Amasya sulu köfte, or meatball stew, is a hot main course that gathers the region's meat culture and its frugal table tradition into a single pot. Small meatballs, rolled to about the size of a hazelnut, cook slowly in a broth of chickpeas and tomato (tomato paste); the dish takes its name from this generous, brothy serving, and it is eaten with bread dipped into the liquid. In the list of regional dishes compiled by the Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, sulu köfte is counted among Amasya's meat dishes, alongside stuffed broad beans, meat and okra stew, keşkek, liver rolls, mıhlama, mumbar and liver in vinegar. The dish thus appears under its own name in the region's official culinary inventory, and it is cooked both for everyday meals and on days when guests are received.

No written history of Amasya's sulu köfte is known, and no document shows when it was first cooked. Its past can therefore be traced from three separate foundations: the general history of meatballs and brothy meatball dishes in Ottoman cuisine, the home recipes compiled from the memories of Armenian families who lived in Amasya in the last years of the Ottoman period, and the order of present-day Amasya cuisine, built on chickpeas, butter and the home preparation of winter food. What is said about how the dish is prepared locally comes from home recipes and regional compilations, and it varies in small ways from household to household.

Its Place in Amasya Cuisine

Amasya cuisine is the product of thousands of years of settlement and an abundant plant cover. In the region, preparation for winter meals begins in summer; foods dried in the summer months are brought to the table in winter. Two meals a day are usually eaten: a morning meal called kuşluk and an evening meal. For those working in the fields there is also an afternoon meal, ikindilik. Within this order, sulu köfte takes its place among the filling cold-season dishes that gather several people around a single pot.

The region's local dishes are arranged under four headings: soups, meat dishes, desserts and pastries. Among the soups are çatal çorba, sakala çarpan, toyga soup, cilbir, helle soup, kesme ibik soup and yarma soup. In this classification sulu köfte belongs to the meat dishes, but its brothy character places it somewhere between a soup and a main course. The Turkish culinary habit of bringing grain, pulses and a modest amount of meat together in a brothy dish has produced just such a plate in Amasya as well.

The Origins of the Meatball and Sulu Köfte

The word köfte comes from Persian; "kûfte" means pounded or crushed. In the culinary dictionary Tercüme-i Kenzü'l-İştiha, attributed to Ahmed Cavid, köfte is defined as follows: it means pounded, crushed; it is shaped into little rounds and eaten sometimes plain, sometimes cooked inside dishes such as meatball soup and sour stew. This definition comes remarkably close to today's sulu köfte: small round meatballs cooked within a brothy dish. The date of the work, however, is uncertain. Some sources place the dictionary in the fifteenth century; yet the Ottoman author known as Ahmed Câvid was a palace official who entered the palace in 1787, served as a chronicler under Selim III and died in 1803 while serving as prefect of Istanbul. Since this dictionary is not mentioned among his known works, it is not certain to which century the definition belongs.

The source that can be securely dated to the fifteenth century is the cookbook of the physician Muhammed b. Mahmûd-ı Şirvânî. Şirvânî was one of the physicians of the reign of Murad II; in the preface to one of his works he calls himself a servant of Murad II and speaks of the debt he owed to Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed). He also wrote his work on preventive medicine, the Sultâniyye, in the name of Çelebi Mehmed, and that book is valued as well for the space it gives to matters of daily life such as eating and drinking. Çelebi Mehmed was a ruler who spent his years as a prince in Amasya; according to Hüsameddin, he was born in 788 (1386) and was a youth of thirteen when he came to Amasya. There is, however, no record that would allow a direct link to be drawn between the physician's cookbook and Amasya.

Şirvânî's Kitâbü't-Tabîh Tercümesi is a Turkish translation, with additions, of the Arabic cookbook written in 623 (1226) by Muhammad b. Hasan al-Kâtib al-Baghdâdî. The work was composed in Bursa, and its only known manuscript copy is in Istanbul, in the Ali Emîrî Efendi collection of the Millet Library. Sources differ on the number of recipes: one record states that the work contains 237 recipes in all, while another notes that Şirvânî added 77 new recipes to the 237 of the original text. The added recipes are regarded as a window onto the tastes of fifteenth-century Anatolia, and among them are numerous meatball recipes made in different shapes and by different cooking methods.

In the sixteenth century köfte kept its place at the palace table. Among the dishes served at the circumcision festivities held in November 1539 for Şehzade Bayezid (Prince Bayezid) and Şehzade Cihangir (Prince Cihangir), sons of Süleyman the Magnificent, was "köfte and fine white bread." Palace documents show that in the same century meatball rice soup, köfte kebab and aya köftesi were cooked in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace. The first printed cookbook, Melceü't-Tabbâhîn, also contains recipes such as kebab köfte, dry köfte, parsley köfte, köfte with egg-lemon sauce, cumin köfte and squeezed parsley köfte. This history does not show sulu köfte to be an Amasya invention; it shows how a very old dish form of Anatolian cuisine settled into the region in its own way.

Köfte is less a dish peculiar to Anatolia than the shared food of a wide geography. Based on rolling minced meat into small balls, it appears in many recipes in the Roman cookbook of Apicius, and in the oldest Persian cookbooks it is mentioned as meatballs bound with egg yolk, sometimes coloured orange with saffron; the Tabriz meatball of northwestern Iran, which can reach about twenty centimetres in diameter, has many regional variants. Sulu köfte is the branch of this large family in which meatballs are cooked together with vegetables and grain in a brothy dish. Because Amasya was a princely sanjak in the Ottoman period, it is a city where palace tastes were reflected in the provinces; yet since no record is known connecting sulu köfte with that period, one must be content to say that the recipe was passed down from generation to generation in the home kitchen, through oral tradition.

Meatballs and Chickpeas in Amasya Homes in the Ottoman Period

One of the most detailed records of Amasya's old home cooking was compiled from the city's Armenian families. The researcher Sonia Tashjian's account of Amasya cuisine, published in 2022, cites as its source Kapriel H. Simonian's memory book of Amasya, printed in Venice in 1966, and describes the city's table in the last years of the Ottoman period together with its recipes. According to this account, the butchers in the market slaughtered cattle or sheep every day except during Lent; because fresh meat was easy to find, meat dominated the diet of Amasya families. The measurements and some details of the recipes appear to have been adapted to the modern kitchen; one recipe noting that the chickpeas may be crushed with a pestle or in an electric grinder shows this.

Among these recipes, the dish recorded as "keofte soup" is a close relative of sulu köfte. Half a kilo of pounded meat, two eggs, half a cup of broken rice, lemon juice, herbs, red and black pepper and salt are kneaded together, the mixture is rolled into cherry-sized balls, and these are dropped into already boiling salted water to cook. The soup comes to the table sprinkled with chopped herbs, served with the water in which the meatballs were boiled and with lemon juice. Small meatballs softened with rice and bound with egg, eaten together with their broth, form the essence of both the mixture and the serving in today's Amasya style. Served with lemon, this soup also stands close to the sour variety of sulu köfte.

In the same account, chickpeas appear as the pulse most often paired with meat. In the dish called "chickpeas with meat," fatty ground beef is fried in its own fat with chopped onions; boiled chickpeas, tomato paste, garlic, mint and water are added, and after boiling for a few minutes the pot is covered, left to rest and eaten with pilaf. In "yakhni with chickpeas," soaked chickpeas are cooked together with the browned meat, and once the meat and chickpeas have softened, tomato and pepper paste, lemon juice and herbs are added. The recipe notes that five dried tomatoes may replace a tablespoon of tomato paste, and one dried hot pepper the pepper paste; this detail reflects a household economy in which paste was not available in every season. Quince galle, for its part, was made by boiling meat on the bone and adding chopped quince; the account notes that dishes such as meat with chickpeas could also be prepared in this way.

The account also includes a meatless chickpea köfte belonging to the days of fasting. Crushed chickpeas are kneaded with boiled potatoes, walnut-sized pieces are taken and hollowed with a finger, and a filling made of onions, walnuts, raisins and poppy seeds is pressed into the hollow. The köftes are wrapped in cloth napkins like little bundles and boiled in salted water; once cool, they are unwrapped and eaten with olive oil, lemon and hot pepper. None of these recipes bears the name "sulu köfte." Yet when the boiling of rice-and-egg meatballs in their own broth, the cooking of minced meat and chickpeas in a broth with tomato paste and the frequent use of mint are set side by side, it can be supposed that all the elements of today's dish were already present in Amasya cooking at the end of the Ottoman period. This is an inference; there is no document showing a direct line of descent between today's sulu köfte with chickpeas and these recipes.

The same records also show how the dish's ingredients were kept ready at home. Beans, chickpeas, lentils, corn and peas were stored among the winter provisions. Tomatoes and red peppers were crushed and boiled, then thickened under the sun to make paste. Each household slaughtered a sheep or a bull for kavurma; the meat was cut into small pieces, boiled in salted water, taken off the bone and fried in its own fat before being stored. The preparation called "kıyma" was made the same way, except that the meat was chopped much finer. Clarified butter and churned butter were used generously, and even the fat that dripped from the kebab makers' grills was bought in the market and put to use in other dishes.

Varieties of Sulu Köfte

In Anatolia, sulu köfte is generally prepared in three kinds, depending on the grain added to the meatball mixture: with bulgur, with rice and the sour (ekşili) version. All contain minced meat for köfte and usually vegetables. When the broth is thickened with egg and lemon, the dish is called ekşili köfte or terbiyeli köfte; without this dressing it cooks in a broth made with tomato sauce and red pepper paste. In the Amasya style, a little rice or bulgur is added to the mixture alongside grated onion, salt and black pepper. Rice gives the meatballs softness and body; bulgur helps them hold together in the broth without falling apart. In the recipe recorded for Afyonkarahisar in the ministry's register of traditional cuisine, the mixture consists of minced veal, fine bulgur known as düğü, onion, egg, parsley and a little baking soda; this example shows the small changes with which the same dish is cooked from region to region.

Chickpeas are the distinctive ingredient of the Amasya version. In general Anatolian recipes sulu köfte is also cooked without chickpeas; in Amasya, however, boiled chickpeas are part of the dish along with the meatballs. Adding chickpeas to a brothy dish makes it more filling and serves the aim of feeding many people with little meat. In some households lemon juice or pomegranate molasses is added to give the dish a slightly sour taste. This reflects the Amasya palate's inclination toward sour dishes and may be considered the local counterpart of the sour sulu köfte; the cooking of meatball soup with lemon and of chickpea yakhni with lemon juice in old Amasya homes points to the same inclination.

Preparing the Meatballs

For the meatball mixture, minced meat is kneaded thoroughly with finely grated onion, a little rice or bulgur, salt and black pepper. Adding rice to the mixture gives the meatballs both softness and body. In general recipes egg or a little flour is also added; these help bind the meatballs and appear in a number of home recipes in the region. In the old Amasya meatball soup, too, the mixture was made by binding pounded meat and broken rice with two eggs.

The kneaded mixture is divided into small rounds the size of a hazelnut, or in some recipes the size of a marble or a chickpea. In the Amasya style it is preferred that the meatballs be small and close in size, so that all of them cook in the same time. To keep the rolled meatballs from sticking, it is also a common practice in some homes to arrange them on a floured tray and gently shake the tray so that they are coated in flour; this gives them a thin crust and slightly thickens the broth.

Cooking

Onion is fried in fat in the pot, then tomato paste is added and stirred until its aroma rises. Chickpeas, soaked and boiled beforehand, are added to this mixture. Hot water is poured in and brought to the boil, and the meatballs are dropped one by one into the boiling liquid. They are cooked slowly over a low flame until they are done and the broth has thickened slightly; in general recipes this takes about half an hour and varies with the size of the meatballs and how well the chickpeas were boiled. Some households add dried mint; mint is a spice often used in the region's buttery, yogurt-based soups, and in old Amasya homes chickpeas with meat were also cooked with mint.

Soaking the chickpeas has long been a task done with care in the region. The housewives of old Amasya soaked pulses and grains overnight in plenty of water, changed the water the next day and boiled them, then changed the water once more after the first boil and cooked them a second time with dried pepper. In today's home recipes, the chickpeas are boiled in advance and added to the pot after the meatballs. Butter is the basic fat of many dishes in Amasya cuisine, from soups to pastries, and sizzling butter is also used when serving sulu köfte.

For a pot serving six, common home recipes give roughly these quantities: three hundred grams of minced meat, half a cup of fine bulgur or rice, one egg, one tablespoon of flour, one teaspoon of tomato paste, ground red pepper, red pepper flakes, black pepper and salt. For the sauce, one tablespoon of butter, one small onion, one tablespoon of tomato paste, a hundred grams of boiled chickpeas and four cups of water are used. After the sauce has boiled for five minutes, the meatballs and then the chickpeas go into the pot and cook for about thirty minutes; dried mint is added in the last five minutes. These are not the exact measures of a regional recipe; they are a typical example of general home practice.

Chickpeas and the Amasya Table

In Amasya cuisine the chickpea is a pulse whose use goes well beyond sulu köfte. Çatal çorba is made with green lentils, erişte noodles and chickpeas. Toyga soup is cooked by stirring cracked wheat, chickpeas, yogurt, egg, flour and meat stock until it boils, and mint sizzled in butter is poured over it; in some recipes wheat, dried beans and chickpeas are used together. Quince galle is a local dish of chickpeas, mutton and quince cooked together, bringing meat and fruit into one pot. The four main ingredients of keşkek are meat, sheep's tail fat, kendimelik wheat and chickpeas. An academic compilation gives one cup of chickpeas, alongside a kilo of coarse wheat and half a kilo of meat on the bone, for an Amasya keşkek serving ten; the ingredients go into the clay pot without being pounded, and the pot, its mouth sealed with dough, cooks for about twelve hours in a wood-fired stone oven. Another local recipe gives the cooking time as four to five hours. Regional recipes even describe the use of chickpea water, left to stand for a while, to leaven the dough of the poppy-seed and walnut çörek.

In the old Armenian kitchens of Amasya, too, chickpeas were never absent from the table: boiled chickpeas were made into a piyaz with scallions, parsley, caraway and pepper, were husked and mashed with tahini and served with oil and parsley, and were added with homemade pasta and ground walnuts to a fasting soup. Keşkek, too, was cooked in these homes with soaked chickpeas, its clay pot buried in the oven overnight. All this use shows how sulu köfte with chickpeas fits into the region's order of ingredients.

The region also knows a dish made with lamb neck and chickpeas, in which hazelnut-sized pieces of dough are pinched into the boiling meat broth; cut-dough soups form a separate family. What all of these share is that they are dishes cooked long with few ingredients, generous with broth, and made with butter. Sulu köfte is the meatball member of this family.

Serving and Its Place at the Table

At serving time, red pepper flakes sizzled in butter are drizzled over the top and the dish is garnished with plenty of parsley. Sulu köfte is eaten with fresh village bread, dipped into the broth. It matters that it reaches the table piping hot, so that its flavour is enjoyed at its best. It is known that dishes of minced meat and chickpeas were eaten with pilaf in old Amasya homes; no written record specific to the region has been found, however, on whether pilaf was served alongside sulu köfte.

In Amasya, sulu köfte is a well-loved dish of crowded family tables, cold days and days with guests. Great importance is given to guests in the region; people want to see a guest at the table at every meal, and if there is no guest that day it is even customary to invite a poor person to eat. The "heavy guest" meal served to a visitor from outside, who often stays the night, consists of six dishes: toyga soup, whole meat, rice pilaf, sinisu börek, okra and a dessert. In summer, eggplant pehli takes the place of the whole meat. Sulu köfte has no place in this traditional guest menu; it belongs to the everyday, intimate table rather than to ceremonial feasts. Its ability to feed many people with little meat also makes it suitable for an unexpected guest. The harmony of chickpeas, meatballs and tomato broth carries the warm and sharing character of Amasya tables onto the plate.

The Table Ceremonies of the Region

In Amasya, food works as a kind of social language beyond everyday nourishment. At village weddings, cauldrons of keşkek, pilaf, meat and helva are boiled at the wedding house; tables are set on the roofs of houses and in courtyards, and the meal is eaten together to the sound of drum and zurna. It is said that because spoons were once hard to find and distribute, guests came to the table with a wooden spoon tucked into their belts. At the bride's bath meal, stuffed broad beans, walnut puaça, bat and lokma are served. When there is a death in a household, neighbours and relatives send food cooked in their own homes to the house of mourning on trays; there is no restriction on the menu, and the dishes that arrive are returned only rinsed in clear water, without being washed.

One of the region's oldest traditions is the Zekeriya Sofrası, the Table of Zechariah. This table, laid for the fulfilment of a wish, is prepared again at home by the person whose wish has come true. There are no invitations; anyone who wishes may join. Alongside Zamzam water, dates, nigella seeds, yogurt, cheese, olives and pide, the table must hold forty-one kinds of food in all. Sulu köfte is not counted among the menus of these ceremonies; even so, it is the everyday counterpart of the same culinary outlook, that of the abundant, shared table.

Registered Dishes and the Position of Sulu Köfte

Amasya cuisine has dishes that have received geographical indication status: Amasya baklalı dolma was registered by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office on 17 August 2021, Amasya çöreği on 24 August 2021, meat with flower okra on 22 November 2021, toyga soup on 1 December 2021, eggplant pehli on 5 April 2022, twisted Amasya çöreği on 7 June 2022, Amasya yağlısı on 16 June 2022 and Amasya keşkek on 28 July 2022. More recent studies also count Amasya quince galle among these registered products. Sulu köfte is not on this list. Consequently there is no protected, standardised recipe for an "Amasya sulu köfte"; every home and every restaurant shapes the dish to its own measure. This is also why the recipe has remained a living home dish.

Academic compilations give the same picture. In a paper on Amasya dishes from the perspective of rural tourism, presented at the international tourism and culinary conference held in Amasya in 2022, a selection of the region's dishes is tabulated as soups, meat dishes, vegetable dishes, cold foods, pastries and desserts; the table includes meat dishes such as keşkek, stuffed broad beans, meat with flower okra and eggplant pehli, but not sulu köfte. Since the table shows only selected dishes, this omission alone is not conclusive. In another study, published in 2026 and based on interviews with hotel managers, chefs and academics, most participants say that dishes specific to Amasya appear only in limited numbers on restaurant menus. Sulu köfte's reputation has therefore remained tied mostly to the home table and to restaurants that serve home-style food.

Nutritional Value

With its combination of minced meat, grain, chickpeas and vegetables, sulu köfte is described as a filling dish rich in protein, iron, zinc and folic acid. This assessment comes from a general recipe and varies with the amount of fat used. A large portion of about 350 grams is given as 455 kilocalories; this is an approximate calculation, not a precise measurement. The way fibrous ingredients such as chickpeas and bulgur keep one full also explains its place at the winter table.

Chronology

1226: Muhammad b. Hasan al-Kâtib al-Baghdâdî writes the Arabic cookbook that Şirvânî would later translate into Turkish.

First half of the 15th century: The physician Şirvânî prepares the Kitâbü't-Tabîh Tercümesi in Bursa; its recipes include numerous meatballs. The physician's death is dated to between 1438 and 1451.

1539: Köfte and fine white bread are served at the banquet tables of the circumcision festivities of Şehzade Bayezid and Şehzade Cihangir.

16th century: Meatball rice soup, köfte kebab and aya köftesi are cooked in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace.

Date disputed: The Tercüme-i Kenzü'l-İştiha defines köfte as a round dish cooked in meatball soup and sour stew.

1966: Kapriel H. Simonian's memory book of Amasya is published in Venice; recipes of the city's old home cooking would later be compiled from it.

2021-2022: Baklalı dolma, Amasya çöreği, meat with flower okra, toyga soup, eggplant pehli, twisted çörek, Amasya yağlısı and keşkek receive geographical indication status; sulu köfte is not on this list.

2022: Sonia Tashjian's account of Amasya cuisine is published; it includes the recipes for meatball soup, chickpeas with meat and the fasting chickpea köfte.

Recent period: The Amasya Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism lists sulu köfte among the province's regional meat dishes.

Bibliography

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