Poultry and Game

The most common sort of poultry is chicken. Lean and tasty, it is most often used in soups and rice dishes, roasted with almonds and honey, stuffed with fresh figs and apricots, casseroled, or sliced and layered with peppers and sheep’s tail fat (kuyrukyağı) in piliç döner; and the breasts are used to make the famous milk pudding, tavuk göğsü. The name for turkey is hindi tavuk, ‘Indian chicken’, which denotes the origins of the bird — not from India but from the New World. Reaching the Ottoman Empire all the way from Mexico in the sixteenth century, it is now mainly used for soup and rice dishes. Quails and their eggs are also popular, but perhaps these birds reached their celebratory heights during the lavish banquets of the Empire, when they were ingeniously stuffed whole into aubergines.