Çilbir

Çılbır is the Turkish dish of poached eggs on garlic yoghurt, finished with butter that has been heated with Aleppo or red pepper flakes until it foams and turns red, and eaten with bread for breakfast or as a light supper. It has a documented Ottoman past: the word appears in fifteenth-century palace records as a general term for eggs cooked in water, and the yoghurt version is the one that survived into the Republic and onto the menus of Istanbul's breakfast places, where it now sits alongside menemen and sucuklu yumurta. Outside Turkey it has had a second life since the 2010s as "Turkish eggs" on brunch menus from London to Melbourne, often with the yoghurt whipped with feta and dill, which is a different and softer dish. The original is three things on a plate, and each has to be right.