Six years after Blue Dome launched in the United States to publish books on Islamic spirituality, history, and art, it has added a new category to its list: cooking. This year the press, which publishes close to 15 books annually, will publish six cookbooks—including five by a single chef, M. Omur Akkor, who lives in Istanbul and has visited 71 cities and hundreds of towns in Turkey to research local and forgotten cuisines.
“Though [cookbooks] are not scholarly books. They still serve a purpose of introducing a part of culture, food, into the Western audience,” says Blue Dome director of publications Huseyin Senturk. He notes that Akkor received the Gourmand Award for best culinary history book for Seljuk Cuisine: A Chef’s Quest for His Soulmate, which shows that it is “more than a cookbook.”
Blue Dome’s other Akkor titles this fall include Best Egg Recipes, Practical Recipes, Ottoman Cuisine, and Healthy Desserts. For Senturk, the appeal of Akkor’s books is the way he puts his recipes into a cultural and historical context.
“Akkor skillfully extracts recipes from different sources and presents them as pure and simple as possible,” says Senturk. “Many of the recipes in Healthy Desserts belong to a time when natural ingredients, like molasses and honey, were not yet replaced by refined sugar. Authenticity and simplicity made all of us at Blue Dome say, ‘Let’s give it a try.’ We realize that with Akkor’s books we are giving the reader a sense of history and opening a window into a different time and culture.”
But that doesn’t mean that every Akkor recipe appears in English exactly as it did in the Turkish edition of his books. Some recipes have been modified or omitted due to the unavailability of the ingredients or the difficulty of the recipes.
To promote the books, Blue Dome is planning a U.S. tour for Akkor. He will travel with a portable kitchen and make stops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
But even with nearly half its 2014 list devoted to cooking, it is unlikely that Blue Dome will continue to publish cookbooks at the same pace. “We are yet to see if we will have proposals that deserve [the] spotlight,” says Senturk.
