Circassian chicken (Çerkez tavuğu) Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Circassian chicken (Çerkez Tavuğu) is a dish that comes from the Circassians of the Caucasus. Poached, shredded chicken is coated in a cold sauce of ground walnuts thickened with bread or stale bread. Chicken, walnuts and bread were all familiar ingredients long present in this region.

This dish took root in Anatolia only after the people who carried it arrived. In the 1860s the war between Russia and the Circassians set off a mass migration; between 1863 and 1865, by some counts up to half a million people resettled in Ottoman territory. Among the foodways they carried into Anatolia and Istanbul was this dish of ground walnuts and chicken.

Once in Ottoman lands, the dish did not stay only on the household table. Its name appears in the cookbook Ev Kadını, published in Istanbul in 1883, and it came to be served at court banquets as well. From home cooking to a palace main dish, and then to a meze eaten by ordinary people, it spread while changing its setting. The cold walnut sauce came from the Caucasus, and the dish sits in a sisterly line with the Georgian satsivi.

The origin of Circassian chicken is told through two accounts that complement rather than contradict each other. At its core is the view that the dish comes from the Circassians of the Caucasus. The mass migration that followed the Russo-Circassian War of the 1860s carried this dish of ground walnuts and chicken into Anatolia; this thread is supported both by migration history (up to about 500,000 people resettled in Ottoman territory between 1863 and 1865) and by its record in a late-nineteenth-century Ottoman cookbook.

The heart of that record is the cookbook Ev Kadını, published in Istanbul in 1883, whose author was Ayşe Fahriye. The catalog of the Library of Congress holds this edition, and it makes firm that the name Çerkez Tavuğu had entered the written record by that year. The date lines up neatly with the arc of the origin account: from the migration of the 1860s to its appearance in print at the end of the century.

At the same time, a few confusions and misdated stories have clung to the dish. Some recipe collections claim it was taken into Ottoman cuisine as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, but no contemporary record supports that. And the suprême de faisan à la Circassienne served at an 1856 banquet celebrating the Crimean victory was a name from French cookery's manner of garnish, a different dish from this chicken and walnuts; only the similar ring of the name leads people to speak of them as one.

The second account does not deny the Circassian origin but rounds it out. On this view, Circassian migrant women brought the dish in by way of the harem of Topkapı Palace, where it was refined in the court kitchens into a banquet main dish before spreading to the meze of ordinary people. The name kept its Circassian attribution while the dish was adapted at court after its arrival. The people of origin were Circassian; the stage of refinement and spread was the Ottoman court, and the two accounts divide the story between them in just this way.