Tuşu (Pickling)

A local movie called Happy Days, made in the 1970s, exposes one of the most divisive issues in Turkish society. It shows a married couple at odds over the best way to pickle vegetables. The husband says lemon, the wife says vinegar. They divorce and then get back together, but never reach agreement. Both as a chef and as a married man, I know you can never win an argument with a woman, so I mostly go with vinegar.

That also puts me on the side of the first published picklers. A fourteenth-century nutrition book contains recipes for preserving cucumber, eggplants, onions and beetroot in a vinegar marinade. In the seventeenth century, Greek meyhanes started pickling a fish called lakerda, its saltiness probably boosting alcohol sales.