Cooking the past : the revival of Ottoman cuisine

Since the 1990s, Turkey has started to develop an extensive interest in its Ottoman past. The view of the Ottomans as "backward" and "pre-modern" that once held sway has given way to a view that grasps the Ottoman past as "open," "tolerant," and "cosmopolitan." Food is one of the areas in which Turkey's Ottoman past is negotiated. This dissertation attempts to trace the revival of Ottoman cuisine through experiences of production, representation, and commodification in Istanbul. It seeks to understand multiple discourses involved in the relationship between the past and the present, within a context where history implicates both continuity and novelty. Ottoman cuisine has developed not only as the foundation of traditional Turkish cuisine, but also as its "other." This dissertation examines the revival of Ottoman cuisine through an analysis of diverse sources, such as cookbooks, media, culinary institutes, cultural and social organizations, the cultural policies of the state, and mainstream restaurant and festival venues. Finally, it asserts that the revival of Ottoman cuisine in particular seems to feed multiple discourses of cosmopolitanism. The turn back to the Ottoman period is both nationalistic and cosmopolitan, such that cosmopolitanism is turned into a national image and a national cultural asset. As a result, the past becomes a utopian project for the future, and cosmopolitanism of the past haunts Turkey and Istanbul as a progressive image for the contemporary world