Kurdish Cuisine: Geography on a Table

At a Glance

Kurdish cuisine is built by geography: mountain herding gives milk, the valleys and plains give wheat. The table rises on these two.
The main source for this article is Ala Barzinji's book Traditional Kurdish Food (2015). The author was born in southern Kurdistan and has lived in Britain since 1995.
The dairy trio is the pillar of the table: mast (yogurt), dew (a churned yogurt drink), and penîr (cheese). We confirmed the names in Chyet's dictionary too.
Wheat has two roads: savar (cracked bulgur wheat) carries everyday life, rice carries the day of welcome.
Bread is baked in the tenûr. Tenûr, in Kurmanji, means the bread oven; the tandır oven found across the region is the same hearth.
Yaprakh, the family of stuffed leaves and vegetables, is the food of labor. The traditional dish of Newroz night is gallaméw yaprakh, vine-leaf parcels.
Refusing food offered to a guest is held to be shameful; Barzinji writes this plainly. The table is set for a crowd.
Summer works for winter: herbs are dried in the sun, pickle jars are filled by communal labor, winter dishes are built on grain.
The kitchen carries identity. In the diaspora, recipes passed from mother to daughter keep the bond with the homeland alive.

In Kent, in the south of England, a kitchen. For years a woman has been scanning the bookshop shelves: the cuisines of the world stand in rows, and Kurdish cuisine is not there. At last she makes her decision. The kitchen she watched her mother work in as a child, she will write it down herself.

The woman's name is Ala Barzinji. She was born in southern Kurdistan and has lived in Britain since 1995. In the preface of the book she published in 2015 she sets a proverb, in the Sorani dialect: Giya le ser bincî xoyi derrwîtewe. Grass grows on its own root. That is the book's very concern: not to cut the bond with the root. Barzinji cooks for this, teaching her children the homeland through the pot.

This article follows the trail of that book. We will give no recipes; we will tell the world behind the recipe. What does a kitchen say about a people? On the Kurdish table, how do geography, season, guest, and memory meet?

How Does Geography Set the Table?

Every cuisine's first cook is the land. The Kurdish country is mountainous, but, as Barzinji reminds us, wide arable valleys run between the mountains. The Tigris and the Euphrates are born from these lands. On the heights the flocks graze; below, the wheat sways. The two pillars of the Kurdish table, milk and grain, come from this pairing.

This land's memory runs deep. Barzinji begins her book with a mound: Jarmo, east of Kirkuk, at the foot of the Zagros range. Archaeologists dug there a village settlement reaching back nine thousand years. The oldest traces of farming and of animal domestication are sought at these mountain feet. So the soil under this table is soil that saw humanity's first bread.

Is there only one Kurdish cuisine? Barzinji's answer is fine: the tables of Silêmanî (Sulaymaniyah), Kermanshah, Qamishli, and Diyarbakır each carry a separate character. But two common denominators are the same everywhere: the freshness of the ingredient, and inventiveness with the season. Herbs like mint, basil, parsley, purslane, and chard grow of themselves in this climate and enter every corner of the table. Olive, sumac, grape, pomegranate, fig, walnut, and honey in the comb are also among this country's gifts.

The Dairy Culture: Mast, Dew, Penîr

The alphabet of mountain cooking begins with milk. In Kurmanji the name of yogurt is mast. The name of the churned yogurt drink is dew. The name of cheese is penîr. This trio stands side by side in the dictionary and on the table alike.

In Chyet's dictionary a proverb announces the season: Adar e, dew li dar e. March has come, the buttermilk is in the churn. The snow melts, milk grows plentiful, the churn begins to work. Barzinji lists the same culture's southern names: dew appears there in the spelling doogh, mastaw is the whey, qaymagh is the clotted cream. At the table they are counted as natural to drink as water.

Is cheese only one kind? It is not. Chyet's dictionary records the varieties item by item: penîrê meşkê, ripened in a skin, and penîrê sirik, into which mountain herbs are folded. That herbed cheese is today a symbol of the tables of Van is no accident; its name is in the Kurdish dictionary, and the thing itself is in the folds of the same mountains. The dairy culture knows no border: in the north and the south the names change, the churn is the same churn.

This abundance has a calendar too. Milk belongs to spring and summer; for winter the mast is strained, the penîr salted, the butter stored. Milk, in Kurdish cooking, is as much a winter insurance as a daily food. We will come back to that shortly.

Wheat's Two Roads: Savar and Tenûr Bread

On the grain side the road's name is savar, that is, cracked bulgur wheat. Boiled, dried, pounded wheat. It is cheap, it keeps, it fills. In Barzinji's book bulgur is inside both the hot dishes and the pickles; as saawer it becomes a pilaf, and roasted, pounded fresh wheat, qarakharman, is counted a flavor of its own.

Rice speaks another language. Barzinji tells at length of rice's central place on the Kurdish table: pilaw, qubli, and the wedding cauldrons. A folk account that Chyet reports shows this pairing with cruel clarity: in the story, to set bulgur before a respected guest is held shameful. Bulgur is the grain of labor, rice the grain of welcome. Look at a table and you can read from the grain whether the day is ordinary or special.

And where is bread baked? Bread's hearth is the tenûr: a clay oven sunk in the ground with fire inside. In the Kurmanji dictionary the tenûr is defined as the bread oven; the tandır found across the region is a neighbor of the same word. Nanê tenûrê, the oven bread, is baked by slapping the dough onto the oven's hot wall. In Barzinji's recipes the thin bread appears as tirie naan; it is folded, fried, and even goes inside the salad. Bread in this kitchen is not a by-product; it is the ground. That the most common Kurdish word for the table is built on nan (bread) comes from exactly this.

The World of Yaprakh: The Food of Labor

The family the reader may know as stuffed leaves and vegetables carries, in Kurdish cooking, the name yaprakh; in the Kurmanji dictionary the same dish is recorded as iprax. Barzinji defines it honestly as "the dish that asks for time." Vine leaf, chard, pepper, tomato, and onion, stuffed with rice, herbs, and spice. It takes hours. Why this labor?

Because yaprakh is not an everyday dish; it is a gathering dish. It calls for crowded tables, feasts, special days. A pot of yaprakh is a home's announcement that something important is happening that day.

Another branch of the same labor-family is the stuffed dumpling. Barzinji tells of these under the names koobba and kifta: a shell of rice or bulgur dough, a meat filling inside. Kinds like kifta zarda float inside the soup. The heavy artillery of the morning table is geepa: a stuffing wrapped in tripe. Barzinji writes that those setting out for a long working day fortify themselves with geepa.

On the meat side let us name two more. Biryanî is the feast dish of southern Kurdistan; Barzinji describes the lamb biryanî as a whole lamb stuffed with rice, almonds, and raisins. The kebab is a craft of its own: the master who makes the kebab is called the wasta, and to Barzinji the good wasta is the man who balances the meat with its fat. The kebab houses are places of celebration; when there is joy, the skewers are lined up.

Why Is the Guest's Table Sacred?

The unwritten constitution of the Kurdish table is the guest. Barzinji makes it law in two sentences: to offer food is an expression of friendship and generosity, and to refuse the food offered is shameful. The table is set to match this. Kurdish dishes are thought out not by the single-plate arrangement but by the vessels to be placed in the middle; in Barzinji's phrasing, the table is designed to take in the guest who arrives unannounced.

Does hospitality end with the food? It does not; the tea round begins. Barzinji tells of the making of cha almost as a ceremony, and gives the name of the glass too: the piyala. Before the one who comes to visit, something sweet is set; the king of the sweets is paqlawa, and in the cities of the south the paqlawa masters have their own separate shops.

This generosity has a side of law as well. Recall the saying from our article on proverbs: the belly that has eaten bulgur must run to another's aid. The table forges a bond; the trouble of the house whose food you have eaten is now your trouble. That is why the guest's table is sacred: it does not fill the belly, it forges an alliance.

Summer Works for Winter: The Seasonal Cycle

In the world before the refrigerator, the kitchen wrestled with the calendar. Kurdish cooking is a master of that wrestling. Summer's plenty is carried over into winter's want. How?

The first road is the sun. Barzinji counts them off: okra, aubergine, mint, celery leaf, and many more are dried on the rooftops. Thanks to the dried celery leaf, that herb is in the pot in every season of the year.

The second road is the jar. At the end of summer tirkhéna is laid down: turnip, turnip leaf, and bulgur, fermented in a clay jar for two weeks. It is a sour, strong winter store, dried into balls and opened in hot water to cook in winter. There is also tirshyat: a pickle set in the juice of black grapes. Barzinji tells its making like a scene of communal labor: the crates of grapes arrive, friends and neighbors are called, the fruit is picked over all together, the jar is sealed. When the pickle is laid down, what is really built is the neighborhood.

The third road is the cauldron. In winter dishes like ganmakotow come to the table: pounded grain, chickpeas, meat, and milk meeting over a slow fire. Barzinji writes that this dish was traditionally cooked in the winter months. Let us not forget the molasses: grape molasses, whose Kurmanji name is dims, is an old winter sweetener recorded in the dictionary. When the larder is full, winter no longer frightens; winter comes to eat the labor stored up in summer.

The Newroz Table: Beside the Fire

When the year turns to 21 March, the kitchen enters its festival preparation. Newroz is the festival of spring and the new year; Barzinji defines it as the memory of a people's deliverance from a tyrant and a symbol of freedom. A fire is lit, and the line dance forms around it. We told the festival's history and the story of the fire in our article on Newroz; here let us look at the table.

Barzinji writes plainly: the traditional dish of Newroz is gallaméw yaprakh, that is, parcels rolled in vine leaves. The filling is set with rice, dill, and fresh onion, and meets yogurt. Why the parcels? The leaf, dried and brined through the winter, returns to the table on the first day of spring. Whoever wants to look for a symbol will find one: to meet the spring with what was saved from the winter.

The Newroz table is a crowded table. Families meet in the city meadows, the food is placed in the middle, it is eaten in the daylight. Fire, song, and vine-leaf parcels: the three legs of the festival. Here the kitchen does not only feed; it hallows the calendar.

How Does a Kitchen Carry Identity?

Let us return to the start: to the kitchen in Kent. Why did Barzinji write her book? Her own answer stands in the preface: food is the way to keep the bond with the homeland alive and to teach the children their inheritance. The recipes in this book were passed from mother to daughter; the last link of a chain that has run for centuries has been set down, in a Kent kitchen. The laborers of that chain were mostly women, and we tell the history of that labor separately in our article on Kurdish women.

The diaspora is the new stage of this story. Today there are Kurdish restaurants in the cities of Europe; tenûr bread is baked in Stockholm, biryanî in London. Abroad a language can be lost, an accent worn thin; the palate is more stubborn. A pot of yaprakh says what the passport does not.

Let us say this too, coolly: the kitchen is the least contested carrier of identity. Borders do not run through the table. The same vine-leaf parcel stands in the neighboring kitchens under other names, and this diminishes no one. What makes Kurdish cuisine its own is not the deed to a single dish; it is the whole that mountain and plain, churn and tenûr, guest and communal labor have built together. Geography set the table; the people turned that table into memory.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the staple foods of Kurdish cuisine? Dairy (mast, dew, penîr), grains (savar, that is bulgur, plus rice and tenûr bread), plenty of fresh herbs and vegetables, and meat in season. Barzinji's book shows these four legs across all its chapters.

What is traditionally eaten at Newroz? According to Barzinji, the traditional dish of Newroz is gallaméw yaprakh, that is vine-leaf parcels, set with rice, dill, and fresh onion. The table is spread on 21 March beside the fire and the line dance.

Are dew and ayran the same thing? They are two names for the same drink: mast (yogurt) shaken out with water. Barzinji records the southern name in the spelling doogh. Chyet's dictionary gives the dew entry with this definition.

Why does Kurdish cuisine resemble its neighbors' cuisines? Because they share the same geography, the same grain, and the same flocks. The words are shared too: tenûr and tandır, yaprakh and the wrapped leaf. Resemblance is the record of exchange, not anyone's deficiency.

Is there a book written about Kurdish cuisine? There is; the main source for this article is Ala Barzinji's Traditional Kurdish Food (2015). The author wrote it herself when she could find no Kurdish cookbook on the shelves.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Ala Barzinji, Traditional Kurdish Food: An Insight into Kurdish Culinary Heritage (2015); the spine of this article, the food names and the culture chapters.
Michael L. Chyet, Kurdish-English Dictionary; the entries for mast, dew, penîr, tenûr, savar, iprax, and dims, and the proverb records.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th ed.); the frame of geography and folk culture.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

Kurdish cuisine is built by geography: the mountain gives milk, the valley wheat. Mast, dew, penîr; savar and tenûr bread. A whole map on a single table: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-cuisine-geography-on-a-table
On the Kurdish table, grain is a language: bulgur the grain of labor, rice the grain of welcome. Look at the spread and you can read whether the day is ordinary or a feast: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-cuisine-geography-on-a-table
Pickle in the juice of black grapes: tirshyat. The neighbors are called, the fruit is picked over together, the jar is sealed. When the pickle is laid down, what is really built is the neighborhood: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-cuisine-geography-on-a-table
The crown of the Newroz table is gallaméw yaprakh: rice and dill in a vine leaf. The leaf saved through the winter returns to the table on the first day of spring: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-cuisine-geography-on-a-table
Ala Barzinji found no Kurdish cookbook on the shelves, so she wrote her mother's kitchen down herself, in Kent. Grass grows on its own root. The kitchen carries identity: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-cuisine-geography-on-a-table