Kelle Paça Soup

Sheep's head and trotters, simmered for hours until the meat slips from the bone and served with garlic vinegar, a spoon of melted butter with red pepper and lemon: kelle paça çorbası is the soup Türkiye eats while the rest of the country is asleep. Kelle is the head, paça the feet, and most shops sell either or both: a kelle bowl is meatier, with cheek, tongue and sometimes brain; a paça bowl is all gelatine and tendon. It is the food of the late night and the early morning, sold in çorbacı soup houses that open before dawn and sit next to the bus station in most Anatolian towns, and it is the traditional cure for a hangover and the standard breakfast of people who have worked all night. Its relative in the Balkans is pača and in the Caucasus khash.