Our National Dish Dried Beans

Dry beans with bacon and rice on the side, but it will be bulgur pilaf, as the saying goes, you can eat it with pleasure. 
It is our national dish. 
Dry beans is a special dish for us Turks.
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Let me ask you a strange question!
Are you sure that beans are a dish of our culture?
Don't say this is a question too! Of course, I hear you say that dried beans are a dish of our culture.
Many of you may even be ordering dried beans in artisan restaurants right now!
Son, take half a dry bean over rice here!
Look how delicious dried beans are with pickles on the side.
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Etymology doesn't say so!
Did you know that the word ‘bean’ has entered our language from Greek?
Can someone explain to me how a dish made from a vegetable whose name is not Turkish is our national dish?
I'm not kidding, I thought that we borrowed the names of fish from Greek, but beans were also borrowed from Greek.
In fact, besides beans, lettuce, cabbage and leek are also Greek words.
It is the pastrami that gives the real flavour to dried beans. 
Except for the bacon, dried beans and rice, even pickles are words that have been borrowed from other languages. Even the word bulgur, like pilaf and rice, is Persian.
I mean, bulgur should at least be Turkish, right? 
But unfortunately even bulgur is Persian. Pickle is also Persian.
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Among cereals, we can count millet as a Turkish word from ancient times.
As far as I know, wheat is also Turkish and barley is also Turkish.
But millet is actually the special product of our food culture. 
In fact, we are known to have started our history with animal husbandry, we spent our first days herding herds of animals in the steppes. In other words, we were a nomadic society.
However, the word ‘agriculture’ comes from millet, so it seems that we were also engaged in agriculture in our time.
Although the names of many cereals such as rye, oats, corn, etc., including the word grain itself, have entered our language either from Persian or Arabic.
In other words, I don't know if we knew cereals other than millet, wheat and barley in the name of agriculture.
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We have worked with the soil, but most of the vegetables are also borrowed from other languages. 
For example, we know that tomatoes, cabbage, beans, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, mushrooms, artichokes and leeks are from Greek.
There is also a plant called borage, which is delicious with fried eggs. For some reason, this plant is not in the etymological dictionary, so I do not know from which language it has passed into our language. Its homeland is mentioned as Syria in the sources. As far as I know, it is also called kaldirek, it is found near streams. While talking about vegetables, I did not want to leave out khodaneh.
Cauliflower, spinach and carrot are Persian.
We can say that aubergine, parsley, okra, corn, broad beans and celery are vegetables of Arabic origin. 
For cucumber and pea, the etymological dictionary says that they are of Italian origin, and broccoli is one of the vegetable names of Italian origin, even though it is written as being of English origin.
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So, are there no Turkish vegetable names?
Even the word ‘vegetable’ itself is Persian.
Look, radish, onion, garlic and zucchini are Turkish words dating back to ancient times.
By the way, is it garlic or sarmısak? This is also a matter of debate.
In the TDK dictionary, they made an explanation for garlic, and for garlic they said to look at the word garlic. So I think the general usage is garlic.
The etymological dictionary, on the contrary, only included the word garlic. 
However, there seem to be clues for both forms in its explanation.
For the old form, they say it is referred to as sarmusak or samursak. 
So in this case both are correct. Sarmusak has probably turned into garlic and samursak has probably turned into garlic.
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In this case, I think that courgette dish with radish, onion and garlic should be our national dish. Because these are the oldest surviving Turkish vegetable and plant names.
Of course, the oldest form of the dish or suffix was dariy.
‘tarığ bişdi, yaş ot ündi’
[the crop has ripened, the grass has grown]
This sentence is mentioned in the Irk Bitig from the year 900. 
What is the millet mentioned here? 
It is normally a wheat-like grain. 
Although in some places corn grains are also called millet, but the word millet from our history means millet, which is a kind of grain. In other words, what we call crops today used to be called millet in the past.
In summary, we are talking about millet, which is the source of the word agriculture.
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In short, I don't want to disappoint anyone, but it seems to me that dried beans should not be pilaf, but a dish made of millet, or a dish made of pumpkin, for example, should be our national dish. 
By the way, it is not clear whether the gourd mentioned in the historical documents (Kashgarli's Divan-ı Lügat'it Türk dating back to 1073) is the gourd we eat or gourd, but the dictionary mentions fresh gourd, that is, the eaten form. 
I don't know whether we have a special dish made of gourd from the old times, I don't know that either. I don't even know that gourd is eaten.
As you know, we already have a saying that it tastes like gourd, so it is a question mark whether gourd can make a delicious dish.
But it is clear that dried beans were not our national dish at the time.
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It seems that we can't get that far from the old vegetable and grain names.
In this case, I can say that we are stuck with dried beans with bacon again. 
Okay, you can cook millet instead of bulgur, as far as I know, millet is quite nutritious even though it is not very tasty. 
However, I think there is nothing like beans.
Okay, both pastrami prices are very expensive and dried beans prices are quite high. 
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What do you want us to do?
Not cook our national dish? 
What do you want from us? 
Do you want us to die of pain? Is that what you want?
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I have a craving, I'll tell my wife to make baked beans tonight, even if she doesn't have bacon. If she makes rice pilaf with it, what more could I ask for? I have pickles at home anyway. 
No, not bulgur pilaf, I like rice pilaf with dried beans. Bulgur pilaf is fine, but I think dried beans taste better with rice pilaf.
And is rice grown only in China?
No, they grow it in our country too now. It used to be grown in the old days.
You know what paddy is, don't you? 
Isn't rice called paddy in Anatolia? 
Okay, paddy is also Persian, but what can we do, you can't eat millet all the time! You can't eat only bulgur either. We need to eat rice pilaf from time to time.
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When I say that we will eat Turkish style, then I will say that we should grind the wheat and eat only bread, but not only bread.
After all, we also have wheat from the old times. But it really can't be done with bread alone. I would say let's make bagels, but bagels are also from Arabic.
We also have barley from the old times, but we used to feed horses with barley. 
In other words, I think we were forced to learn new vegetables and grains from the Iranians and Arabs.
At that time, we were in contact with the Greeks the most in this regard. Look, the Greeks taught us many vegetables. 
Well, they probably did not only teach us their names, they probably taught us how to cook them while telling us that this is beans.
The reason why we have such a rich food culture in Anatolia is that there is a very rich human unity and cultural unity in these lands.
I think we should appreciate this richness of culture.
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Dried beans are not delicious without tomato paste. 
Anyway, no dish is delicious without tomato paste. 
Where did tomato paste come into our language?
You guessed it! 
We got the word tomato paste from the Italians! The Greeks taught us tomatoes, but it was probably the Italians who thought of making tomato paste from tomatoes.
In this case, our famous proverb is not such an old proverb after all!
How did they say it? The tomato paste of the food, the hips of the ladies or something like that!
I am not a fan of this proverb, but I know that food would not taste good without tomato paste. 
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By the way, when I say that we were once a nomadic society, look what comes to my mind?
When we talk about dried beans and national dish, we always stick to vegetable dishes.
Could it be that our real national dish is lamb çevirme?
The words ‘lamb’ and ‘çevirme’ are Turkish words from ancient times.
In fact, here in Russia they call doner kebab shavurma, which is the same word as the word çevirme. 
Recently, many döner kebab parlours have been opened because it is fashionable, but there are also many shavurma parlours opened especially by Tatars and Azerbaijanis.
In short, I think especially lamb shawarma could be our real national dish.
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Anyway, we're not going to roast lamb around here anymore. It's too expensive and where are you going to find lamb? Even finding live animals for sacrifice is quite difficult here.
But there is no obstacle for dried beans!
Let me ask the lady, did she put the beans in hot water to soak? I told her at the beginning of this article that she should make baked beans tonight.
After all, if dry beans were to be cooked in the evening, it was necessary to soak the beans early.
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Dried beans and rice have become a rich dish nowadays, I should feel a bit rich, right?
Well, dried beans are not that expensive here, but it is still a good dish to make you feel good lately. Russians don't know much about dried beans.
By the way, bacon is also available here. We also buy it from time to time. However, bacon prices have increased quite a lot here recently. That's why we won't have bacon this time.
After this article, if you intend to eat half dry beans over rice in an artisan restaurant, let me end this article by saying bon appetit in advance.
Love and respect to everyone from Moscow.