I used to joke that the word paçanga (pronounced ‘pachanga’) sounds like a Spanish dance, and when we were researching this book, I got two shocks. First, it is the name of a type of music popular in Cuba since the late 1950s; and second, there are scholars who claim the dish was brought to Anatolia by Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century. I hope that’s true, because then this dish would represent a blend of three communities that contributed greatly to Turkish cuisine—the Armenians, with their pastırma-making skills; the Bulgarians, with their dairy farming; and the Spanish Jews, with their sophisticated technique (and the name).