Some desserts are born of the plainest ingredients and stay in the memory precisely because of that simplicity. Höşmerim is foremost among them. Made from fresh unsalted cheese, sugar, semolina or flour and patient stirring, it is one of Anatolia's old dishes. It is widely made in the Marmara, Aegean and Central Anatolian regions, and today its name is most often linked with Balıkesir. In Amasya cooking, too, höşmerim is described as one of the home desserts made with fresh cheese. Before turning to the region's own table, a look at the dessert's name, its trail in written records and its forms in different corners of Turkey makes the höşmerim of Amasya easier to understand.

What Höşmerim Is

Depending on where it is made, höşmerim is known as höşmelim, hoşmerim, peynir tatlısı (cheese dessert), peynir helvası (cheese halva) or kaymak helvası (cream halva). In some places it is described as a cheese variety of semolina halva, while elsewhere a flour halva made only with flour, butter and milk cream goes by the name höşmerim. This variety shows that the dessert is not bound to a single recipe. What the versions share is a soft, partly granular, halva-like texture, usually served hot or warm. It is generally eaten after a meal as a light dessert, and is sometimes topped with honey, nuts or ice cream.

In the Balıkesir style the main ingredients are fresh unsalted cheese, sugar, semolina and egg yolk. Saffron is usually used for colour, while in commercial production colourings such as riboflavin or tartrazine do the job. According to the geographical indication document, the dessert consists of fifty per cent raw milk, forty per cent sugar, nine per cent semolina, close to one per cent egg yolk and one hundredth of one per cent colouring. The milk may be sheep's or cow's milk. Pastry shops also sell versions with hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts, chestnuts, mastic and fruit. Traditional höşmerim, however, is mostly made plain, and most of it is still produced on a small scale.

The Origin of the Name and the Stories Told About It

The most common explanation of the name goes back to Persian. According to it, höşmerim was formed by joining hoş, meaning sweet or pleasant, and maram, meaning clotted cream (kaymak), so that the word originally meant something like "sweet cream". According to records based on the Nişanyan etymological dictionary, the oldest known use of the word in Turkish is in the 1540 dictionary of Nimetullah bin Ahmed, the Lügat-i Nimetullah. This shows that the name was known at least in the written Ottoman language of the sixteenth century. Whether the dessert was then understood in its present cheese form or as a cream halva, however, cannot be deduced from this record.

It is also often repeated that the dessert was made by the Anatolian Yörüks who migrated from Central Asia. Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname is said to relate that höşmerim was found among the first Turkmen nomads who settled in Balıkesir and passed from there to Havran. The guess that it was first made in Anatolia at Balıkesir rests on these accounts. There is, however, no firm document or date on the matter, and the full text of the relevant passage of the Seyahatname is not quoted in the sources consulted.

The popular explanation of the name takes an entirely different road. According to a story of unknown origin, the woman who first made the dessert asked her husband, returning from military service, "hoş mu erim, hoş mu erim" ("is it nice, my man, is it nice, my man") as she served it. As the phrase passed from mouth to mouth, the dessert took this name. A more detailed version says that in Ottoman times married women addressed their husbands as "er" and "erim". A young bride who had waited for years for her husband to come back from the front, and had at last come to think him dead, was astonished and overjoyed when he suddenly appeared one day. Because poverty had left little in the house, she added semolina, sugar and egg to the cheese she had curdled from the cow's milk and cooked it. She served the dish asking "hoş mu erim", and her husband replied "hoş hoş".

No written basis for the story is known. The fact that the word appears in a sixteenth-century dictionary as a Persian compound suggests that the folk etymology may have arisen later, as the name was likened to familiar Turkish words. This is an inference. Even so, the tale is of interest because it shows the dessert remembered as a dish that could be made in a poor household from whatever milk was at hand and with few ingredients.

Höşmerim in the Melceü't-Tabbâhîn

The oldest known detailed recipe for höşmerim is in the Melceü't-Tabbâhîn, known as the first Turkish cookbook printed in the Ottoman Empire. The title of the book, compiled by Mehmed Kâmil and printed in 1844, means "Sanctuary of Cooks". It contains two hundred and eighty-four recipes for food and drink, from soups to kebabs, from mezes to pastries, and from vegetable dishes to compotes and sherbets. The presence of höşmerim in this book shows that in the middle of the nineteenth century the dessert was known in Ottoman cooking and thought worth putting into writing.

The recipe in the book, as quoted from the edition prepared by Günay Kut and Turgut Kut, runs as follows: "Bir kıyye miktarı tuzsuz taze peynir veyahut teleme dedikleri peynirden tedarik edip el ile bir tencere içine ufaklayıp kor üstüne vaz birle karıştırmaya başlayalar tâ ki kaynayıp eridikte içine on dirhem miktarı dakîk-i hâs zammedip yine karıştırıldıkta yağını koyuverip peynir şekeri gibi uzamaya başladıkta indireler. Taamı latif bir taamdır. Tenâvül buyrula. Bazıları şeker veya asel dahi hîn-i tenâvülde vazederler, latif olur." In modern terms, about one okka of fresh unsalted cheese or teleme is crumbled by hand into a pot set over embers and stirred until it melts. When it has melted, about ten dirhams of fine flour are added, and once the mixture releases its fat and begins to stretch like cheese candy it is taken off the heat. Some people put sugar or honey on it as they eat.

The heading of the recipe is quoted in two forms. One rendering reads "Höşmerim, which they also call sündürme", while another, based on the Kut edition, gives the heading as "Cheese höşmerim: shepherds call it telmuş, Yörüks call it sündürme". Common to both is the note that the dessert was known among the Yörüks as sündürme. The stretching of the cheese over the fire, its "sünmesi", could be taken as the explanation of this name, but this too is an inference not written in the source.

A notable feature of the Melceü't-Tabbâhîn recipe is that the dessert itself contains no sugar. Sugar or honey is added on top afterwards, at the table. In today's Balıkesir höşmerim, by contrast, sugar goes in during cooking and makes up almost half of the mixture. This difference suggests that over time höşmerim shifted from a cheese dish towards a sugared dessert. The home method described in Amasya rests on the same foundation. Cheese melting in the pan and stretching into threads as it warms, the semolina or flour added to it, and finally the mixture releasing its fat form the essence of the recipe. Only the measure of the additions and the sweetener changes.

Höşmerim in Balıkesir

Most sources agree that the type made with cheese, semolina and sugar is identified with Balıkesir and its surroundings. The geographical indication document states that the dessert is also known in Central Anatolia and the Black Sea region, but that its true birthplace is Balıkesir and that it has come down from the Ottoman period to the present. The document does not ground the dessert's tie to the region in natural conditions, explaining it instead by human factors, that is, by a production habit long maintained by the people living there. Today the places where the dessert is made most are Balıkesir and Bursa above all, followed by Çanakkale, Tekirdağ, Kırklareli and İzmit.

Production in the villages of Balıkesir shows clearly how the dessert is tied to milk and to the season. In the method recorded at a dairy in Erdel, one of the Karakeçili villages of the İvrindi district, höşmerim is made from sheep's milk. The ewes begin to be milked after the lambs are weaned, usually in the spring months, and milking continues until summer. The tastiest höşmerim is said to be made from milk taken at the end of spring, when the milk has thickened. It is also related that in Yörük villages the milk was sheep's milk or a mixture of one third cow's and two thirds sheep's milk, and that the dessert was cooked over a wood fire.

In the Erdel method the strained milk is heated to cheese-making temperature, rennet is added, and it is left covered. Within forty-five minutes to an hour it sets into curd and begins to weep whey, and this teleme is broken up thoroughly with a spoon, ladle or whisk. Locally this step is called "breaking the teleme". A little hot water is added to the curd and part of the liquid is drained off in a strainer. The curd is then put in a pot, eggs are broken into it, and one or two handfuls of flour or semolina are added, only to bind it. The mixture is stirred over the fire without pause so that it does not catch on the bottom. When it releases its fat, its colour slowly turns to amber and it begins to come away from the bottom of the pot as the spoon is drawn through, the sugar is added. After the sugar has melted the dessert is stirred for a few more minutes, then spooned onto plates and left to rest. Made with five litres of sheep's milk and a little more than a kilo of sugar, this quantity serves ten to twelve people.

Höşmerim by Region

In Turkey the name höşmerim describes a family of related desserts. In Balıkesir the version with cheese, semolina and egg yolk is known. In Konya, by contrast, cream is used in place of cheese and flour largely takes the place of semolina. Konya höşmerim is made by combining flour toasted in clotted cream and butter with milk and sugar, and is served with walnuts, pistachios or honey. In another Konya recipe, cream or kaymak and butter are melted and toasted with flour, a little semolina and cornflour until the colour deepens, then a milk syrup boiled separately is poured into this halva and stirred in quickly, and the dessert is served hot without waiting. According to the sources, Konya höşmerim has been eaten since the Seljuk period.

In the Tekirdağ area sugar, flour and fresh unsalted cheese may be used. Höşmerim in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir, on the other hand, is made by toasting full-fat cow's cream, flour and a very little salt. The registration document notes that full-fat cow's cream of the kind also used for butter-making is preferred, and that cow's cream is less sour and lighter than the cream of sheep's or goat's milk. The cream is melted in the pan, and once it begins to bubble the flour is added and toasted over a low heat with a wooden spoon. Now and then the cook stops stirring and shakes the pan so that a crust forms on the bottom. When the flour dries and starts to fall away in flakes it is spread across the pan with the back of the spoon, and when the underside has browned in five to ten minutes it is turned over with a flat lid and the other side is browned as well. The dessert is cut into four and grape molasses (pekmez) made from local grapes is poured over it.

Sivrihisar höşmerim is served freshly toasted straight after the meal, and is offered as part of the custom of eating at the home of the family elder on the morning of a religious festival (bayram). Besides the pekmez version it can also be eaten with syrup, without syrup, or with milk jam. According to the document, the making stays the same and only the way of serving changes. In Kırşehir höşmerim is made with flour, milk, eggs, butter and sugar, and is traditionally offered to women who have just given birth. The registration document records that the recipe has been handed down from generation to generation through the knowledge of the region's women and cooks. In the Beypazarı and Çamlıdere districts of Ankara, and in Çankırı, Mengen and Gediz, there are also local desserts known by the name höşmerim. In the eastern Black Sea region, around Rize and Trabzon, a similar dish made with milk, cornflour, cheese and salt and called höşmer or höşmerim is also known.

This wide spread makes it difficult to determine how old the dessert is in any particular region. Desserts with very different ingredients have gathered under the same name. When the cheese recipe of the Melceü't-Tabbâhîn is set beside the word's meaning of "sweet cream", one may think that the name was originally a general term for cream or cheese milk desserts and later divided into different forms from region to region. This is an inference that the sources do not state directly.

Flour Halva Höşmerims

Some of the desserts known as höşmerim have no place for cheese at all and come closer to flour halva. In the Kırşehir method two eggs are beaten with half a teaspoon of salt, and a batter of medium thickness is made with three glasses of milk and four glasses of flour. Two tablespoons of melted unsalted butter are added and the batter is cooked over a medium heat for five to seven minutes, stirred constantly and without being allowed to brown. When it begins to form lumps, half a tea glass of sunflower oil and the sugar are added, and when it loses its stickiness and starts to fall apart into grains the heat is turned off. The dessert is turned out onto a plate, a glass of granulated sugar is sprinkled over it, and it is served with walnuts or pistachios. The registration document also stresses that making it requires skill.

In Beypazarı the dessert is made by cooking, in melted butter, a dough kneaded from dark flour, preferably milled in the district, with milk and cream. When served, sugar syrup, pekmez or honey is poured over it. In Mengen wheat flour, milk cream or cream, milk, butter and salt are cooked in a pan and topped with white sugar, honey, pekmez or jam. In Çankırı the presence of salt in the dessert is the distinguishing feature. Rock salt dissolved in boiling water makes the dessert "kıyır kıyır", crisp and crumbly in the local phrase, and comb honey is used instead of sugar. In Çamlıdere there is no cheese or semolina at all. In Gediz a dough of fresh unsalted cow's cheese, semolina, wheat flour, sugar and baking powder is baked in the oven and soaked in syrup twice. This resembles a syrup-soaked oven dessert more than the pan-cooked dessert of Balıkesir.

In the eastern Black Sea region, around Trabzon and Rize, höşmer is remembered as a halva and höşmer made with food such as flour, fat, salt and milk collected from houses by children who traditionally went out to pray for sunshine. Here the dessert is tied to a custom in which children took part rather than to hospitality at the table. These examples show that the word höşmerim has a meaning broad enough to cover many desserts that do not share the same ingredients. For anyone wishing to distinguish the cheese höşmerim of Amasya, the most decisive criterion is that fresh unsalted cheese lies at the heart of the dessert.

Geographical Indication Registrations

The commercial and cultural value of höşmerim has also come to light through geographical indication registrations made in recent years. The first registration was for Balıkesir höşmerim. According to the registration document, the application was made by the Balıkesir Chamber of Cooks, Köfte Makers and Related Tradesmen, the dessert was registered as a designation of origin with effect from 21 February 2011, and this registration was announced in the Official Gazette of 22 September 2014. Some sources, however, give the year of the Balıkesir registration as 2015. The document states that inspection is to be carried out under the coordination of the chamber by a three-member commission made up of one person each from the university, the municipality and the provincial directorate of agriculture.

The registration of Kırşehir höşmerim was obtained by the Ahiler Development Agency. The application was made on 17 August 2017 and the registration took place on 1 December 2017. For Sivrihisar höşmerim the application was made by Sivrihisar Municipality on 12 November 2019, and the registration was completed on 28 September 2020. Then in 2021 the höşmerims of Çamlıdere, Çankırı and Mengen, and in 2022 those of Beypazarı, Gediz and Konya, also received geographical indications. For Konya höşmerim the application was made by Konya Metropolitan Municipality in February 2022, and the registration came in August of the same year.

The differences between the recipes of the registered desserts are striking. The cheese and semolina dessert of Balıkesir, the Sivrihisar dessert toasted with cream and eaten with pekmez, and the Çankırı dessert based on salt, honey and flour may share the same name, yet they are very different dishes. Each document defines its own recipe with its ingredients and measures, and inspection follows that recipe. A separate höşmerim registration belonging to Amasya does not appear in the sources consulted.

Höşmerim in Amasya Cooking

In Amasya höşmerim is counted among the home desserts made with fresh cheese within the region's tradition of sweets. Its basis is fresh cheese made that very day. This cheese, low in salt and soft in texture, is left to melt in the pan. Semolina or flour is gradually added to the cheese as it warms, stretches and pulls into threads. This addition gives the dessert both body and its own slightly gritty texture. When sugar is added, the faintly salty taste of the cheese strikes a surprising balance within the dessert.

The milk and cheese on which the dessert depends have long been among Amasya's well-known products. Hüseyin Hüsameddin writes that the summer pastures of the Akdağ nahiye (sub-district), which covers the eastern part of the Amasya kaza (district), were plentiful, its winter quarters favourable, its water abundant and its air very healthy, so that most of the sheep of the Amasya sanjak grazed there in summer. According to him, the butter, cheese and yoghurt from this area were highly esteemed and enjoyed great fame in the region known as Pontus. The same author also lists the vineyards, gardens, butter, yoghurt and cheese of the village-like quarters of Karasenir and Kayabaşı among the prized produce. These records do not mention höşmerim, but they show that fresh cheese-making and sheep's milk had long been part of daily life in the region.

In Amasya it is said that höşmerim reaches its finest in the spring months, when the animals give the most milk and fresh cheese is at its best. For this reason the dessert is thought of less as something kept in the larder for long than as a dish that comes to the table with the freshness of the day and depends on the abundance of the season. The same observation has been put on record in writing for the sheep's milk höşmerim of Balıkesir. For Amasya, however, these accounts rest on local knowledge. No written record documenting the history or the composition of höşmerim in Amasya has been found.

In old Amasya halva also had a religious and social place, although the halva mentioned in this context in the sources is flour halva. Describing the Selağzı neighbourhood, Osman Fevzi Olcay writes that every year on the eve of the Feast of the Sacrifice (Kurban Bayramı) Karcı İmam Tevfik had flour halva made, that the halvas were wrapped in pide bread and carried in large laundry baskets to the Aşağı Pirler Tomb, and that they were distributed there after the hafızes had recited the whole Qur'an and offered prayers. This custom was reportedly carried out without fail on the same day every year. The record shows that the flour halva type, which elsewhere in Anatolia takes the name höşmerim, was known in Amasya too, but it contains no information that this halva was called höşmerim in Amasya.

Höşmerim does not appear among the featured desserts in publications introducing Amasya cuisine either. In a publication of the Central Black Sea Development Agency introducing the cuisine of the region, the desserts named for Amasya are vişneli ekmek, stale bread spread with butter, crisped in the oven and served with sour cherry syrup; unutma beni, also made with stale bread and sweetened with pekmez; and ayva peverdesi, a quince dessert said to have been sent as a gift to the sultan. Höşmerim is not on this list. This may be read as meaning that in Amasya the dessert has lived on as a common cheese dessert made in homes, as in many parts of Anatolia, rather than gaining a fame peculiar to the region.

In Amasya cooking höşmerim stands apart from the showy desserts of banquet tables. It comes to the table beside a glass of tea in the late afternoon, during a conversation, or as a quickly prepared treat for an unexpected guest. It is the dessert of the skill of making something good from what is at hand. The folk tale of a table first laid in a poor household fits this idea of simplicity, but it cannot be said that the two accounts confirm each other.

How It Is Made

For a home recipe in the Balıkesir style you need about one litre of raw milk, one teaspoon of rennet, two eggs, two glasses of granulated sugar and one and a half glasses of semolina. The semolina and sugar are mixed in a bowl. The milk is warmed until lukewarm, its temperature tested with a finger. The rennet is added and the milk is left for ten to fifteen minutes with the lid on. Then the sugar and semolina mixture is added to the pot together with the egg yolks. It is stirred over a low heat with a wooden spoon so that it does not catch. When the mixture thickens and becomes pitted with little holes, the heat is turned off, and it is spooned onto plates and left to cool. When served it can be garnished with kaymak, pistachios, hazelnuts or walnuts.

On a commercial scale Balıkesir höşmerim is prepared by a more systematic method. According to the registration document, one hundred kilograms of fresh raw milk are curdled with twenty to twenty-five grams of rennet and left for twenty to twenty-five minutes to set. Some sources give this quantity as one hundred litres. The curd is broken into small pieces with a wire whisk so that the cheese does not stay in lumps but spreads through the whole dessert. While the stirring continues the whey is heated and twenty to twenty-five egg yolks are added. When the temperature reaches sixty-five degrees, seventy kilograms of sugar are added and the mixture is brought up to eighty-five degrees so that the sugar melts. At this point ten to fifteen kilograms of semolina are added and the mixture is cooked for one to one and a half hours with stirring. After the heat is turned off, the dessert rests for ten to fifteen minutes, is put into its packaging while still hot, and is left to cool.

The skill lies in the details beyond these measures. The secret of höşmerim is in the measure of the fire and the patience of the stirring. Overcooked, it hardens. Undercooked, it falls apart. Practised hands keep turning it without leaving the pan until the mixture takes on a golden colour and releases its fat. In some homes pounded walnuts or hazelnuts are sprinkled over it. At other tables it is served piping hot with nothing added. A plain portion in the Balıkesir style is said to contain an average of 340 calories, though the figure varies with where it is made and what is put on top.

Its Place at the Table

Höşmerim is associated with customs such as being served hot after the meal, appearing at the family elder's table on festival mornings and being offered to women who have just given birth. These customs are recorded for Sivrihisar and Kırşehir in their registration documents. No written record of a similar ceremonial use in Amasya has been found. At the everyday table in Amasya the dessert is described rather as a sweet for teatime and for home hospitality.

No reliable written source has been found on when the dessert reached Amasya, exactly what composition it is made with in the local kitchen, or whether it has a separate local name. For this reason the accounts of the home method in the sections on Amasya should be read as local knowledge. The information on the region's milk and cheese production and on its flour halva custom, on the other hand, rests on the works of Hüseyin Hüsameddin and Osman Fevzi Olcay. For the general history, name and varieties of the dessert, the Melceü't-Tabbâhîn, the geographical indication documents and encyclopaedic sources have been used.

Chronology

Seljuk period: Konya höşmerim is described as a dessert eaten since the Seljuk period.

1540: The word höşmerim appears in the dictionary Lügat-i Nimetullah by Nimetullah bin Ahmed. This is the oldest known record of the word in Turkish.

1844: Mehmed Kâmil's cookbook Melceü't-Tabbâhîn is printed. It contains a recipe for höşmerim made with fresh unsalted cheese or teleme and fine flour.

2011: Balıkesir höşmerim is registered as a designation of origin with effect from 21 February 2011. The registration is announced in the Official Gazette on 22 September 2014. Some sources give the year of registration as 2015.

2017: Kırşehir höşmerim receives a geographical indication.

2020: Sivrihisar höşmerim receives a geographical indication.

2021: The höşmerims of Çamlıdere, Çankırı and Mengen receive geographical indications.

2022: The höşmerims of Beypazarı, Gediz and Konya receive geographical indications.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Mehmed Kâmil. Melceü't-Tabbâhîn: Aşçıların Sığınağı. Edited by Günay Kut and Turgut Kut. Turkish Manuscripts Institution, 2015 (recipe as quoted in Türk Tarım Orman Dergisi and Milliyet). turktarim.gov.tr
  • Çevik, Müge (2022). Balıkesir'in coğrafi işaretli ürünü Höşmerim. Türk Tarım Orman Dergisi, March-April 2022 (based on the work of Mehmet Bilir). http://www.turktarim.gov.tr/Haber/772/balikesirin-cografi-isaretli-urunu-hosmerim
  • Özcan, T., Yılmaz Ersan, L., Akpınar Bayizit, A. and Aydınol, P. (2009). Höşmerim Tatlısı Üretimi ve Özellikleri. II. Geleneksel Gıdalar Sempozyumu, 27-29 May, Van.

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources