The invention of heritage: Turkish cooking show, Sarayın Lezzetleri (Flavors of the Palace) as a case of gastrodiplomacy

Abstract

In recent years, educated and inventive chefs started to do extensive research, including archival research, to reinvent Ottoman cuisine. In particular, late-Ottoman recipes have been modernized and updated for today’s taste by culinary researchers and professionals. Therefore, the dishes from Ottoman palace cuisine have developed into a new way of rewriting history to respect the Ottoman past. The past revived through culinary practices reproduced and shaped political interpretations that Ottoman Empire refers to a multi-ethnic civilization governed by a righteous and victorious Turkish nation. Thus, it is emphasized that Ottoman cuisine is described as a new traditional cuisine that once constituted the basis of today’s Turkish cuisine rather than being completely distinct from Turkish cuisine. The food travelogue Sarayın Lezzetleri intends to convince the Turkish audience that Turkish cuisine has become one of the world’s most popular cuisines due to the Ottoman Empire’s culinary heritage. Thus, I aim to revisit the concept of gastrodiplomacy to explore the invention of culinary heritage with the transformation of Ottoman recipes. Rather than the common use of gastrodiplomacy as an external project, this thesis questions how gastrodiplomacy becomes an internal project to convince an internal audience. In this thesis, therefore, I aim to show how Sarayın Lezzetleri constitutes a Turkish gastrodiplomatic case by cooking Ottoman recipes, introducing Turkish cuisine and history, and displaying Turkey’s regions on the screen.