Eating the past: multiple spaces, multiple times -performing ‘Ottomanness

construction of history and the processes of differentiation, commodification and exoticism. Food is related to sensory experiences, and taste and smell play a crucial role in the creation and representation of the past. This article studies the past as/through text and performance by looking at how history is brought back, represented and performed by food practices in the present. It analyses a number of Ottoman restaurants in terms of their expression of the Ottoman past and their ways of performing ‘Ottomanness ’ in the city of Istanbul. K E Y W O R D S exoticism Ottoman past performance restaurant spaces taste Food as a cultural agency This is to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. (Probyn, 2000: 14) Elspeth Probyn defines eating as ‘intensely social ’ and ‘boringly mundane’ (2000: 1). While eating is the most ordinary activities in our lives, it is an important reflection of how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues (2000: 14). Cooking and eating, and cuisine for that matter, provides various entry points to cultural analysis and to the question of how identities and experiences are reconfigured between and within A R T I C L E INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studie