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.

The heads are singed to remove the wool, split, soaked and scrubbed, and the trotters scraped clean; a shop that skips this stage will have a soup that smells of the farmyard. They go into a large pot with water, onion, bay and salt and simmer for four to six hours, skimmed often, until the broth is cloudy and sticky with collagen. The meat is picked off the bone, chopped and returned to the pot, and the bones discarded. Two finishing styles exist. The plain southern style serves the broth as it is, white and clear. The terbiyeli style thickens it with a roux of flour and butter whisked with egg yolk and lemon, which turns it pale yellow and gives it body. At the table everyone adjusts for themselves: a ladle of sarımsaklı sirke, crushed garlic steeped in vinegar; a drizzle of butter with pul biber; lemon, salt and dried mint.

A good kelle paça has a broth that coats the lips and sets to a jelly if left to cool, with a clean, meaty smell and no trace of mustiness. Mark down a thin broth that tastes of stock cube, meat that has been boiled to strings or left in chewy lumps, and any gaminess that the garlic has to cover rather than complement. The meat should be generous enough that a spoon finds something in every scoop; many shops charge by the bowl and ration accordingly. The condiments should arrive separately so the bowl is not pre-soured. Bread should be fresh and plentiful, because it is the only side. A terbiyeli version that has curdled or thickened into a paste is a technical failure, not a stylistic choice.

Ahmet Faruk Akbaş

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