Bulgur pilavı Period BOrigin theory CVerified

An old grain of the land

Bulgur is wheat that has been boiled, dried, and cracked into coarse groats. It is an old grain preparation deeply rooted across the land from Anatolia to Mesopotamia, and its antiquity reaches back to the Neolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk (c. 7100 to 6000 BCE). Among the charred plant remains found there, traces of porridge- and bulgur-like cooking have been identified. Bulgur was a material that lay ready to hand for the people of this land from far back, as a matter of course.

When court technique met a common grain

Bulgur pilav came about when a way of cooking refined in the Ottoman period was laid over this grain. You fry the groats in butter, then cook them in stock so the grains drink up the liquid and turn out plump. This was a technique honed at court for rice pilav, and turning that same hand toward cheap, familiar bulgur is what made this dish. In relation to rice pilav, it is a sister that branched off, with the leading grain swapped from rice to cracked wheat, a dish drawn from the same method of cooking.

In inland Anatolian homes, bulgur pilav appeared on the table as a daily side to meat and bean dishes, and as a staple in its own right. It makes no show of itself, but it is a dish tied straight to the grain of the land and the life lived on it.

Think ''pilav means rice'' and something drops out of view. Throughout the Ottoman period, rice was an expensive, prestige food. It was the festive grain of the court and the urban wealthy, not something the inland poor could eat from day to day. What people set at the center of their diet instead was bulgur, cheap and long at hand.

The point that matters is that bulgur pilav was not a mere substitute for rice pilav. What the study ''Culinary Cultures of the Middle East'' (edited by Zubaida and Tapper) and the Britannica entry on bulgur describe is a picture of two lines standing side by side over a long stretch, divided by class and region: rice pilav (the prestige food of court and city) and bulgur pilav (the staple of the inland poor). Neither was a lesser version of the other; each had struck roots in a different way of living.

There is written support for how the prestige side dominated the record. The first printed Turkish cookbook, Mehmed Kamil's ''Melceu't-Tabbahin'' (1844; English translation by Turab Efendi, 1864), gives a pilav chapter titled ENVAI PILAWLAR, and all eleven pilavs it collects, from the plain to the Persian-style to the tomato and fish kinds, are rice pilavs; the book has no entry for bulgur pilav. That absence in an elite cookbook fits the two-line picture: the written canon of nineteenth-century Ottoman court and urban cooking was made of rice pilav, and bulgur pilav lay outside that canon, in the everyday food of the inland poor.

As the modern period brought the price of rice down, rice pilav spread into the role of the leading side dish. Even so, bulgur pilav did not disappear. Supported by a native grain of the land, it has stayed on the tables of Anatolia as a staple. Behind the history of the court's prestige food, another pilav has quietly carried on from the side of the common people. That is the story of this dish.