morning on his way to the post office. When Baba Efendi reached the Buusoğlu bakery opposite the Vakıfhan, he had bread from the oven given to the animals under his own eye, waited until they had eaten their fill and only then went on to his office. In the evening, when the office closed, the same scene was repeated and the dogs received their evening bread as well. Small as this neighbourhood memory is, it shows an outlook in which bread was counted the due not only of people but of every creature living in the town.

Bread in Amasya: Public Kitchens, Bakehouses and Bakeries

The ground in which the habit of using up stale bread took root in Amasya was a town full, for centuries, of institutions that baked and distributed bread in bulk. In the first volume of his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar lists the imarets, the public kitchens built by sultans, viziers and emirs to feed students and scholars and to nourish the poor and visiting guests: the imarets of Bâyezîd Pasha, Yörgüç Pasha, Sultan Bâyezîd, Mehmed Pasha and the Hâtuniye. Each also had a tabhane, a guesthouse, beside it. In addition there were eleven further ziyafethanes, or hospices, from the Pervâne Bey Hospice in the Mevlevi lodge to the Ahî Sa'deddîn Hospice. In Hüsameddin's words, the food of these hospices was plentiful, their cooks and bakers were appointed, and their overseers were salaried. The author adds that until forty years before his own time the houses of Amasya's notables had each been a kind of hospice too.

The Sultan Bayezid Complex had a separate building in which bread was baked. When Hüsameddin describes the location of the Qur'an school (dârülkurrâ) built by Bayezid II and completed in 891 (1486), he places it "to the north of the imaret's bakehouse and to the west of the guesthouse". Olcay, for his part, relates that the madrasa built by Mehmed Pasha, brother of Hızır Pasha, had a bakehouse and an oven beside its first room on the Yeşilırmak side, and that in this oven, especially throughout the month of Ramadan, pide flatbreads were baked and distributed to the townspeople, to the poor of the quarter and for charitable purposes. Olcay gives the madrasa's construction date as 902 (1496), adding "as far as I remember". Of the Yörgüç Pasha Mosque he writes that in his day nothing remained but the derelict bakehouse within the mosque and the family's gravestones. Beneath the Mehmet Bey Madrasa, too, there was a bread oven built to provide income for the madrasa.

Bread was also a vehicle for religious and ceremonial charity. According to Olcay, every year on the eve of the Feast of the Sacrifice, Karcı İmam Tevfik Efendi had flour helva made; the helva was wrapped in pide bread and carried in great laundry baskets to the Tomb of the Lower Saints (Aşağı Pirler Türbesi), where, after the hafızes had completed their recitation of the Qur'an and the prayer, it was handed out to the people. That bread served so widely as a means of charity helps explain why even its smallest piece was treasured at home.

In the Amasya market of the early twentieth century, bakers were among the town's well-known figures. Walking the market shop by shop from Selağzı to the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, Olcay says that the bread of the Buusoğlu bakery, which came after the shops beneath the Vakıfhan, had won great fame in Amasya. Elsewhere he mentions the same bakery as "the famous pide bakery run by the baker Şekeroğlu Buus". The baker İbrahim Ağa from Yenice village, who kept a bakery in Selağzı, the bakery of Ekmekçi Bandili and the baker Hacı Necip are other names that appear in the same memoirs. In one corner of the market stood the shop of Mehmet, a greengrocer who sold yogurt, and that of Hatip Hoca, the renowned master of cacık, neither of them far from these bakeries. The two basic ingredients of ekmek aşı, bread and garlic yogurt, could be found within a few steps of each other in the same market.

Bread in the Price Registers

In Ottoman towns the price of bread was not left free; it was fixed by the kadi as an official price, the narh. Yılmaz Karadeniz's study, based on Amasya Islamic court registers nos. 52 and 53, shows in detail how the bread narh worked in Amasya between 1764 and 1771. The narh was usually set twice a year after consulting the town's market heads and the elderly, experienced members of the guilds, and was entered in the kadi's registers. Bread prices were sometimes given as a separate "bakers' narh" list and sometimes as notes written in the margins of the price lists for other goods. A tradesman who broke the rule could have his shop closed.

In Amasya the price of bread was always held at one akçe; what changed was the weight of bread given for one akçe. In 1764 one akçe bought 120 dirhems of bread; the following year this was cut to 90 dirhems, and within the same year it was freed on condition that it stay between 110 and 80 dirhems. In 1767 and early 1768 one akçe bought 125 dirhems, close to four hundred grams of bread. In 1770 and 1771, however, under the burden of the Russo-Ottoman War, the amount fell to 80 dirhems, about two hundred and fifty grams. The bread bought for the same money had shrunk by more than a third. In the war years tens of thousands of kiles of flour and barley were collected from the sanjak of Amasya for the army. A purchase decree of 1769 demanded seventy thousand kiles of flour and forty thousand kiles of barley at state prices set below the market rate.

The prices in the same registers also indirectly explain why ekmek aşı settled in as a frugal home dish of modest households. In 1764 and 1765 the narh for one kıyye of meat, about one kilo three hundred grams, was between 12 and 18 akçes in Amasya. The same amount of clarified butter sold for 54 to 60 akçes, and honey at a similar price. Rice, by contrast, cost 18 to 20 akçes a kıyye and bulgur around 10. The lists name Amasya rice and Boyabat rice separately. In a town where one akçe bought around four hundred grams of bread, bringing a few days' stale bread back to the table with a handful of pilaf or minced meat and the household's own yogurt was the most sensible way to use costly butter and meat sparingly.

The Memory of Famine Years

Behind the respect shown to bread lie the hard famine years in which Amasya had its share. Hüsameddin writes that in 685 (1286), when the Ilkhanid troops plundered the regions of Erzurum and Sivas on their way back from their winter quarters at Erzincan, famine and dearth broke out everywhere, and even the meat of cats, mice and dogs became so scarce that it was placed under price control like mutton and beef. The picture he draws for the year 718 (1318), relying on the chronicle of al-Aynî, is darker still. That year famine gripped the people of Anatolia so severely that the poor were forced to sell their children to feed themselves.

After the great earthquake of 818 (1415), the people of Amasya lived in tents for about three months. According to Hüsameddin, the gardens, vineyards and fields that had survived the earthquake also dried up, and famine seized the town. In the late eighteenth century, in 1185 (1771), while the Russo-Ottoman War was still under way, farming had come to a halt because of six years of war and levies, and famine and high prices covered the land. The memory of that year lives on in a nickname. Zanalızâde es-Seyyid el-Hâc Ahmed Efendi, one of the notables of Amasya, earned the name "Bakırcı", the Copper Man, because during the famine he handed out grain and seed free of charge to the poor, measuring it with a copper scoop. Hüsameddin praises this generosity by saying that "his name was copper, but his bounty made it silver". Ahmed Efendi died in 1195 (1781).

The Place of Yogurt and Garlic

What sets ekmek aşı apart from an ordinary soaked-bread dish is the garlic yogurt spooned over it, and in this respect Amasya has long had fertile surroundings. Hüsameddin speaks highly of the vineyards, vegetable gardens, butter, yogurt and cheese of the Karasenir and Kayabaşı quarters just outside the town. Of the Akdağ district he writes that its summer pastures were wide and its water plentiful, that most of the sheep of the sanjak of Amasya grazed there in summer, and that its butter, cheese and yogurt were famous throughout the whole region known as "Pontus". Olcay, in turn, relates that in summer, milk and yogurt were brought every morning from the village of Şeyh Cüi to the pavilions of the townspeople who moved out to the Şeyh Cüi picnic grounds.

Strained yogurt stands out at the Amasya table in dishes other than ekmek aşı as well. Toyga soup, a speciality of the region, is likewise a thick soup made with cracked wheat, chickpeas and strained yogurt. Ekmek aşı is the plainest form of this habit: the contrast between bread softened under a hot, rich sauce and cold, sharp garlic yogurt carries the whole flavour of the dish.

The Recipe in the Amasya Cuisine Book

The recipe in the book published by the Governorate is the best-known written source for the region. The ingredients listed are stale bread, 200 grams of minced meat, one onion, three glasses of water, one glass of strained yogurt, two cloves of garlic and mint. Pilaf or rice is also on the list. The minced meat and onion are sautéed, and leftover pilaf, if there is any in the house, or otherwise a tea glass of soaked rice is added to the sauce. Three glasses of meat broth are added and brought to the boil. Meanwhile the stale bread is cut into two-centimetre cubes. If desired, the bread is lightly toasted in the oven. Adding leftover pilaf to the sauce shows that the recipe is open to using up the previous day's other leftovers along with the stale bread.

The way it is served is one of the recipe's interesting features. A large tray (sini) or copper basin (lenger) is placed in the middle of the table, small pieces of bread are arranged at the bottom, and the boiled sauce, still runny, is poured over them. Garlic yogurt goes on top, mint is sprinkled over it, and the dish is served onto plates from there. The book also describes another way of serving: the bread is first divided among the plates and the remaining steps are done directly on each plate. Serving from a large common dish also fits Amasya's customs of hospitality. Sources describing the region's traditions write that people in Amasya want to see a guest at their table at every meal, and if there is no guest they call in a poor or lonely person and share the meal with them. Eating from the same dish means, in tirit-type dishes, that everyone at the table is equal.

Variations from House to House

Ekmek aşı in Amasya does not fit a single mould. If the recipe above, with its minced meat and rice, sits at one end, the version made in plainer homes sits at the other. In this simple form butter is melted in a pot, crushed garlic is lightly fried and tomato paste is added, then hot water or broth is poured in and brought to the boil. Cubed or hand-crumbled stale bread is added to this spiced, garlicky liquid and cooked until it softens and absorbs it. In some households an egg is cracked into the soup, in others yogurt is added on top for a richer consistency. When serving, red pepper flakes or mint are sizzled in hot butter and drizzled over the plate. Prepared this way, ekmek aşı makes a meal on its own.

The version prepared by an Amasya housewife on a television cooking programme is another example of this variety. There half a kilo of beef rib is boiled and shredded, added to fried onions and seasoned with tomato paste, oil, red pepper flakes, ground paprika, black pepper, mint and cumin. Village bread cut into cubes is soaked with the cooking broth, topped with garlic strained yogurt and served with the meat. This recipe shows how close papara and tirit come to each other: it is a meat-and-soaked-bread dish, and the amount of meat, the choice of spices and whether pilaf is included vary from household to household.

In another home recipe the bread is first lightly toasted in an oven at 180 degrees. Onion is fried in butter until pink, minced meat is added and cooked until its juices are absorbed, salt and black pepper go in, three glasses of hot water are added, and after it has come to the boil once or twice the heat is turned off. After resting for five minutes the sauce is poured over the bread and served with garlic yogurt. Red pepper flakes sizzled in butter may also be poured over the yogurt.

The Right Bread, the Right Consistency

The success of ekmek aşı depends largely on the state of the bread. Experienced cooks say that bread a day or two old is best suited to the job. Bread dried hard as stone does not take up the sauce well, while fresh bread falls apart too easily. The sauce is poured over the hot bread but not stirred too much, because the more it is mixed the more the dish turns to mush. The bread should absorb the sauce and soften without losing its shape. The amount of liquid, too, should be neither too little nor too much. It is served hot, because papara left standing turns doughy and loses its texture.

The toppings vary from region to region. In Amasya garlic yogurt is an almost unchanging element. Mint or sizzled red pepper flakes differ from house to house. In some regions, for example in the papara of Erzurum, cheese is also added. Amasya recipes make no mention of cheese. This difference suggests that the cheesy papara of the dictionaries and Amasya's ekmek aşı, though they share a name, draw on different traditions.

Its Place in Amasya's Table Culture

Because Amasya is remembered as the town where Ottoman princes (şehzades) were raised, its cuisine is often described in connection with the palace. Culture and tourism sources write that the town developed dishes of its own with a flavour and appearance worthy of sultans. It is also reported that Evliya Çelebi, describing Amasya, mentioned its breads along with its forty kinds of pear, eleven kinds of cherry, seven kinds of grape and seven kinds of quince. The same sources give an example concerning bread: stale bread was not thrown away but turned into a new kind of dessert called "Unutma Beni" (Forget Me Not). Unutma Beni is made with stale bread and sweetened with grape molasses (pekmez). The story of the cake eaten in the prince's palace turning, through the skill of a poor family, into vişneli ekmek, sour cherry bread, belongs to the same tradition. For vişneli ekmek, stale bread is spread with butter and toasted in the oven, and sour cherry syrup is poured over it. These two desserts show that the habit of not wasting bread in Amasya was not limited to savoury dishes. Ekmek aşı is the savoury, main-meal branch of the same habit.

The regional cuisine list of the provincial directorate of culture and tourism includes, among soups, çatal soup, toyga soup, helle soup, kesme ibik soup and yarma soup; among meat dishes, bakla dolması, keşkek, okra with meat, mıhlama, madımak, patlıcan pehli and sulu köfte; and among pastry and dough dishes, Amasya çöreği, yağlı (katmer), bişi, cızlak, eli böğründe, hengel, meatless mantı, sini suböreği, tray börek, yakasal böreği, yanuç and ekmek aşı. That ekmek aşı is counted under pastry and dough dishes shows it is classified as a dish derived from bread or dough. The same list also includes desserts such as kuymak, gömlek kadayıfı, kalbur tatlısı and şeker böreği.

In Amasya, the dishes of special days and of guests follow a different order. The table for an honoured overnight guest described in the sources has six dishes: toyka soup, whole roast meat, rice pilaf, sini suböreği, okra and a dessert. In summer patlıcan pehli takes the place of the whole meat. At village weddings cauldrons of keşkek, pilaf, meat and helva are set boiling. To welcome returning pilgrims, toyka soup, pehli or whole meat, pilaf, dates and zamzam water are served. Ekmek aşı is not mentioned in these ceremonial menus. Its place is the everyday table of a household that wants to make use of its stale bread. The road that runs from the bakehouses of the public kitchens to the bakeries of the market, and from there to the household pot, makes ekmek aşı the last link in a long chain built in Amasya so that no piece of bread would go to waste.

Chronology

1286: According to Hüsameddin, famine and dearth break out in Anatolia after Ilkhanid troops plunder Erzurum and Sivas.

1318: According to a record based on al-Aynî's chronicle, Anatolia suffers a severe famine.

1415: After the great earthquake in Amasya, gardens and fields dry up and famine seizes the town.

1486: In the Sultan Bayezid Complex, the Qur'an school to the north of the imaret's bakehouse is completed.

1496: According to the date Olcay recalls, the Mehmed Pasha Madrasa is built with its bakehouse and oven.

1764: According to the Amasya Islamic court registers, one akçe buys 120 dirhems of bread.

1767: Bread becomes cheaper; one akçe buys 125 dirhems of bread.

1770-1771: During the Russo-Ottoman War, one akçe's worth of bread falls to 80 dirhems; farming in Amasya comes to a halt and famine follows. Zanalızâde Ahmed Efendi distributes free grain to the poor and earns the nickname "Bakırcı".

1876: Ahmed Vefik Pasha's Lehce-i Osmânî records the word papara with the meaning "whey, cheese cooked in water".

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Books

  • Turkish Language Association, Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, "papara" entry
  • Sevan Nişanyan, Nişanyan Sözlük, "papara" entry (citing Ahmed Vefik Paşa, Lehce-i Osmânî, 1876) nisanyansozluk.com

Other sources

  • Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, Regional Cuisine page
  • Central Black Sea Development Agency (OKA), Lezzet promotional booklet, Amasya section
  • Sofra, "Ekmek Aşı (Papara)" recipe
  • ShowTürk, "Amasya Mutfağı'ndan Ekmek Aşı" programme
  • Lezzet, "Geleneksel Papara Yemeği Yapmanın İncelikleri"
  • Hatice Şirin Uyanık, "Tirit Yemeği", Balıkesir Posta (13 October 2023)

Online sources