Where this comes from

Tradition

Everything cooked in this kitchen starts with two sentences of my father's. After them come the lines I wrote about it myself — one on passion, one on tradition.

My father's words

My father said

Our ingredients are not meat and fire.

They are love, passion and tradition.

Abidin Çelebi·✷ 1946 · ☾ 2009

Lines of my own

Passion

Passion is the pure symphony of creation,
traditions and cultures, poverty and plenty, joined into one.
It lives in the kitchen — the kitchen that builds bridges,
from the poorest to the richest, across space and across time.

Out of little it makes abundance and splendour;
creativity is what sets the fire going.
It is medicine drawn from the knowledge of the hand,
stilling what the soul has wanted for so long.

It passes love on, quietly and without a sound,
binding hearts that once knew one another.
It is what the ancestors left us, the gift of belonging —
from a mother and a father to the child who carries the love on.


Tradition

Tradition is origin and future.
Tradition is knowledge.
Tradition is progress.
Tradition is taste.
Tradition is the rule that everything can be made better than it already is.
Tradition is the story that carries on into the future.
Tradition is home and belonging.
Tradition is a road across continents — the result on your plate.

Buyrun, afiyet olsun

Abidin Çelebi
Abidin Çelebi · ✷ 1946 · ☾ 2009
BookCallDirections