The first time someone told me the story of Imam Bayildi, I was sitting in a kitchen in Alexandria, and the woman telling it was laughing. The imam fainted, she said. Because the eggplant was that good. Or because the olive oil cost a fortune. Or because he found out his wife had been cooking for days and spent everything on the oil. She shrugged. The story changes depending on who needs it.
What doesn’t change — what gets repeated in cookbook after cookbook, on restaurant menus, in food writing that treats the name as local color rather than a land claim — is the name itself. Imam Bayildi. Turkish. Ottoman. The imam fainted. The dish belongs to whoever gets to name the fainting. But the eggplant itself — split, braised in olive oil, stuffed with tomatoes, onions, garlic — has older names in languages that did not survive the naming. And the women who cooked it before it was Turkish had names too.
A Mediterranean dish name is never just a label. It assigns authorship. It implies origin. It can preserve a lineage, or it can cut one clean. When a dish changes hands — through conquest, migration, population exchange, colonial rule, or the quieter violence of a cookbook that doesn’t cite its sources — the name is the first thing rewritten. The recipe follows. The cook disappears.
What the Imam Erased
The standard account places Imam Bayildi’s popularization in the Ottoman court kitchens of the 19th century. But food historians including Tijana Gajic and Charles Perry have traced the eggplant-and-oil preparation much earlier, across the eastern Mediterranean, with Armenian, Greek, and Arab versions that predate the Turkish name by centuries. The Armenian preparation — sometimes called badrijan, more often described by technique than given a narrative title — involved splitting and braising eggplant in olive oil with garlic and summer vegetables. Monastic kitchen records and community cookbooks from the Ottoman interior document the method. Greek preparations from the Aegean coast used the same technique under different names. None involved an imam.
The name Imam Bayildi did something the older names didn’t. It attached a story — folkloric, memorable, charming — to a technique that had circulated for hundreds of years without needing one. It branded the dish. In the context of an empire actively consolidating culinary identity as cultural property, branding meant the eggplant preparation now had an owner. The owner spoke Turkish. The owner was Ottoman. The women in Armenian villages and Greek fishing towns and Arab market towns who had been cooking the same dish under quieter names were suddenly cooking someone else’s heritage.
I’m not trying to take Imam Bayildi away from Turkish cuisine. I’m asking what it means that the other names vanished. The Armenian cook who braised eggplant in her village in the 1840s did not faint. She was not a story. She was a person feeding people. And when the tale of the fainting imam traveled — through Ottoman-era recipe books, through 20th-century European food writers who encountered the dish in Istanbul, through Elizabeth David and Claudia Roden and every cookbook that followed — her name was already gone.
Naming doesn’t just label. It narrates. And in narrating, it picks a protagonist.
What French Colonialism Renamed
In North Africa, the same process ran on different mechanics. French colonial rule didn’t merely rename dishes. It restructured the entire vocabulary through which food could be described, claimed, and eventually exported as national heritage.
Take chorba. The word is Turkish in its Mediterranean circulation — from çorba, meaning soup — but the preparations it describes across Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya are deeply Arabic and Amazigh in technique: slow-simmered grain soups with lamb, chickpeas, fresh herbs, and spices including coriander, cumin, sometimes rose. In Algeria, chorba was a Ramadan staple, a street food, a family dish. During the war of independence, it was the soup that fed FLN fighters in the mountains and the cities. The French military knew this. Colonial nutritionists documented it. Administrators catalogued it. And when French food writers and colonial-era cookbooks wrote about North African cuisine, they kept the word chorba but stripped it of its Arabic context, presenting it as a generic soup that happened to exist in the colonies.
The Frenchification of North African food vocabulary was systematic. Couscous — from the Berber seksu — became couscous in French, and through French, became the word the world uses. The original Amazigh term, which carries a specific grain technology and a community preparation method involving multiple women steaming semolina in a kiskis over hours, was reduced to a product name. Harissa — from the Arabic root meaning to crush or pound — was kept as a word but redefined by French colonial chefs as a condiment, a relish, a garnish — rather than the labor-intensive preservation technique that Tunisian women used to store roasted pepper paste through winter. The technique was women’s work. The name, once Frenchified, became a commodity.
What the colonial renaming accomplished was not the erasure of the food — the food survived — but the erasure of the social relations behind it. A French cookbook in 1930s Algiers listing chorba did not name the woman who simmered it. It did not note that the grain was hand-rolled. It did not mention that spice ratios varied by family, by village, by the season’s pepper crop. It presented the dish as a thing that existed, authorless, in a land France was administering. The name stayed. The people behind the name thinned until they were invisible.
Post-independence, the colonial vocabulary persisted. Algerian restaurant menus in the 1970s and 1980s listed chorba without crediting it as the soup that had fed resistance fighters — too peasant, too humble, too close to the village for a national cuisine trying to present itself as modern. Tunisian cookbooks standardized harissa as a national product while the women who still ground it by hand in Sfax and Mahdia were losing their markets to factory production. The colonial name had done its work: the dish was legible to the world. The cooks were not.
What Thessaloniki Forgot to Translate
The third case is quieter. In some ways more painful. Because here the erasure happened not through conquest but through the bureaucratic violence of a population exchange.
Before 1923, Thessaloniki was a Sephardic Jewish city. The Ladino-speaking community that arrived after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries maintained a culinary tradition blending Iberian, Ottoman, and Mediterranean techniques with a distinct language. Recipe titles in Ladino cookbooks and household manuscripts — many of which survive in the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and in private family collections — used names like borekas de merendjena (eggplant boreks), keftes de pescado (fish fritters), and avramis, a Sabbath stew whose name carried no Greek equivalent because no Greek cook had made it.
After the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey — which displaced over a million Greeks and Turks across the Aegean — Thessaloniki’s demographics shifted. The Greek state, anxious to present a unified Hellenic culture, began Hellenizing public life. Food included. Sephardic recipe titles in community cookbooks were translated into Greek, often loosely. Borekas de merendjena became melitzanopita. Keftes de pescado became psarokeftedes. The Ladino names — which carried the specific history of a community that had cooked in this city for four hundred years — were replaced with Greek names that made the dishes legible to the new national cuisine but unmoored them from their makers.
Nikos Kazantzakis’s references to Thessaloniki’s food in his travel writing mention the dishes by their Greek names. The Ladino names do not appear. The Sephardic women who maintained these recipes — who in many cases were the only people still cooking them — became invisible in the literature about their own city’s food. By the time the Holocaust destroyed Thessaloniki’s Jewish community in 1943, killing over 45,000 Jews, the Hellenization of recipe titles was nearly complete. The cookbooks that survived carried Greek names for dishes that no longer had cooks. The Ladino titles remaining in family manuscripts were fragments of a vocabulary the city had already begun to forget.
Rena Molho, who has worked extensively with these archives, notes that Ladino recipe titles function as the last record of a community’s presence in the kitchen. When the title changes, the community’s claim changes with it. A dish called borekas de merendjena belongs to a Sephardic woman in Thessaloniki in 1900. The same dish called melitzanopita belongs to Greek cuisine. The eggplant has not moved. The name has. And with the name, the author.
The Craft of Naming in Food Documentation
I have spent years working with oral histories from diaspora kitchens — women in Marseille, in Alexandria, in São Paulo, in the Paris banlieues — who cook dishes their grandmothers made and who do not always know the original names. Sometimes the grandmother spoke a language the granddaughter doesn’t. Sometimes the name was never written down. Sometimes the name changed at a border crossing, the way keftes became keftedes and kefta and kofte, each version a small translation that also, quietly, relocates the dish.
When you document a recipe from a displaced community, the first question is not what to call it. The first question is who called it what, and when, and whether they are safe to name. In politically sensitive fieldwork — with Syrian refugee cooks in Jordan, with Palestinian farmers in the Jordan Valley, with Libyan women who cooked underground during sanctions — naming a source can endanger them. Oral historians pseudonymize. We create composite figures when the specific cook cannot be identified or cannot be named without risk. We attribute recipes to a region, a village, a generation, when the individual behind them has requested anonymity or has been lost to the archive.
When I reconstruct a diaspora food story and the cook’s real name cannot be used — because she is dead, because she is endangered, because the community asked me not to — I build a composite figure. The figure needs a name that is plausible, culturally specific, ethically constructed. Not a generic placeholder. Not a name claiming more specificity than the evidence supports. It has to do what every dish name does: assign authorship without fabricating it.
For writers and oral historians navigating this terrain, a character naming tool can help systematize the creation of composite figures — ensuring pseudonyms carry the right cultural signals, from language of origin to regional specificity to period appropriateness, without defaulting to anachronistic placeholders. The goal isn’t to generate fiction. It’s to name honestly what cannot be named literally, so the recipe carries an author even when the author’s real name is unsafe or unknown.
The Reedsy Character Name Generator, for instance, draws from a database of over ten million names across dozens of languages and cultural traditions. It matches names to setting, period, and context — the same attributes that make dish names politically loaded origin claims. Writers often reach for such tools early in drafting, when a figure is still taking shape, then adjust the name as the story develops and the evidence sharpens.
But there are ethical boundaries. The Authors Guild’s guidelines on AI and assistive tools remind writers that maintaining standards of attribution and preserving authentic human voices is a professional obligation, not a convenience. When a food writer uses a naming tool to construct a composite figure for a diaspora recipe, the obligation is the same: the figure must be honest about what it is. Labeled as a composite. Not claiming to be a specific person. Not flattening a community into a single representative. The tool assists the naming. The writer owns the ethics.
In my own work, I have created composite figures — an Alexandrian grandmother, a Beirut home cook, a Sephardic woman in Thessaloniki — when the specific individuals behind a recipe cannot be named. I label them as composites. I note what is reconstructed and what is documented. I do not pretend they are real people. But I give them names, because a recipe without an author is a recipe that can be claimed by anyone, and the history of Mediterranean food is full of people who have claimed what was not theirs.
What Remains in the Name
The eggplant in olive oil does not care what you call it. The woman who cooked it did. She cared because the name was how she passed it on — to her daughter, to her neighbor, to the cookbook that may or may not have recorded it, to the city that may or may not have remembered her. When the name changes, the chain breaks. The recipe survives. The lineage does not.
I write about dish names the way other people write about borders. Because a name is a border. It marks where one claim ends and another begins. It determines who gets to say this is ours and who is left saying this was ours. The Mediterranean kitchen is full of dishes that were ours and are now someone else’s — not because the food changed but because the name did.
The imam fainted. The cook disappeared. And every time we write the dish’s name without asking who else called it something else, we choose which one of them to remember.
Further Reading
Spyros Paraskeuas and Tijana Gajic on Ottoman court cuisine and the standardization of dish names; Charles Perry’s work on medieval Arabic and early Ottoman cookbooks; Rena Molho’s research on Sephardic Ladino cookbooks in the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki archives; Julia Cwiertka’s scholarship on colonial food vocabulary and its postcolonial legacies; the oral history collections of the Alexandria and Mediterranean Food Heritage Project; Sidney Mintz and Richard Wilk on how food naming encodes power and cultural ownership; Beshara Doumani’s work on Palestinian household archives and the preservation of food knowledge under occupation.