Kebabs

When in Turkey, one cannot miss the chance to try the world-famous Turkish kebabs. These skewered and grilled meats come in various forms, such as Adana kebab, made with minced meat and spicy seasonings, and Shish kebab, featuring marinated cubes of meat. The succulent flavors and aromatic spices make kebabs a true Turkish delight.

Mezes

For those who enjoy variety, mezes are a delightful way to start a meal. Mezes are a collection of small dishes served as appetizers, ranging from stuffed grape leaves (Dolma) to eggplant-based delights like Babaganoush. These small bites are perfect for sharing, too!

Turkish Delight (Lokum)

No visit to Turkey is complete without indulging in the sweet, chewy goodness of Turkish Delight. Known locally as Lokum, these confections come in a rainbow of colors and flavors, often featuring nuts or dried fruits. They make for a perfect souvenir to bring back home and share the delightful taste of Turkey with your loved ones.

Baklava

A dessert that has transcended borders, Baklava is a heavenly treat made from layers of thin pastry, chopped nuts, and sweet honey or syrup. The perfect combination of crispy layers and sweet filling creates a dessert that’s both rich and satisfying. Don’t miss the chance to taste this classic Turkish sweet.

Koftes

Koftes are meatballs made with minced meat and a mix of spices. Often grilled or cooked in a flavorful tomato-based sauce, koftes can be enjoyed on their own or with a side of rice or bread. They are a staple in Turkish households.

Pide

Turkey’s answer to pizza, Pide is a boat-shaped flatbread topped with a variety of ingredients such as cheese, meats, and vegetables. The crust is fluffy and delicious, making Pide a popular choice for a quick meal. Each region in Turkey has its own twist on Pide, adding to the diversity of this beloved dish.

Turkish Tea and Coffee

To wash down these tasty dishes, be sure to enjoy some traditional Turkish tea or coffee. Turkish tea is a black tea served in small tulip-shaped glasses, often accompanied by sugar cubes. Turkish coffee, on the other hand, is known for its strong, rich flavor and is often enjoyed after a hearty meal.

Exploring the local markets, street food stalls, and traditional restaurants will expose you to a variety of flavors that will undoubtedly make your trip memorable. So, pack your bags and get ready to embark on a culinary journey through the vibrant and delicious world of Turkish cuisine.

Turkey officially changes name at UN to Türkiye 

United Nations says request from Ankara has been accepted with immediate effect

Turkey’s government has sent a letter to the United Nations formally requesting that it be referred to as Türkiye, the state-run news agency has reported.

The move is seen as part of a push by Ankara to rebrand the country and dissociate it from the bird of the same name and negative connotations associated with it.

Anadolu Agency said Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson to UN secretary general António Guterres, confirmed receipt of the letter from Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish foreign minister. The agency quoted Dujarric as saying that the name change had become effective “from the moment” the letter was received. Dujarric told the Washington Post: “It is not uncommon for us to receive such requests.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has been pressing for the internationally recognised name Turkey to be changed to Türkiye (tur-key-YAY) as it is spelled and pronounced in Turkish. The country called itself Türkiye in 1923 after its declaration of independence.

In December 2021, Erdoğan ordered the use of Türkiye to better represent Turkish culture and values, including demanding that “Made in Türkiye” be used instead of “Made in Turkey” on exported products. Turkish ministries also began using Türkiye in official documents.

The government this year released a promotional video as part of its attempts to change its name in English. The video shows tourists from across the world saying “Hello Türkiye” at famous destinations.

The Turkish presidency’s directorate of communications said it launched the campaign “to promote more effectively the use of ‘Türkiye’ as the country’s national and international name on international platforms”.

It was not clear whether the name, with a letter that doesn’t exist in the English alphabet, will catch on widely abroad. In 2016, the Czech Republic officially registered its short-form name, Czechia, and while some international institutions use it, many still refer to the country by its longer name.

Turkey’s English-language state broadcaster TRT World has switched to using Türkiye although the word Turkey slips in, used by journalists still trying to get used to the change.

TRT World explained the decision in an article earlier this year, saying Googling “Turkey” brings up a “a muddled set of images, articles, and dictionary definitions that conflate the country with Meleagris – otherwise known as the turkey, a large bird native to North America – which is famous for being served on Christmas menus or Thanksgiving dinners.”

The network continued: “Flip through the Cambridge Dictionary and ‘turkey’ is defined as ‘something that fails badly’ or ‘a stupid or silly person’.”

TRT World argued that Turks prefer their country to be called Türkiye, in “keeping with the country’s aims of determining how others should identify it”.

source: AP

CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH DICTIONARY

turkey (noun)

B1 [ countable ]
a large bird grown for its meat on farms

B1 [ uncountable ]
the flesh of this bird used as food

turkey noun (FAILURE)
[ countable ] informal
something that fails badly:

His last film was a complete turkey. – Legutóbbi filmje egy óriás bukta volt. 

[ countable ] US informal
a stupid or silly person:

What did you do that for, you turkey? – Miért csináltad most ezt, te bolond?

Turkey Idioms

Cold Turkey

 stop something immediately – valamit hirtelen abbahagyni

Some people quit smoking by smoking less and less each day until eventually, they do not smoke any cigarettes at all. Not me. I quit cold turkey. – Néhány ember úgy szokik le a dohányzásról, hogy egyre kevesebbet szív, míg végül már egyáltalán nem gyújtanak rá. Én nem így tettem. Én egyik pillanatról a másikra hagytam abba.

Have you ever quit anything? How did you do it? Did you do it cold turkey? – Szoktál már le valamiről? Hogyan csináltad? Egyik percről a másikra?

Go Cold Turkey

to stop something immediately – valamit hirtelen, egyik percről a másikra abbahagyni

This idiom is similar to the above idiom, but the addition of the verb “go” means that you can use it without the verbs “stop” or “quit”, like in the first idiom.

To quit smoking, I went cold turkey. – A dohányzást egyik percről a másikra hagytam abba.

My New Year’s Resolution is to go cold turkey on coffee. – Az fogadtam meg újévkor, hogy azonnal abba fogom hagyni a kávézást.

Talk Turkey

 to talk business; to talk honestly and opening instead of saving one’s feelings or true opinions – üzletről beszélgetni, illetve nyíltan érzelmeket feltárva beszélni, nem elfedni a valós érzéseinket és véleményünket

Let’s be honest, this new project is not working. Let’s talk turkey about what we can do to change things. – Legyünk őszinték, ez az új project nem működik. Beszéljünk nyíltan arról, hogy mit tehetünk az érdekében, hogy változtassunk a dolgokon.

It’s a vision that is watched – unseen by the Cratchits – by a fast-repenting Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present who is showing the miser the error of his ways.

Duly chastened by his supernatural experience, the newly festive Scrooge sends over, on Christmas morning, a turkey that is “twice the size of Tiny Tim” – and will certainly feed more people than the goose. This set the seal for the popular English Christmas meal. But what did people eat at Christmas time before goose and turkey?

A time of gifts

In the anonymous late 14th-century poem Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is served “many delicacies” on Christmas Day in the castle of Sir Bertilak, but no meat in the meal he eats on Christmas Eve, which was a time for fasting.

During the medieval period, it was traditional in wealthier households for a boar’s head to take pride of place at the centre of the festive table – a tradition alluded to when Sir Bertilak presents Gawain with the head and flesh of the boar he has killed. A 15th-century carol, The Boar’s Head, celebrates the dish like this:

Chief service in all this land

Wheresoever it may be found,

Served up with mustard.

Of course the poor would have eaten what they could get, including scraps from their master’s table if they had access to them.

Good bread and good drink

For the Elizabethans, no specific food was special during Christmas time. In Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573), Thomas Tusser recommended: “Good bread and good drink”. Meat was the dominant foodstuff:

Beef, mutton, and pork, and good pies of the best

Pig, veal, goose, and capon, and turkey well dressed.

Potatoes – a product of the New World, like the turkey – were not a regular feature of feasts until the middle of the 17th century. Even then they remained expensive – which is why bread and pies dominate in descriptions of Christmas foodstuffs before Dickens. Vegetables are rare in descriptions of early feasts and do not feature in the Cratchit Christmas dinner. The Brussels sprout – a member of the cabbage family, specially developed by 16th-century Belgian farmers – may have become a staple of the modern Christmas dinner in part due to fashion and an increasing awareness of nutrition, and the fact that cabbage had a reputation since ancient times of preventing drunkenness.

Robert Herrick’s Ceremonies for Christmas (1648) urges “merry, merry boys” to bring in the Christmas log and to consume strong beer and white bread “while the meat is a-shredding / For the rare mince-pie”. The yule log would have been lit on Christmas Eve; the modern confection of sponge and chocolate is a nod towards this old tradition. On the contrary, mince pies used to be savoury – in Hannah Woolley’s popular cookbook of the time, The Queen-Like Closet (1670), there is a recipe for “good minced pies” containing veal. Puddings too were often savoury, similar to haggis – although it is the sweet plum pudding that would become the traditional Christmas pud.

Twelfth night

Yet for the Elizabethans, and subsequent generations too, Twelfth Night (January 6) rather than Christmas Day was the main focus of revelry during the Christmas season. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (first performed around 1602) Sir Toby Belch evokes the historical figure of the Lord of Misrule. When Sir Toby mocks Malvolio’s puritanism with “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” he anticipates the banning of such food during the English Commonwealth of 1649 to 1660.

Herrick’s poem Twelfth Night, or King and Queen (1648) describes the Twelfth Night Cake – a spiced fruit cake containing a bean and a pea that represents the king and queen with the recipients of each being crowned king and queen for the night. Herrick’s “bowl full of gentle lamb’s wool” (hot ale, roasted apple pulp, and spices) is used to wassail (toast) the pretend king and queen.

Samuel Pepys makes several references to Twelfth Night Cake in his diary, including an entry for January 6 1668 where he describes “an excellent cake” that cost him nearly 20 shillings – about one day’s salary from his job as Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board.

Twelfth Night remained the focus of festivities during the Regency period and Jane Austen would have been familiar with the eponymous cake. She also mentions Christmas in her novels but does not specify the Christmas Day meal. In Emma, there is a Christmas Eve dinner at Randalls, the home of the Westons, where saddle of mutton is served, and in Persuasion, a visit to the Musgroves during the Christmas holidays reveals tables “bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies”. Brawn here indicates a dish of meat from the head of a pig set in its own jelly and so harks back to the boar’s head from medieval times.

The closest most of us get to Boar’s Head these days is likely to be a pub whose name commemorates it. So we can largely thank Charles Dickens, who was himself very fond of turkey, for the tradition of the Christmas dinner turkey – a gift from the newly reformed Scrooge, which now forms the centrepiece of most Christmas tables.

source: theconversation.com

What did people eat for Christmas or Twelfth Night in different periods of history in Britain? Can you find the information in the text?

Key

– Come on you maggots. Move it. Come on, move along. There’s chimneys to sweep. I do not pay you to have fun.

-Christmas turkey, all the trimmings and exotic delicacies from far, far away. Step right up.

– Fruit.

– Thank you, Mrs. Sainsbury. Come on.

– Gotcha. Ho, ho, ho. Nicholas, the Sweep, eh?

– I got my first thief. I caught him orange-handed.

– It wasn’t me.

– What should we do with him?

– Chuck him in the dungeon.

– Burn the witch.

– Give him a fair trial.

– Sorry, uh, uh, I mean…

– Banish him forever. Banish him.

– I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.

– Oh, that is disappointing. Some people are just rotten to the core.

– Rotten to the core. Ho, ho, ho!

– Thief, thief, thief, thief!

– It wasn’t me.

– Sssh, I know, I know. Let’s get you somewhere safe.

– These are for you.

– But…miss… I can’t pay for these.

– Well, if you can’t do something special for someone at Christmas, when can you?

– Miss. There’s something I need to do.

– What’s this? Who’s done this?

– What? What’s this? Get back to work.

And that is a totally true story. Merry Christmas!

Can you find the English equivalent of these Hungarian phrases in the script?

1. Valamit meg kell tennem.

2. Nem azért fizetlek benneteket, hogy szórakozzatok.

3. Mit csináljunk vele?

4. Nem én voltam.

5. Ki tette ezt?

Key

1. There’s something I need to do.

2. I do not pay you to have fun.

3. What should we do with him?

4. It wasn’t me.

5. Who’s done this?

Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Cooking Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
Oven Temperature: 180° c  –  360° f

Step 1:  You’ll need

• 850 g pumpkin, chopped
• 350 ml cream
• 190 g brown sugar
• Half tsp salt
• 3 eggs and 1 egg yolk
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• quarter tsp nutmeg
• quarter tsp allspice
• the zest of 1 lemon
• 1 short-crust pastry base , ready made
• 1 roasting tin
• 1 spoon
• 1 fork
• 1 pie mold
• 1 jug
• 1 hand blender
• aluminium foil
• parchment paper
• about 500g of beans to weigh down the crust

Step 2: Preheat the oven

Set the temperature to 180ºC or gas mark 4.

Step 3: Roast the pumpkin

Tip the chopped pumpkin into the roasting tin and cover it tightly with aluminium foil. Put the tin on a low shelf in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes (this is the first stage of creating the pumpkin puree).

Step 4: Prepare the pastry base

Gently lay the pastry crust on the pie mold and carefully press it down to form the shape of the pie. Remove any excess pastry from the edges. Now using a fork, lightly jab the bottom of the base various times. This will prevent the pastry from rising.

Put the parchment paper over the top of the pastry and pour the beans on top to weigh it down.

Step 5: Bake the pastry

Place the pie mold in the oven with the pumpkin and bake for 20 minutes.

Step 6: Remove from the oven

When the pastry crust is golden brown, take it out of the oven. Test the pumpkin to see if it’s done by piercing it with a fork. It needs to be completely soft to make the puree. Remove it from the oven and discard the foil. Take the beans off the pastry and leave it and the pumpkin to cool.

Finally, raise the temperature of the oven to 210 degrees centigrade or gas mark 6.

Step 7: Make the pumpkin puree

Spoon the cooked pumpkin into the jug and using the hand blender, blend into a puree.

Step 8: Prepare the pie filling

In a large bowl mix the brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, lemon zest and salt. Now, whisk the eggs, add them to the other ingredients and stir. Pour in the pumpkin puree and cream and stir well.

Step 9: Bake

Pour the filling into the pastry crust, almost to the top. Carefully place it into the centre of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Lower the temperature to 160ºC and bake for a further 35 minutes.

Step 10: Remove from the oven

When the pie is fully cooked remove it from the oven and allow it to cool and set.

Step 11: Serve

The pie can be eaten warm or cold and served dusted with icing sugar and with a dollop of whipped cream.

Thanksgiving Quiz

1. The first renowned celebration took place in 1621 in ……………….. .

a) in Florida

b) in Plymouth

c) the USA

2. The Pilgrims invited the American Indians to celebrate ……………….. .

a) the anniversary of their arrival

b) the successful corn harvest

c) Pocahontas’s wedding

3. In the first year ……………….. of the colonists died.

a) half

b) a quarter

c) one-tenth

4. In 1863 ……………….. proclaimed the last Thursday in November a national day of thanksgiving.

a) Benjamin Franklin

b) Bill Clinton

c) Abraham Lincoln

5. The Thanksgiving menu traditionally features ……………….. .

a) turkey and pumpkin

b) ham and pumpkin

c) turkey and sweets

6. According to the National Turkey Federation, an estimated ……………….. turkeys were eaten at Thanksgiving.

a) 25 million

b) 19 million

c) 46 million

7. The world record for the largest pumpkin pie is held by a ……………….. diameter pie.

a) 10-foot

b) 20-foot

c) 22.5-foot

8. The first Thanksgiving lasted for 3 days, but the Pilgrims didn’t eat ……………….. .

a) clams

b) venison

c) pumpkin pie

9. Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on the ……………….. .

a) last Monday of November

b) second Monday of November

c) second Monday of October

10. The Pilgrims moved to America because ………………..

a) they needed more land.

b) they wanted to have religious freedom.

c) they were starving in England.

11. Their ship was called the ……………….. .

a) Bounty

b) Mayfly

c) Mayflower

12. The Pilgrims were originally sailing for ……………….., but couldn’t get there because of stormy weather.

a) Australia

b) Virginia

c) Mexico

13. American Indians in New England observe the ……………….. at the same time as Thanksgiving.

a) National Day of Mourning

b) Indian Harvest

c) Indian Summer

14. The Pilgrims were helped by an Indian called Squanto, who had been kidnapped years earlier by a/an ……………….. captain.

a) English

b) French

c) Spanish

15. A male turkey is called a ……………….. .

a) tom

b) larry

c) harry

Answers: 1-b 2-b 3-a 4-c 5-a 6-c 7-b 8-c 9-b 10-b 11-c 12-b 13-a 14-a 15-a