Sucuk

The sucuk is recognisable among all the dried sausages by its flattened section and its horseshoe shape. This profile results from repeated pressing under weight during drying, which drives out moisture faster and more evenly than a cylindrical casing does and produces, at the cut, a lozenge- or oval-shaped slice. Cumin, garlic and red chilli dominate the seasoning. The total absence of pork makes sucuk a sausage fully compatible with Islamic and Jewish dietary requirements, a constraint that has shaped an alternative charcuterie tradition across the Muslim and Sephardic worlds.

Its etymology remains debated. The Turkish term sucuk, from which derive the Bosnian sudžuk, the Armenian and Georgian sujuk, the Levantine soujouk and the Greek soudjouk, is of uncertain origin: some etymologists attach it to Persian, others to a Turkic root designating animal fat. What is attested is that the preparation predates the Ottoman Empire. Spiced dried sausages of beef or horse meat, stuffed into casings and air-dried, were known among the nomadic Turkic peoples of Central Asia well before the conquest of Anatolia in the eleventh century. It was the Ottoman expansion between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries that spread the sucuk through the Balkans, the Levant, the Caucasus and Egypt.

Its geographical spread bears the direct imprint of the Ottomans. It is found under related names throughout the Empire’s former sphere of influence: sucuk in Turkey, sudžuk in Bosnia and Serbia, sujuk in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, soujouk in the Arab communities of the Levant. Everywhere the same horseshoe shape recurs, the same flattened section, the same cumin-led seasoning.

Its culinary use varies with its form. The dried sucuk is eaten in thin slices as an aperitif. The fresh version is grilled in the pan, on a very hot surface, the thick slices releasing their spiced fats to perfume fried eggs or melted cheese. The sucuklu yumurta (eggs with sucuk) in Turkish breakfast is one of the most deeply rooted dishes in everyday cooking.

Turkish sucuk is today produced on a large scale by national manufacturers who export it to Europe and the Arab world, at the price of a standardisation that erases the artisanal regional variations: the sucuk of Afyonkarahisar, noted for its higher proportion of garlic, or that of Kayseri, drier and more mature, tends to disappear from mass commerce. Outside Turkey, the popularisation of Ottoman and Middle Eastern cuisines since the 2010s has broadened their presence in Turkish, Arab, and Armenian grocers across Western Europe and North America. The fresh Bosnian sudžuk, the Bulgarian lukanka and the Armenian soudjouk of Beirut constitute so many autonomous branches of a single tree whose common root remains nomadic Central Asia.