Two important factors characterized Sephardic cooking in Turkey: the Spanish heritage and the Turkish culture with additional traditions, flavors and techniques imported from the Greeks, who were very famous for their culinary skills. We read a lot of stories of Muslims visiting their Jewish neighbors on their religious holidays and being offered of their traditional dishes and of Jews visiting their Muslim neighbors on their holidays to partake of the delicious sweets and desserts.
There are a multitude of dishes with vegetables in the Sephardic cuisine. You can create a whole meal without any meat at all as meat was always the most expensive ingredient to buy for a family. So we have a lot of very tasty dishes with vegetables that were used to their very last bits, even their peels. A very good example of this is the dish made from squash peels, called “kashkarikas”. It is a delicious dish eaten cold, like a salad, with olive oil and lemon and dill.
In summer, when tomatoes are plentiful and very cheap you could make a very substantial and delicious entrée, called “Armi de tomat”, a tomato and rice stew is made of tomatoes, onions and parsley. This is a dish that is specifically sephardic, just like “kashkarikas”, and red beet leaves pie, not known by the wider Muslim Turkish community.
As to the dishes with meat, we have a lot of dishes made with minced meat and most of these are köftes of one form or another. The most famous of these is the leek meatballs or köftes de prasa, as we call them.
