The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 01, The Oil Coast, the Anchovy Coast and the Court Between Them

Imam Bayıldı

Name: Imam Bayıldı
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Istanbul, the Aegean and the Black Sea
Ingredients: 4 aubergines; to taste salt; a generous pour olive oil, a generous quantity; 2 onions, sliced; 3 garlic cloves; 2 tomatoes, chopped; a little a little sugar; to taste salt, black pepper

The Aegean coast

Imam bayıldı, whole aubergine braised in olive oil with onion and tomato: a whole deep purple aubergine, split lengthways and collapsed soft, its slit filled with a glossy reduced onion and tomato mixture.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

Researched: 20 sources cited

Whole aubergine, filled and braised in olive oil, meatless, and served cold: the clearest single expression of zeytinyağlı as a discipline.

The fainting-imam legend is folklore, not documented history; see the history section above.

The Aegean coast

The story told about this dish almost everywhere, that it was invented in 1869 at Dolmabahçe by French Empress Eugénie's own chef, using béchamel, to win Sultan Abdülaziz's favour during a state visit, does not survive checking, and this chapter does not repeat it as fact. The earliest written recipe, in Urbain Dubois's French cookbook Cuisine de tous les pays (1872), under a French transliteration of the dish's name, contains no béchamel, and tas kebab, the lamb stew served over it today, was added to the recipe only later. Drawing on Mihran Arabacıyan's 1876 Armenian-script Turkish cookbook, the 1880 Ottoman cookbook Yeni Yemek Kitabı, and Priscilla Mary Işın's respected Osmanlı Mutfak Sözlüğü (2017), the better-supported account is that Sultan Abdülaziz, a genuine food enthusiast, simply enjoyed an aubergine dish made by one of his enslaved African cooks and named it after himself, the dish's real origin lying in Ottoman cooks adapting French purée technique rather than in a romantic royal encounter. A parallel, weaker legend attaches to imam bayıldı, that an imam fainted, bayıldı, either from the dish's flavour or from shock at how much oil his wife had used. This chapter treats that story the same way: repeated everywhere, confirmed nowhere, and not asserted as history.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus resting.

Ingredients

4 aubergines
to taste salt
a generous pour olive oil, a generous quantity
2 onions, sliced
3 garlic cloves
2 tomatoes, chopped
a little a little sugar
to taste salt, black pepper

Method

Part-peel each aubergine in alternating stripes, slit lengthways without cutting through, salt generously and rest 20 to 30 minutes to draw out bitterness.
Shallow-fry the aubergines in olive oil until softened and lightly coloured on all sides.
Sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil, add the tomato, salt, black pepper and a little sugar, cook until reduced to a thick, sweet filling.
Pack the filling into the slit in each aubergine.
Bake at around 180°C for 25 to 30 minutes.
Always finish and serve cold or at room temperature. Serving this dish hot is a genuine technical error, not a stylistic choice.

What a modern chef changes

The rest treated as the whole point, per Rung 4.

Rung 4

Method

Rest the finished dish overnight in the fridge, then bring it fully back to room temperature before serving, using the same sous vide 20 to 22°C bath as a precise tool for the return step.
Do not economise on the olive oil. Turkish sources are consistent that this dish is built around a genuinely generous quantity of good, cold-pressed oil as a primary flavour component, not a light cooking medium; using it sparingly undercuts the dish structurally.
Finish with a second, more peppery raw oil at the table, distinct from the oil used in the braise.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists