Turkish Winter Food in a Place With No Winter

In January in Florida it is seventy-five degrees and the sun is out. This is, objectively, very good weather.

It is also the time of year I most want boza.

Turkish winter food is built around cold — around coming in from it, around needing something dense and warm, around the specific pleasure of a hot drink in cold hands. Take the cold away and something interesting happens to those dishes. Some of them stop making sense. Others turn out not to have needed the weather at all.

What stops working

Boza is the clearest case. The whole ritual is the street seller calling out in the dark on a freezing night, and you going down with a jug. Fermented millet, cinnamon on top, roasted chickpeas on the side. It is thick and sour and warming.

Drinking boza at seventy-five degrees is not the same drink. I have tried. It is fine. But half of what makes it work is the contrast, and without the cold there is nothing to contrast against.

Salep has the same problem, worse. It is a hot, thick, almost gluey drink made from orchid root, and it exists specifically to warm you from the inside. There is no version of that which makes sense in a Florida January.

Mıhlama too, to be honest. Butter, cornmeal and stretching cheese eaten straight from the pan — that is mountain food from a cold, wet region. In heat it is simply heavy.

What travels perfectly

Chestnuts do not care about the weather.

I roast them here in December because I grew up with them, and they are as good in the sun as they were on a cold street in Istanbul. Roasted chestnuts are just roasted chestnuts.

Quince is the surprise. Quince season in Florida overlaps with the holidays, and poached quince with clotted cream sits better after a heavy meal here than it ever did in Turkey — precisely because the climate makes you want something lighter.

Sütlaç is the same. Rice pudding served cold, dusted with cinnamon, is arguably a better dessert in warm weather than in cold. In Turkey it is a winter dish by habit rather than by logic.

And the soups travel. Lentil soup, yayla çorbası, any of the yogurt-based soups — these are eaten year-round in Turkey anyway, and in a climate where you use the air conditioning constantly, something warm at lunch is more welcome than you would expect.

What I have started doing instead

The instinct with these dishes is to replicate them exactly. I have stopped doing that.

What I do now is keep the flavors and change the form.

Chestnut in a purée under roasted meat rather than eaten from a paper cone. Quince poached and served cold with cream rather than warm. Cinnamon and clove in cold desserts where they read as festive without being heating.

The mıhlama flavors — cornmeal, butter, melting cheese — work in small portions as a side rather than as a meal.

It is the same adjustment I made in Oman, and in Dubai before that. You cannot import a cold-weather cuisine intact into a hot country. What you can do is work out what each dish is actually for, and find another way to get there.

The thing nobody warns you about

The dishes I miss most are not the ones I expected.

It is not kebabs or börek — those are everywhere and they work in any weather. It is the small things attached to cold: the smell of a chestnut cart, the sound of the boza seller, the specific comfort of coming inside.

Those you cannot cook. You can make the food, and the food is good, but the rest of it stays where you left it.

Which is, I think, why I keep making them anyway.