When Amasya's beet dish is mentioned, what comes to mind is not, as the name might suggest, the red root beet. The main ingredient is a leafy green plant that the locals call ot pancarı (greens beet) or kuş ekmeği ("bird's bread"). It is cleaned and chopped finely, sautéed with onion and minced meat, cooked with bulgur and, as a rule, served with garlic yogurt. The dish's second familiar name is pastırmalı pancar, beet greens with pastırma. In the recipe given in the Amasya Cuisine book prepared for the Amasya Governorship, pastırma does not appear as a required ingredient but as an option alongside çemen, the spice paste that coats it. What we have, then, is a dish of greens and bulgur that leaves a little room between its name and its recipe, and that changes shape from one household kitchen to the next. The written traces of the dish's past confirm this flexibility: in memoirs describing Amasya in the last years of the Ottoman period, a bulgur pilaf made with "pancar" greens gathered in the spring months appears in a form strikingly close to today's recipe.

Its Name and Main Ingredient

In the introductory text published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism the dish appears under the title "Amasya Pancar Yemeği" (Amasya Beet Dish), and the first sentence of the text is a note on naming: in Amasya, beet is also called kuş ekmeği. The text gives no botanical name for the plant and speaks only of "ot pancarı" and "green beet greens". It is therefore impossible to say with certainty which species or variety the ingredient corresponds to. What is known is that beet, sugar beet and chard all belong to the plant group Beta vulgaris, and that chard is described as a large-leaved, vitamin-rich vegetable that is easy to digest. The part of the plant used in the dish is the leafy green part rather than the root.

The dictionaries make this naming more complicated still. The Turkish Language Association's Current Turkish Dictionary defines pancar as a vitamin-rich plant of the goosefoot family (Beta vulgaris) and gives, as a second sense, its thick, fleshy root from which sugar is obtained. In the same dictionary, however, kuşekmeği is an entirely different plant: a herbaceous plant of the mustard family, growing on barren ground, with white or purple flowers and formerly used in medicine, in other words pennycress (Thlaspi). No botanical record has been found showing whether the green called "kuş ekmeği" in Amasya corresponds to this dictionary definition. Since local plant names in Anatolia can refer to different plants from one province to the next, it would be wrong to transfer the dictionary sense directly to Amasya usage.

There are also hints that in the regional kitchen the word "pancar" stands for a group of greens rather than a single plant. In a kaba pancar (coarse beet) recipe from Amasya the ingredient is described as "mixed greens", with kuş ekmeği, mallow, dikencik and corn poppy listed in parentheses. The Tokat version of the beet dish likewise calls for a kilo of the mixed greens sold at the market. The memoir collection describing the cuisine of Amasya's Armenian inhabitants in the Ottoman period does not use the word "pandjar" for a single plant either; in the English translation the word is glossed as "edible wild greens". It follows that the beet dish is the name not of a single vegetable but of whatever greens were gathered or found at the market that day, and the recipe is kept flexible accordingly. This variety also explains the care given to cleaning and chopping: the greens are washed thoroughly and drained, picked over, and chopped as finely as possible.

One detail suggests that the local names were not confused with one another. In a paper presented to the international tourism and culinary conference held in Amasya in 2022, madımak (knotweed) and kuşekmeği appear as separate dishes in the list of Amasya's vegetable dishes, and pirpirim appears in the same list. The Amasya Cuisine book also gives madımak as a recipe separate from pancar. From these two sources one may infer that in Amasya the name kuş ekmeği does not refer to madımak; this, however, is an inference, and it is not enough to establish the botanical identity of the green.

Gathering Pancar in the Last Years of the Ottoman Period

The most detailed information on the dish before its present written recipes comes from an unexpected source. Sonia Tashjian's article on the cuisine of Amasya, published in 2022 by the Houshamadyan project, which aims to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life, relies largely on Kapriel H. Simonian's memory book of Amasya, printed in Venice in 1966. According to the article, the people of Amasya gathered edible wild greens called "pandjar" in the spring months and used them in various dishes. Some of these greens could be eaten without boiling, while others came to the table only after being boiled and drained. The same text also records that the root beet was kept separately as a winter provision: the beets, rendered "beets" in the translation, were stored together with carrots and potatoes in pits dug into the floor of the pantry. Green pancar gathered as a wild plant and pancar kept for its root were, in other words, separate things in the household of that period too.

The article gives three recipes made with pancar greens. The first is the dish whose name is translated directly as "pilaf with wild greens": half a kilogram of greens, one onion, one cup of coarse bulgur, two tablespoons of oil or vegetable oil, two and a half cups of water, red and black pepper, and salt. The greens are boiled, drained, chopped and fried together with the chopped onion; then the bulgur, spices and water are added and the dish is cooked over a low flame until it has absorbed all the water. The second recipe uses a kilogram of greens, half a kilogram of cabbage, half a cup of coarse bulgur, four cups of water, two onions, oil, pepper, mint and salt; the greens are boiled and drained, the cabbage and onion are steamed in oil, and then the greens, bulgur, spices and water are added and the whole is cooked over a low flame. In the article this dish is named, with the word used there for cabbage, "wild greens with kelem". The third recipe is an omelette: half a kilogram of greens is boiled and drained, chopped and fried in oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and cooked with three beaten eggs poured over it.

These recipes show that the basic framework of today's beet dish existed in Amasya at least in the last years of the Ottoman period: greens, onion, bulgur, and slow cooking until the water is absorbed. Two important differences stand out. In the old recipes the greens are first boiled and drained, whereas in today's recipe the raw greens go straight into the pot and are left to wilt. In addition, the old pilaf contains no meat or pastırma, and the fat is given as "oil or vegetable oil". The same article says that pilafs were cooked with oil on ordinary days and with vegetable oil during the great fast of Lent; this double option in the pilaf with greens suggests that the dish suited both the Lenten table and ordinary days. This last point is not stated in the text; it is an interpretation drawn from the way the recipes are built.

The Recipe in the Amasya Cuisine Book

The main source of today's recipe is the Amasya Governorship's Amasya Cuisine book. The book has been published page by page on the Ministry's website and gives an English version of every recipe alongside the Turkish text. The dish appears in the "Vegetable Dishes" section, on page 41, between fried squash peel and kabak çırpma, under the heading Pancar; in the English section it is called "Beet" and the ingredient is translated as "beet leaves". This translation shows that the main ingredient was understood not as the root but as the leaves. The recipe is based on one kilogram of greens beet, and the list of ingredients is as follows.

  • 1 kg greens beet (also called kuş ekmeği)
  • 200 g minced meat
  • 1 dry onion
  • 1 tablespoon tomato paste
  • Fat and salt
  • Pastırma if possible, otherwise çemen
  • 1 tea glass of pilaf bulgur
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 bunch of parsley

The method is briefly described. The onion and minced meat are sautéed in fat; the picked-over, chopped green beet greens are placed on top and left to wilt. Then the bulgur, a little çemen, salt and tomato paste are added, two glasses of hot water are poured in, the lid is closed, and the dish is cooked over a low flame. If desired it is served with garlic yogurt poured over it. Although three eggs and a bunch of parsley are on the list of ingredients, the method does not say when or how these two are to be used. Whether the eggs are added to the cooking dish, or whether the parsley goes into the dish or is set aside for serving, cannot be determined from the book; it would be wrong to say anything definite on this point. Since it is known that in the old Amasya kitchen pancar greens were fried with three eggs into an omelette, it is a plausible possibility that the eggs were broken over the greens at the end of cooking; but this is only a guess drawn from a resemblance, and the book contains no statement to that effect.

Neighbouring Recipes in the Same Book

The vegetable section of the Amasya Cuisine book makes it possible to read the beet dish side by side with the region's other greens dishes. The recipe for pirpirim, the green known elsewhere as purslane, follows the same pattern; the Turkish Language Association's dictionary likewise records pirpirim as a dialect name for purslane. Onion and minced meat are sautéed in fat, the washed and picked-over pirpirim is added, and once the greens have wilted completely, rice, tomato paste and salt are stirred in; the dish is cooked with one glass of water, lid closed, over a low flame. It differs from the beet dish in using rice as its grain and less water. The book adds a note beneath this recipe: if fine bulgur fried in butter is used instead of rice, the dish can be served as a separate dish under the name pirpirim kavurması. The note shows that in greens dishes rice and bulgur can stand in for each other; the memoirs of the old Amasya kitchen likewise record that pilafs were made either with coarse bulgur or with rice.

The madımak recipe, by contrast, makes the place of pastırma in a greens dish quite clear. It uses five hundred grams of washed and picked-over madımak, one medium onion, two hundred grams of pastırma, a tablespoon of tomato paste, half a tea glass of oil and a glass of cracked wheat. The onion is sautéed in the oil, the pastırma and tomato paste are added, the chopped madımak goes in, then hot water and the cracked wheat are added and the dish is left to cook and served hot. Among the book's greens dishes, pastırma is an ingredient that in some recipes replaces meat or is used together with it. Seen in this context, there is nothing odd about the beet dish being called "with pastırma". Even so, in the book's beet recipe the real meat is the minced meat; pastırma or çemen is mentioned as an additional seasoning.

Pastırma and Çemen

Pastırma, which gives the dish its name, is a meat product made by salting and drying raw meat and then coating it with çemen. Çemen is made of garlic, fenugreek and spices, and gives pastırma its distinctive aroma and flavour. Çemen is also used as a seasoning in its own right and is described as a paste-like mixture of ground fenugreek, ground red pepper, garlic, salt and water. Tokat çemeni and Kayseri çemeni are prepared with different spice blends; Kayseri çemeni also received a geographical indication in 2023. According to the booklet of the Central Black Sea Development Agency introducing the region's foods, Tokat çemeni is made by mixing powder obtained from dried and ground fenugreek seeds with homemade pepper paste, walnuts, garlic, mint, olive oil and salt; it is spread on bread and is also used as a sauce in dishes.

The views put forward on the origin of pastırma reach back to Central Asia, to the story of the Huns carrying dried meat in their saddlebags. Evliya Çelebi, in the seventeenth century, mentions the cumin-spiced beef pastırma of Kayseri. Kayseri is today regarded as the centre of pastırma; the pastırmas of Kastamonu, Afyon, Ankara (from billy goat), Sivas, Erzurum and Diyarbakır have each been registered with a geographical indication as well. Amasya's own pastırma tradition is less well known. According to the article based on Simonian's memoirs, the people of Amasya were famous for the cured meat they called "aboukhd", for their sausages, and for a meatless Lenten sausage made with onions, garlic, cumin and walnuts, and each household stored its own winter supply of these. The same text describes how pastırma pide was made by arranging slices of pastırma on the pides baked in the oven before the bread.

In Amasya's beet dish the place of this product is flexible. The recipe's phrase "pastırma if possible, otherwise çemen" shows that pastırma is the preferred ingredient and çemen the substitute when it cannot be found. The neighbouring practice of Tokat throws light on the logic of this substitution: the same booklet writes that in Tokat meat on the bone was salted in summer, smeared with çemen and dried, to be used in dishes in winter, and that madımak, although eaten fresh in season, was also dried for winter and could be cooked with pastırma or with çemen. Since the aroma of pastırma comes largely from its çemen coating, adding çemen directly to the dish when there is no pastırma aims to replace the pastırma flavour rather than the meat. This, too, is an interpretation drawn from comparing the recipes, not something the sources say outright. The kaba pancar recipe from Amasya, which notes that no stock is needed when the dish is made with minced meat or pastırma, likewise assumes that the meat or pastırma lends the dish salt and flavour.

Bulgur, Yogurt and the Table

Bulgur places the dish somewhere between a stewed vegetable dish and a pilaf. In the kaba pancar recipe from Amasya, garlic is sautéed together with the onion, tomato paste and spices are added, the greens are stirred and sautéed over a low flame, then the bulgur is added and the dish is cooked with enough boiling water to cover the greens. The recipe also notes that stock may be added for flavour, and that this is unnecessary if the dish is made with minced meat or pastırma. It is served with whipped garlic yogurt and red pepper flakes. In Tokat's plainer recipe, onion and minced meat or pastırma are sautéed, the finely chopped beet greens are added, the greens are cooked with water, the bulgur goes in last, and the dish is served hot; the fat named in the recipe is butter.

The place of bulgur in the Amasya kitchen, and the ways it is used, are shown in figures by the master's thesis that Hüsniye Koçak completed at Ankara University in 2005. According to the study, based on interviews with three hundred women living in the central district of Amasya and its villages, half of them villagers and half town dwellers, 78 percent of the village women cooked bulgur pilaf by frying the bulgur in fat; in the town centre the most common method, at 45.3 percent, was to tip the bulgur into boiling water. Two thirds of the village women kept their bulgur, cracked wheat and rice in cloth sacks. In vegetable dishes, 72 percent of the villagers used vegetable oil, while in the town olive oil led at 52.7 percent; 12 percent of the village women said they used animal fat in vegetable dishes, whereas no one in the town did. The share of women cooking vegetables in their own juices or in little water was 18.7 percent in the villages and 80 percent in the town. The thesis does not deal with the beet dish separately; but these figures help to explain why a greens and bulgur dish that is bound to no single recipe, and is cooked with different habits in village and town, appears in so many forms.

Yogurt is the companion at this table. The slightly earthy taste of the cooked greens is balanced by the sourness of the garlic yogurt, and the pepper flakes add colour and heat. The memoirs describing the old Amasya kitchen also mention that garlic yogurt was a sauce widely used in the region, served especially with dolmas. According to the sources, cooking times vary from recipe to recipe: Amasya's kaba pancar recipe allows ten minutes of preparation and fifty minutes of cooking, while for the Tokat recipe fifteen minutes of preparation and thirty minutes of cooking are enough.

Comparing the Recipes

The written recipes at hand are enough to see how the same dish changes from household to household, region to region and period to period. The recipe in the Amasya Cuisine book takes minced meat and bulgur as its base, makes do with onion, tomato paste, salt and çemen or pastırma, and calls for two glasses of hot water; garlic goes only into the serving yogurt. The kaba pancar recipe from Amasya cooks a kilo of mixed greens with two dry onions, two cloves of garlic, four tablespoons of oil, a tablespoon of tomato paste and half a tea glass of bulgur; spices are left optional, and meat is added optionally as minced meat or pastırma. Here the greens are first sautéed over a low flame, the bulgur is added afterwards, and enough water is poured in to cover the greens. The Tokat recipe prepares a kilo of greens with three onions and half a glass of bulgur, offers three hundred grams of minced meat or a hundred grams of pastırma as alternatives, uses two tablespoons of butter, and adds the bulgur only after the greens have cooked thoroughly in water.

The pilaf with greens handed down from the Ottoman period adds a fourth measure to these three. In this recipe, with one cup of coarse bulgur and two and a half cups of water to half a kilogram of greens, the proportion of bulgur to greens is higher than in any of today's recipes; the dish resembles a bulgur pilaf with greens more than a vegetable dish. Its lack of meat, the absence of tomato paste, and the boiling and draining of the greens beforehand also set it apart from today's recipes. The absence of tomato paste in the old recipe is striking, but since the same memoirs write that tomato and pepper paste was prepared at home by thickening it in the sun, it would be wrong to attribute this difference to paste being unknown.

In none of the recipes are the measures exact; the water is adjusted to however much liquid the greens release, and the spices or meat are left to the household's preference. The common points of the dish in the Amasya sources, however, are clear: finely chopped greens, sautéed onion, bulgur and garlic yogurt. Compilations describing the same region's pirpirim dish describe a similar arrangement of the table: the dish, made with freshly gathered greens, minced meat, rice, tomato paste and onion, is eaten in summer and winter alike, mostly at the evening meal, and served with yogurt.

Season and Meal

The sources do not agree on the season in which the dish is eaten. One of the local food compilations presents pastırmalı pancar as a dish generally eaten in the winter months and at evening meals. The introductory text published by the Ministry, on the other hand, gives no season. The article based on Simonian's memoirs, however, states plainly that pancar greens were gathered in the spring months. These two pieces of information need not exclude each other: the season in which the greens are gathered and the season in which the dish is most eaten may differ. Yet no information specific to Amasya has been found on whether greens beet was dried or otherwise kept for the winter. The memoirs list herbs such as mint, thyme, basil and tarragon being dried in summer and kept in cloth sacks, and vegetables such as okra, aubergine and peppers being dried in the sun, but they do not mention pancar greens among them. The drying of madımak for winter is recorded for neighbouring Tokat. Which green was used for the winter pancar therefore remains an open question.

There is also a figure showing that the habit of gathering and eating wild greens is still strong in the region. According to a study evaluating the data of the 2017 Turkey Nutrition and Health Survey, 65.9 percent of individuals aged fifteen and over across Turkey consume edible wild greens; in the West Black Sea statistical region, to which Amasya belongs, the figure is 84.5 percent, the highest in the country. This figure is information at the scale of the region; it gives no number specific to Amasya or to the beet dish, but it shows that greens dishes remain part of everyday cooking in this region.

Compilations describing Amasya cuisine in general write that the summer months were mostly spent preparing for winter, and that many foods were dried and used again at the winter table. The same compilations list sunflower, poppy and beet among the ingredients frequently used in the kitchen. They note that great importance was given to the morning breakfast called kuşluk, and that there were many dishes for the evening and afternoon meals. Pastırmalı pancar is counted among the meat dishes and appears in the same list as bakla dolması, meat with okra, keşkek, ciğer sarması, göbek dolması, madımak, mıhlama, mumbar, tripe, patlıcan pehli, pastırma pağallemesi, pirpirim, liver in vinegar and sulu köfte. The pastırma pağallemesi on this list is a dish of pastırma cut to the thickness of a matchstick and sautéed with onion, generally eaten at breakfast. In the Amasya kitchen pastırma meets not only the beet dish but other tables as well.

The Amasya Table as the Book Describes It

Before setting out its recipes, the Amasya Cuisine book opens with a short section titled "A History of Amasya Dishes". Here Amasya is presented as a city that served for a long time as a capital for many peoples, acted under the Ottomans as a school and academy for candidates to the throne, and is known as the City of Princes; according to the book, the city also sought in its food a flavour, appearance and quality worthy of sultans. Dishes such as keşkek, bakla dolması, vişneli ekmek and unutma beni are cited in this account as examples of the city's culinary skill. The beet dish is not among those named; the book does not mention it among the city's famous dishes but gives it within the recipe section, among the vegetable dishes.

The book also lists, one by one, the dishes tied to ceremonies and occasions. It writes that at weddings, especially village weddings, cauldrons of keşkek, pilaf, meat and halva were boiled, and that the "ağır misafir" (honoured guest) table set for a guest from far away had to include six dishes: toyka soup, whole meat, rice pilaf, sinisu böreği, okra and a dessert; in summer, patlıcan pehlisi takes the place of the whole meat. There is no greens dish on these lists. The beet dish is not mentioned as part of these ceremonial tables; the sources count it among home dishes. The picture given by the memoirs of the old Amasya kitchen agrees with this: there, pancar greens appear not in festive pilafs but in the everyday pots of spring, in plain dishes cooked with cabbage, with bulgur or with eggs.

Its Place in Amasya Cuisine

The beet dish is not on the list of regional dishes approved by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; that list is led by pastries and pilafs such as Amasya çöreği, kabak kavuklu pilav, bişi, eli böğründe, hengel, yakasal böreği and yanuç. Even so, the beet dish has found its way into the Amasya Cuisine book and into the "Vegetable and Greens Dishes" section of the Ministry's introductory texts, and it is a home dish mentioned among Amasya's dishes in the compiled sources. Among the keywords of the text, besides Amasya cuisine, traditional cuisine and greens dishes, the name kuş ekmeği also appears.

Another well-known feature of Amasya cuisine is the tradition of the Zekeriya Sofrası. This table, laid with raw foods, is prepared at home especially by those whose wish has been granted, and is offered to guests. The beet dish is not mentioned as part of this table, but it is one of the examples showing that the region's food culture is built around plants and the seasons. Greens, bulgur, onion, tomato paste, yogurt and a little meat are ingredients found together in many parts of Anatolia; Tokat's beet dish is prepared within the same framework. What sets the Amasya recipe apart is that the green is called kuş ekmeği, that çemen can take the place of pastırma, and that the dish is served with garlic yogurt. The resemblance between the Ottoman-period bulgur pilaf with greens and today's beet dish with minced meat or pastırma suggests that the dish, even as its name and ingredients changed, has lived on from generation to generation on the strength of the same habit of gathering greens.

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