I’ll Have the Turkish Eggs, Hold the Appropriation

I remember hearing an imam say that you get to the heart through the stomach. 

My mum was raised against the culinary backdrop of a stuffy home science classroom in 1980’s Northwest Sydney. Eggs were scrambled on gas stovetops until they turned into rubber, garnished clumsily with sliced cherry tomatoes like deformed butterflies.

My baba, on the other hand, grew up in central Iran, and would watch his neighbours grab opposite ends of an embroidered blanket and stand under ripe mulberry trees, waiting for the wind to blow. After lengthy family dinners, the streets echoed with the sound of sandals pounding on pavement and tomans rustling in clenched fists, as kids ran to the bazaar for tubs of saffron ice cream.

And then there is me, a biracial bridge between these two worlds. I’ve spent most of my life in Sydney’s Inner West. Our claim to fame is intergenerational pork roll joints and the fact that every household has an Ottolenghi cookbook. Part of soft-launching my adulthood has been to cook my own meals, so the recipes I’ve been looking to add to my Pinterest board, What’s Cooking, Good Looking?, have been recreations of these eclectic childhood flavours.

That’s when I stumbled upon çilbir, the breakfast of 15th century Ottoman Empire sultans. Picture this: the golden yolk of gently poached eggs spilling across a bed of crushed garlic and yoghurt. Buttery sauce drizzled across the plate, infused with fiery swirls of Aleppo pepper. Flakes of dried mint melt on your tongue as you crunch into toasted bread drowning with sesame seeds. Yeah, try not to drool on the page, thanks.

As a neighbouring country to Iran, Turkish cuisine has always felt familiar to me. My first Persian New Year was spent in the border town of Doğubayazıt, and my baba speaks rudimentary Türkçe learnt through compulsory military service. So, I was ecstatic to combine two of my favourite things in life: 

1. good food

2. connection to my culture.

But as I doomscrolled çilbir recipes on Instagram, I kept noticing comment sections were consistently full of controversy. Turkish people saying the dish was made improperly, Bulgarian people chiming in and claiming the food as theirs, and then bouts of casual Islamophobia still happening in 2025 somehow. I hadn’t seen people this worked up over eggs on Instagram since Kylie Jenner. 

These are early signs of an awfully familiar epidemic developing within the Western food world: culturally rich recipes being popularised by people who aren’t experienced in making them. Personally, I like my eggs without wondering which Balkan country the recipe was stolen from, or whether the ingredients in it are even accurate. 

Now, before we dive into the doom and gloom of post-colonial food politics, I want to emphasise that attempting to cook dishes from other countries is not an inherent problem. It can prompt those who might’ve grown up in traditional ‘Australiana’ kitchens, like my mum, to appreciate diversity. Immigrants are also given an opportunity to adapt traditional flavours to a Western market (shoutout to Uni Bros’ halal snack pack), and for mixed race people, such as myself, it can be a chance to connect to our roots.

The issue is not within these private kitchen spaces, but in the public sphere of social media, where inaccurate versions of traditional recipes are gaining mass popularity and monetisation, but losing their cultural distinctiveness in the process.

Some might argue that bending food rules is a matter of accessibility and normalisation, like calling it ‘Turkish eggs’ instead of attempting to pronounce that intimidating, squiggly ‘ç’. While it might come from a good place, our wilful ignorance of the context behind these dishes further erases the presence of people of colour in a predominantly white culinary world. If we already normalise French restaurant terms like à la carte, surely, we can learn how to say “chill-burr”.

Confining this misrepresentation solely to the digital (typically American) world diminishes the impact it’s also having locally. There’s been many times my baba and I have ventured into a wanky Inner West café only to spot a “Persian Love Cake” on the menu, and had no idea what it was, despite being self-professed expert consumers of Iranian sweets. And as it turns out, the dish is Sri Lankan with Portuguese origins. Maybe it was just some foodie blogger who saw pistachios and rose petals in the ingredient list and made an assumed, educated guess. Regardless, “Persian Love Cakes” now make these predominantly white-run cafés $9 a sale.

 

As grim as this all sounds, not all hope is lost. Awareness is slowly but surely being raised about how to respectfully dabble in other cuisines. 

Some creators have added the suffix “-style” to their recipes (i.e. “Turkish style eggs”) to pay homage to the heritage of the dish without claiming to be an exact replication. It’s a small detail, but an effective repellent against the types of people who call their plain noodles Chinese the moment they throw a tablespoon of Laoganma in there.

There are also quite a few content creators who have started to call out the bastardisation of their cultural recipes. Most notably is Malaysian YouTube comedian Nigel Ng and his character Uncle Roger, who routinely insults the whitewashed egg fried rice of Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver. Ng has gone on to do global comedy tours, including performing at Enmore Theatre back in 2022—which I was at, because I’ve been a lifelong financial supporter of ethnic egg dish reclamation!

As if cooking wasn’t enough effort already, having to toe the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation can be daunting. We live in an age where the norm is accepting aesthetically edited 15-second montages as recipe gospel and re-creating them in kitchens across the globe without hesitation. But it is important to be aware that ethnic food trends conveniently missing traditional ingredients or methods are dilations of culture, serving to make dishes more palatable to a Western audience.

And cooking isn’t about that. It’s about getting sick of rubbery scrambled eggs and aspiring for something different. It’s about listening to your Middle Eastern husband long for food to taste like it did back home. Rather than letting social media wellness gurus dictate how we make Turkish eggs, let's open our hearts, and our stomachs, to the people who are fluent in the stories and languages behind their food.