Garlic

This popular Lebanese pickle is served as a mezze. Make sure the walnuts have a fresh taste.

Although this is not a pickle, I am including the recipe because it is a very useful sauce to have at hand when required, and it can be prepared in advance and stored in jars. It keeps for months if the surface remains covered with a film of oil.

This famous and formidable chili paste goes into many North African, especially Tunisian, dishes. It keeps very well for many weeks in the refrigerator if covered with oil. You can now find it store-bought more easily, including some homemade-type artisanal varieties.

This easy pickle makes a ready delicious mezze.

This Armenian specialty makes a hearty main dish. It has a pure and fresh quality and is an entirely different experience from eating an Italian or Asian pasta dish.

Manti, a specialty of Kayseri, are said to have been brought to Turkey from China by the Tartars. I first saw them being prepared in a hotel in Izmir twenty years ago. I was accompanied by Nevin Halici, a cooking teacher, culinary historian, and ethnographer, who was then researching the regional foods of Turkey. She was going from village to village, knocking on people’s doors and attending the traditional lunches where women cook together. The second time I saw the little dumplings being made was in a hotel in San Francisco, where at the invitation of the Institute of Food and Wine she was cooking a Turkish meal for almost a hundred people. She shaped the dumplings into tiny, open-topped, moneybag-like bundles, baked them for 20 minutes, poured chicken broth over them, and put them back in the oven again until they softened in the broth. The following recipe is for the easier version, like ravioli, which many Turkish restaurants make today. It is really delicious and quite different from any Italian dish. They call it klasik manti, and often cook it in chicken broth (see variation), which is particularly delicious.

A good partner to omelets, little spicy sausages, and fried or broiled eggplant.

Beans cooked in olive oil and eaten at room temperature are a Turkish staple. The mottled pink borlotti beans (they are called barbunya, which is also the name for red mullets) are a special treat. The Turkish ones obtainable here need to be picked over for foreign matter. There are also good-quality canned varieties which you can use.

Turlu is a Turkish dish of mixed seasonal vegetables cooked in olive oil. The winter turlu consists of root vegetables and beans.

A tbikha is a Tunisian dish which mixes fresh vegetables with pulses such as chickpeas and dried fava beans.

A disadvantage of these root vegetables is that they provoke wind. But they do have a delicious flavor. Smoother, less knobbly varieties available today are easier to peel.

You need waxy new potatoes for this. Large ones can be quartered, baby ones can be left whole or cut in half. I don’t bother to peel the very small ones. Serve hot or cold.

I like the surprising blend of sweet potato with ginger and chili pepper.

Takleya is the name of the fried garlic-and-coriander mix which gives a distinctive Egyptian flavor to a number of dishes. It goes in at the end. In Upper Egypt they chop up and mash the okra when it is cooked. Serve hot as a side dish with meat or chicken.

Bell peppers change in color as they ripen from olive, pale, and bright green to vivid yellow and red. The red ones are the ripest and sweetest. In Turkey they are roasted or deep-fried whole and served hot as a first course accompanied with yogurt or with a tomato sauce. There is no need to peel them. A long, pointed, piquant (but not hot) variety is also prepared in the same way.

A North African dish which can be served hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.

The combination of spinach with chickpeas is common throughout the Middle East, but the flavors here are Egyptian. You may use good-quality canned chickpeas. It is good served with yogurt.