Description

This is a rare, first published Ottoman cookbook and possibly first printed book in Islamic world, containing food recipes only. It includes 284 food and drink recipes, written in a simple language, omitting unnecessary ingredients and complicated steps. The text is divided in 12 chapters, describing meat, fish and vegetarian dishes, typical for the Ottoman and Turkish cuisine:

1. Soups, including still today very popular Tarhana soup.
2. Various kebabs, made of mutton, lamb and fish, as well as grilled pieces of chicken, scallops, oysters, cheese, veal and bonito.
3. Dumplings (köfte), stews (including trout, rabbit and garlic) and fritters (Mücmer).
4. Pan dishes (including liver, anchovy, mackerel, fish and oyster).
5. Böreks.
6. Baklava, Kadayif, Halva and other pastries.
7. Cold desserts (including a desert made of chicken breasts, Aşure, Güllâç etc).
8. Different types of dishes, made of variations of leftovers of meat, vegetables and fruit.
9. Stuffed vegetables (dolma).
10. Rice (Uzbek, Persian etc.).
11. Compotes.
12. Desserts, cookies, salads, pickles and canned fruit and vegetables.

Some of the recipes are very rare and have not been mentioned in other cookbooks.

Not much is known about the author Mehmed Kamil, except that was a teacher at the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul.

Early Istanbul Lithography

This book is not only interesting for being the first printed cookbook, but also for the date 1844, which is exceedingly rare for a lithographic publication in Istanbul. Lithography was introduced to the Ottoman capital in 1831, when Hüsrev Pasha opened at the Ministry of War a lithographic press, led by a Frenchmen Henri Cayol. After only 5 books were printed until 1836, Cayol opened his own shop close to the French embassy, where he worked until his death from cholera in 1865.

Only recent archival researches identified the anonymous publisher of the first Ottoman cookbook as nobody else but Henry Cayol himself (Erdem 2023, pp. 112-113).

All the works from this Frenchmen’s lithographic shop in Istanbul are rare today. Cayol’s work was often concentrated on Western subjects. Among others he published the first printed pharmacopeia in the Ottoman Empire, issued same as our item in 1844, therefore the production of the first cookbook, a genre widely popular in the West at the time, by Cayol is not surprising.

This is the first edition of six, with the last one being published in 1889. The book is very rare. We could trace two institutional examples on Worldcat (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky, Bavarian State Library).

A translation of the recipes from this book to modern Turkish and English was published in 2000 in the publication İlk Basılı Türkçe Yemek Kitabı Meiceü’t-Tabbâhîn (Aşçıların Sığınağı).

References: OCLC 750958184. Cf. J. de Hammer-Purgstall, Liste des ouvrages imprimés à Constantinople en 1843 et 1844, Journal asiatique IV-IX, p. 280; Yahya Erdem, ürk Taş Baskıcılığı Başlangıç Yılları ve İlk Kitaplar, 2023, pp. 112-113.