Essential Turkish Cuisine

Fantastic cookbook with Beautiful pictures (which I enjoy as it shows the finished product); impressive cookbook which one would probably display on the coffee table for guests to enjoy & admire! To purchase this cookbook at such a bargain price (barely $4 - compared to its brand-new price $50) makes it all the more enjoyable! Bon appetit!

From the Wife: This is a good cookbook, though not--I think--as wonderful as some other Turkish cookbooks--such as Ayla Algar's and Neset Eren's. Lots of nice pictures and, what I like best, blurbs about the origins of recipes on nearly every page. I've made many of these recipes--especially those with eggplant, and regret that we don't have Turkish eggplants in this country. What a difference they would make in a recipe's success. For some reason, the copy I received came damaged. I kept it, but I wish all of Amazon's books were carefully packaged.

Nice recipes and interesting regional and historical comment but very poorly illustrated, although maybe this only applies to the Kindle edition where the photographs are extremely small and few and far between. Perhaps there are more and better photographs in the hardback edition.

Bought this as a gift for my mother. She loves it. It arrived quickly and she's already made a few delicious dishes. Her husband is Turkish so you know it's legit!

best book in this topic .Engin Akin knows Turkis kitchen well.

thank you

Love this book.

The best cookbook to come along in a long time. Not only are the recipes delicious but surprisingly easy to execute. Instructions are clear and the history and provenance of each is explained and detailed. So is the explanation of ingredients and techniques. I've already marked all the dishes I'll be making, I'll be cooking from it for some time. Engin's personality comes through, her sense of humor and her love of life. The book is a delight!

I bought this book based on the top review, which claims that it has "lots of nice pictures". This is incorrect, untrue and false. There is a paucity of pictures in this book. I reckon that there is one picture every ten pages and that <10% of the recipes are accompanied by pictures. Where there are pictures, they are not of the dish itself. For example, what does "Lentils with quince and mint (Meksenye)" look like? Who knows, becuase the picture accompanying the recipe is of freshly picked quince and not of a meal. Other recipes are accompanied by unrelated pictures, such are a market stall or a fish seller. I bought another book, Istanbul Cult Recipes, at the same time. This has a picture per recipe (which is the standard format for cookery bestsellers) either on the opposite page or the same page. .Cookery books without pcitures show a lack of understanding of, and contempt for, eating, cooking and learning.1. People eat with their eyes. This has been scientifically proven. A Japanese study showed a direct link between seeing food and the drive to eat. Viz. a picture of a dish is a catalyst to cooking it.2. People need a frame of reference when making an unfamiliar dish. How is one to know that one's dish came out correctly, if there's no picture of the end product for comparison?3. Visual learners learn by seeing.4. The publishers know that pictures make cookery books more attractive to buyers, that's why the images of the book on Amazon are chosen from the few pages which have pictures. The actual paucity of pictures in the book implies that the publisher and/or author were too lazy and/or too cheap to photograph the dishes.5. This is the age were there is a YouTube video for almost anything one could want to learn. Why would one want a book centred on text and text alone?Will be returned.

I really wanted to like this book but somehow it never got me fired up the same way that David Dale's and Somer Sivrioglu's Anatolia did - kinda like the whole not coming through bigger than the sum of the its parts ... informative preamble, useful cultural context and interesting recipes for sure, but nothing that hooked me and got me in the kitchen cooking

Quality binding, great photos and well written.

Este libro a parte de ser muy bonito visualmente es muy completo. Las recetas son de auténtica cocina turca tradicional además de algunas más modernas.

Love it. wtih easy to follow preparing instructions. For beginers and comprehensive instructions. All my friends a cooked for them turkish were delighted and wanted more.