Among Amasya's traditional desserts, Unutma Beni ("Forget Me Not") is the one that gets talked about most for the fewest ingredients. Its recipe rests on a village loaf, a cup of grape molasses and a handful of walnuts, and its name comes from a story of parting that has been told in the city for generations. For a long time the dessert remained household knowledge in village homes and neighbours' kitchens. In the 2000s it was written down in the cookbook published by the Amasya Governorate, then made its way into recipe books prepared by the municipality and the university and into academic studies, and in 2023 it was registered with a geographical indication by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office. Today it lives on both as a memory of the village kitchen and as a regional product with an official definition, set measurements and its own inspectors.

A Bread Dessert in the Kitchen of the City of Princes

Amasya is known as the city to which Ottoman princes were sent to learn statecraft, and its food culture is remembered together with that past. The introduction to the Amasya Cuisine book prepared by the Amasya Governorate says that the city served as a school, an academy, for would-be sultans and so developed dishes "of a taste, appearance and quality worthy of sultans." According to the book, Amasya keşkek was refined with such skill that people would say "all the keşkeks on one side, Amasya keşkek on the other," and the combination of dried broad beans and meat in bakla dolması is described as a work of art that demands patient labour. The same introduction makes a striking comparison about desserts: the fresh cake eaten in the princes' palace was turned by the ingenuity of a poor family into cherry bread (vişneli ekmek), while stale bread, instead of being thrown away, gave "world cuisine a new kind of dessert under the name Unutma beni."

The statement captures the dessert's place in Amasya cooking well. The display of the palace table stands on one side and the thrift of the ordinary household on the other, yet both are counted as part of the city's dessert culture. In Amasya's known table customs, the grand desserts belong elsewhere: at the six-course table laid for the "heavy guest" who comes from outside and stays the night, made up in turn of toyga soup, whole meat, rice pilaf, sinisu börek, okra and a dessert, the dessert is one of tırtıl baklava, kuymak or gömlek kadayıfı. The "güvey önü" tray prepared for the wedding night likewise sets tırtıl baklava beside whole meat and pilaf. No record shows Unutma Beni being served at these ceremonial tables; it is rather a dessert of everyday life, made at the hearth at home from leftover bread.

Amasya's food traditions also suggest the setting in which the dessert gained its meaning. According to local collections of folk culture, the people of Amasya are very hospitable and wish to see a guest at their table at every meal; if there is no guest that day, they invite a poor person to the table and share the meal. At weddings, especially village weddings, cauldrons of keşkek, pilaf, meat and helva are boiled; neighbours send trays of food to a house in mourning; and pilgrims setting out for Mecca are given rusks and twice-fried bread shaped like lokum as provisions for the road. In these customs bread, sharing and seeing someone off always have a place. It can be said that Unutma Beni is not listed as a separate ceremonial dish here, yet it springs from the same world of values; this is an interpretation and is not stated directly in the sources.

The Story of Its Name

The tale attached to the dessert's name appears in almost every source in the same frame. A young woman, fearing that she will be forgotten when her husband leaves for military service, makes him this dessert. It is a farewell gift, prepared in the hope that every mouthful will remind him of home, of his homeland and of her, and its name carries that wish. In news reports the dessert is sometimes also called a "farewell dessert." No document, however, has been produced to say to which year, which village or which family the story belongs. The first books to put the dessert in writing do not mention the story either; neither the Amasya Governorate's 2010 cookbook nor the recipe book published by the municipality in 2021 says anything about a husband leaving for the army, and the geographical indication document describes only the recipe and the product's tie to the region. In the sources examined, the story appears in news and promotional pieces published after the registration.

The event is therefore treated as a local legend. The sources that relate it use expressions such as "passed from mouth to mouth" or "according to legend." Seeing a young man off to the army is a constant theme of laments, folk songs and memories in Anatolia, and in Amasya it remains a living ceremony today. The Amasya Municipality's book of local flavours lists the "send-off meal for a soldier" separately among its special-occasion dishes: the family sending a son to the army lays a table before the farewell attended by friends and relatives, and offers those who come a menu of soup, whole meat, pilaf, keşkek and a dessert. The book does not name the dessert served at this table. What the young woman of the legend had at hand, in any case, was usually the household's bread, molasses and walnuts. This fit between the dessert's name and its ingredients makes the story believable, but it is not evidence that settles the matter.

Döndü Olgun, president of the Amasya Toprak Women's Initiative Production and Management Cooperative, tells the story this way when describing the dessert: "The story of this dessert rests on the love a young woman felt for her husband going off to the army." In the same conversation she also mentions its role in preventing waste and calls it "the sweetest example of recycling." In another account Olgun says that the dessert is regarded as a symbol of love, labour and sharing. These words show that the dessert is seen as a dish that carries both a feeling and a habit of thrift.

How the Recipe Came to Be Written Down

The earliest written recipe for Unutma Beni among the sources examined is in the Amasya Governorate's bilingual book Amasya Cuisine (Amasya Mutfağı). The book, the Governorate's publication no. 42, was edited by H. Harun Yörgüç; its first edition appeared in October 2006 and its second in February 2010, each in two thousand copies. The foreword was written by the governor of the day, M. Celalettin Lekesiz, who hoped the book would become "a bedside book, especially for housewives." According to the book's credits, the recipes were compiled with the food and beverage services teachers of the Amasya Anatolian Girls' Vocational High School, the school's other teachers and administrators, housewives named one by one, master instructors and cooks. The Unutma Beni recipe appears on page eighty of the second edition, in Turkish and English side by side, with the dessert's English name given as "Forget Me Not." Whether the recipe appeared in the same form in the first edition cannot be determined from the copy examined.

The book's dessert chapter shows Unutma Beni within its own family. The same chapter includes cherry bread, höşmerim, eggs with molasses, apple dessert, apple compote, the pişmaniye known as teltel, and gömlek kadayıfı. Of these, höşmerim is made by adding diluted molasses syrup to flour roasted in fat, and eggs with molasses by whisking eggs into grape molasses brought to the boil in butter; both, like Unutma Beni, are sweetened with molasses. Another remark in the book's introduction deserves mention: the author claims that many recipes in cookbooks published in various provinces "have been taken straight from the archive of Amasya dishes with one or two letters changed." This is a claim that shows the book was prepared out of a concern to claim the local cuisine as Amasya's own; it is not supported with specific examples.

The second important compilation is the book Amasya Local Flavours (Amasya Yöresel Lezzetleri), prepared in 2021 under the Amasya Municipality's project "Amasya Cuisine Becomes a Brand in Gastronomy," carried out with the Central Black Sea Development Agency's 2020 technical support programme. Its advisers included Erdal Ünsalan and Kenan Pala of Amasya University, and the dishes were prepared by academics and chefs. Unutma Beni is given here on page ninety-six as a recipe for six, with a preparation and cooking time of thirty minutes; under "source of the recipe" the word "Anonymous" is written. The note acknowledges that the recipe is not attributed to any particular person or family but rests on the common knowledge of the people.

The dessert entered academic publications by way of these two books. An article by Aykut Şimşek and Göksu Demircan, published in the Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences in December 2020 and examining how domestic tourists visiting Amasya view its cuisine, quotes the sentence about cherry bread and Unutma Beni on the authority of Yörgüç's book. A study by Erdal Ünsalan and Kenan Pala on Amasya's potential for gastronomy tourism, published in December 2022, repeats the same information, lists Unutma Beni among the desserts in its table of traditional Amasya dishes and gives its recipe for six. The dessert does not yet appear in that study's table of products with a geographical indication; at that date the number of Amasya's registered gastronomic products is given as nine.

Ingredients and Preparation

The Recipe in the Books

The recipe in the Governorate's cookbook is very brief. One cup of molasses, two tablespoons of sugar, one cup of water and a village loaf are enough. The molasses is cooked with the sugar until it becomes syrupy, the sliced bread is dropped into it and both sides are cooked. The slices are lifted out of the syrup with a skimmer and served with walnuts poured over them. The municipality's 2021 book repeats the same recipe with somewhat more precise measurements: one cup of grape molasses, two tablespoons of sugar, one cup of water, six slices of village bread and one tea glass of walnut kernels. The result is a dessert with one slice of bread per person and a measured amount of walnuts.

Recipes published in the press in later years describe this framework in slightly different stages. According to them, the stale village bread is first toasted in the oven, the molasses is boiled with some water in a pot to make a syrup, the toasted bread is soaked with the syrup in the same pot, and the dessert is served on a tray sprinkled with walnuts. In other words, the books' recipe cooks the bread directly in the syrup, while the newer accounts toast it in the oven first and then lay it in the syrup. Both are presented as recipes for the same dessert, and the difference between them is not made a matter of debate in the sources.

The Recipe in the Registration Document

The geographical indication document ties the dessert for the first time to a production method with measurements given in grams. According to the document, Unutma Beni for five requires 350 grams of white sugar, 700 millilitres of grape molasses, one litre of water, 500 grams of stale whole wheat bread and 200 grams of walnut kernels. Sugar and molasses are added to water brought to the boil in a pot and stirred; the stale village bread is cut into pieces seven centimetres thick, dipped into the boiling mixture and taken out; walnut kernels are sprinkled on top, and the dessert is served on a tray or in portions. This recipe is markedly more syrupy than the one in the books: the proportion of molasses and sugar to bread is high, and the bread is briefly dipped and lifted out rather than cooked in the syrup. The document also defines the bread as "whole wheat," while the books' expression "village bread" is kept unchanged in the document's method section.

Molasses, Bread and Walnuts

Grape molasses, village bread and walnuts are the three ingredients that never change in any account, and all three are products of Amasya itself. The municipality's book recalls that Evliya Çelebi, describing Amasya, listed the city's breads, its forty kinds of pear, eleven kinds of cherry, seven kinds of grape and seven kinds of quince. A news report that reached the press in December 2025 showed, in an unexpected way, that the tradition of boiling molasses is still alive in Amasya today: in the Şeyhcui neighbourhood attached to the city centre, hollows large enough for several people to fit inside had been dug over the years into a rock face beside a forest road, and it emerged that they were dug to obtain the clayey soil used in making grape molasses. Ercan Eftelioğlu, speaking in the report, said that without this soil the molasses does not set to the desired consistency, and that the method is a practice known in the region. The molasses that goes into the dessert's syrup is the product of such labour.

Yield is the most frequently repeated fact about the dessert's economy. Arzu Keskin, who says she learned the recipe from her elders, notes that about twenty portions of Unutma Beni can be made from one village loaf, and says that it is "not a costly kind of dessert at all" and that the more you eat, the more you want. The reports also relate that, thanks to grape molasses with its high nutritional value, it is regarded as a winter dessert, and that housewives favour it because it can be prepared quickly. Requiring no preparation beyond slicing the bread and crushing the walnuts while the syrup boils on the stove, the dessert stands clearly apart from desserts that call for leavened dough or long resting.

The Value of Stale Bread

In Anatolia bread is the most respected part of the table; kissing a fallen piece and raising it to the forehead, and turning stale bread into another dish rather than throwing it away, are widespread habits. Traces of this habit are clear in Amasya too. The Governorate's book says in a single sentence that the palace cake became cherry bread and stale bread became Unutma Beni, and counts both desserts as products of the skill of a poor household. That the dessert is made with village bread takes on meaning in this context; in the village, bread is baked at home or bought from the village oven, and it hardens after a day or two.

Cherry bread is Unutma Beni's closest relative, and setting the two side by side shows the dessert's character more clearly. According to the recipe in the Governorate's book, a stale loaf is sliced for cherry bread, each slice is spread with unsalted butter and toasted in the oven, a kilo of pitted sour cherries is cooked with two cups of sugar and the syrup is poured over the bread, which is sprinkled with walnuts and served cold. The Central Black Sea Development Agency's publication introducing Amasya's flavours also mentions cherry bread as "a kind of dessert eaten in the princes' palace," and immediately afterwards presents Unutma Beni as a dessert "likewise prepared with stale bread and sweetened with molasses." The two desserts are two interpretations of the same idea: one belongs to a richer table with butter, seasonal cherries and plenty of sugar, the other to the village table that can be laid in any season of the year with nothing but molasses and walnuts.

Present-day accounts highlight this aspect in the language of sustainability. Turning stale bread into a dessert is presented, at a time when food waste is debated, as "an example of traditional recycling." This is a reading made from today's perspective and does not rest on any document explaining the dessert's origin. For the villager of the past, stale bread was a blessing that no one would think of throwing away, and the dessert was a natural outcome of that attitude.

Geographical Indication

Application and Registration

The geographical indication application for Unutma Beni was made by the municipality of Ziyaret, a small town attached to central Amasya. According to the records of the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office, the application was filed on 24 August 2022 under number C2022/000267, and the dessert was registered on 20 November 2023 under registration number 1497 with the name "Amasya Unutma Beni Tatlısı." Protection runs from the application date under Industrial Property Law No. 6769. The indication is of the "mahreç işareti" type, that is, a designation of origin based on the reputation linking the product to the region; according to the document, all stages of this dessert's production must take place within the geographical boundary. The product group is "bakery and pastry products, dough-based dishes, desserts," and the geographical boundary is the whole of Amasya province. In the press the registration was described as a joint initiative of the Amasya Governorate and the Ziyaret Municipality.

These dates agree with reports published earlier. A January 2023 report by the Central Black Sea Development Agency gives the number of Amasya's registered products as eighteen; the most recently registered was Amasya Walnut and Honey Baklava, whose certificate was presented at a ceremony held in Amasya on 12 January. Listing twenty-two products at the application stage, the same report includes Unutma Beni Tatlısı. The same list of applications also includes products such as Amasya Honey, Amasya Jujube, Amasya Jujube Molasses, Sakala Çarpan Soup, Amasya Şehzade Kebab, Kaypak (Piruhi), Merzifon Karası Grape, Taşova Bread, Ziyaret Village Bread, Ziyaret Sini Çöreği and Ziyaret Yer Çöreği. The number of products bearing the name Ziyaret shows how much weight the small town's municipality gave to recording its local products. Which of these products were later registered is not stated in the sources consulted here.

Definition and Inspection

The registration document defines the dessert as follows: a dessert produced in Amasya province by slicing stale whole wheat bread, soaking it in a mixture of boiling water, white sugar and grape molasses, and pouring walnut kernels over it. According to the document, the dessert has deep roots in Amasya, holds an important place in the region's culinary culture, "is frequently eaten on important occasions and at everyday meals," and is made and eaten daily. Its reputational link to the region is grounded in this prevalence. This statement in the document does not fully match local testimonies saying that the dessert was rarely made in town centres; the document may be describing the dessert's place across the whole province, and the witnesses the difference between town and village.

The document also regulates how the name is to be used and how the product is to be inspected. The logo bearing the words "Amasya Unutma Beni Tatlısı" and the designation-of-origin emblem are placed on the product itself or its packaging, or, if that is not possible, kept in an easily visible place in the business. Inspection is carried out, under the coordination of the Ziyaret Municipality, by a three-person board with one expert each from the municipality, the Department of Hotel, Restaurant and Catering Services of Amasya University's Vocational School of Social Sciences, and the Amasya Provincial Directorate of Agriculture and Forestry. The board inspects regularly once a year, and at any time when deemed necessary or when there is a complaint; it checks the ingredients and their quantities, the production method, the manner of serving and the use of the name and logo against the document. Thus a village household's dessert made by eye has become, on paper, a product measured gram by gram and with named inspectors.

Its Revival

The dessert's recent situation is well illustrated by work done at a vocational high school in Amasya in the spring of 2024. Bilsen Bodur, a food and beverage services teacher at İlduş Hatun Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, points out that the dessert was made in villages but rarely in town centres. Bodur, who says her mother also made it when she was a child, explains that by teaching it to the students they will help it sweeten people's tables. Bodur's name also appears in the list of contributors to the Governorate's 2010 Amasya Cuisine book, as a food and beverage services teacher then working at the Amasya Anatolian Girls' Vocational High School. There is thus a direct link between the generation that put the recipe into the book and the generation that is teaching it again to students.

In the same report, the school's principal Zübeyde Komaç states that they have begun entering competitions with the registered dessert and that making and presenting "a very economical, nourishing dessert with cultural value" has been a source of pride for the school. One of the students, Seda Koçak, says: "We won't let Unutma Beni be forgotten." Bodur's remark shows that the dessert lived on for generations in the village kitchen but was not common in the town centre. Registration and the school's work have made the recipe visible. Reports published in January 2026 show women producers such as Döndü Olgun and Arzu Keskin presenting the dessert. In guides to Amasya cuisine and in the municipality's presentation of local cooking, too, it is counted among the city's desserts together with kuymak, yuka dessert, gömlek kadayıfı and cherry bread.

How It Is Made Today

Today the dessert is easily made in a home kitchen. One cup of grape molasses, two tablespoons of granulated sugar and one cup of water are boiled in a pot until syrupy. Sliced stale village bread, preferably lightly toasted in the oven, is dropped into the syrup, and when both sides have absorbed it, it is lifted out with a skimmer, arranged on a plate and served with plenty of crushed walnuts. Those who want a more syrupy result can follow the proportions in the registration document, where the bread is merely dipped into plenty of molasses water sweetened with sugar and taken out again. The softened bread and the crisp walnuts are the dessert's only contrast; the traditional recipe has no cream, chocolate or other addition.

Chronology

October 2006: The first edition of the Amasya Governorate's Amasya Cuisine, edited by H. Harun Yörgüç, is printed.

February 2010: The book's second edition is published; the Unutma Beni recipe appears in the dessert chapter in Turkish and English.

31 January 2013: The book's Unutma Beni recipe is added to an online cultural inventory.

December 2020: An article by Şimşek and Demircan on Amasya cuisine mentions the dessert on the authority of Yörgüç's book.

2021: The Amasya Municipality's book Amasya Local Flavours publishes the dessert as an "anonymous" recipe for six.

24 August 2022: The Ziyaret Municipality files a geographical indication application for Amasya Unutma Beni Tatlısı.

January 2023: Unutma Beni Tatlısı is named among Amasya's products with a pending geographical indication application.

20 November 2023: The dessert is registered as a designation of origin under number 1497.

26 April 2024: A report appears that the dessert has been remade at İlduş Hatun Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School.

January 2026: Women entrepreneurs present the dessert with its story and recipe, and the reports appear in the national press.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Erdal Ünsalan, Kenan Pala, "Amasya İlinin Gastronomi Turizmi Potansiyeline Yönelik Kavramsal Bir Çalışma", December 2022: https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/2517073
  • Aykut Şimşek, Göksu Demircan, "Amasya'ya Gelen Yerli Turistlerin Amasya Mutfağına Yönelik Algılarının Belirlenmesi", Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences, no. 8, December 2020, pp. 185-205. amasya.bel.tr

Official sources

Other sources

Online sources