Şeftali kebabı

A sausage without a skin

Instead of a casing, şeftali uses caul fat, the thin, fatty membrane around an animal’s stomach, called banna or panna in Cyprus. Wikipedia and Visit North Cyprus both describe it as a type of crépinette, a sausage wrapped in caul rather than a skin.

Recipes from the north of the island and from Turkish Cypriot cooks fill it with minced lamb or beef, finely chopped onion and plenty of flat-leaf parsley, seasoned with salt and pepper and sometimes cinnamon or chilli. The mixture is rolled into pieces about the size of a thick finger, wrapped in the washed caul, threaded on skewers and grilled over charcoal. As it cooks, the fat melts into the meat, and what is left crisps into a thin golden-brown layer.

Turkey’s culture ministry also publishes an oven-baked version, in which each patty is wrapped with a slice of tomato and strips of green pepper and baked in a little water. Visit Cyprus, the official Cyprus tourism portal, gives a recipe with minced pork, cinnamon and optional breadcrumbs, wrapped in pork or lamb caul.

Peach or Chef Ali?

In Turkish, şeftali means peach, although there is no fruit in the dish. Wikipedia and Visit North Cyprus link the name to the pink colour, or the texture, of the cooked meat.

The other story, told by Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and by Visit North Cyprus, credits a cook or street vendor called Ali, nicknamed “Şef Ali”, Chef Ali, whose “Şef Ali kebabı” became şeftali kebabı over time. Writing in Hürriyet Daily News in May 2020, the columnist Yusuf Kanlı noted a third claim, that the Greek Cypriot name came first and turned into the Turkish word for peach, and concluded that how the name evolved does not really matter.

At the table

Şeftali is commonly served in pitta with salad, and Visit North Cyprus adds that it is sometimes topped with cacık, the yoghurt and cucumber sauce; the cookbook writer Gonul Daniels serves it with warm pide and a salad of cucumber, tomato, onion and flat-leaf parsley. Cyprus Mail describes sheftalia as most commonly served in pitta with souvlakia, which together make a mixed kebab.

Kanlı counts şeftali, with molohiya, golokas, halloumi and a salad of black-eyed peas, as the backbone of Turkish Cypriot food culture, and Turkey’s culture ministry presents it as a dish for lunch or supper, served after a soup, with a vegetable dish cooked in olive oil.

Relatives and recipes

Similar caul-wrapped dishes exist elsewhere. In a 2020 column for the Turkish Cypriot news site Gazedda, Mete Hatay listed relatives from France and Italy to Anatolia, among them an 1848 Ottoman recipe for “hurma kebabı” that closely resembles şeftali, while stressing that şeftali is an inseparable part of Cypriot culture.

The chef Selin Kiazim, who draws on her Turkish Cypriot heritage, writes in her cookbook Oklava that şeftali was probably one of the first dishes she planned for her restaurant’s menu, because it is a Cypriot kebab and her favourite. Her recipe uses beef mince and grated lamb suet, with the caul soaked in lemony water before wrapping, and she says it must be eaten with an onion salad, lavash or Turkish bread, and lots of lemon.

In Emblem World, şeftali kebabı sits in the Northern Cyprus food collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.