Salça (Paste-Making)

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By David Dale and Somer Sivrioglu

Published 2015

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The array of dishes that can be called ‘Turkish cuisine’ evolved in a time-rich, cash-poor society. Because of harsh climate variations in the eastern half of the country, people had to find ways to make ingredients last across four seasons. So they perfected techniques for drying, pickling, brining, preserving and pulverising products that were plentiful in late summer.

The pulverising process is called salça in Turkish—a word that entered culinary dictionaries only in the nineteenth century, even though it’s derived from the Latin salsa. Before that, the word palude was used for pastes, sauces and reductions that were thickened with starch. For me, salça means a concentration of one ingredient—a paste, perhaps with salt as a preservative.