Dolma (, Turkish: ) is a family of stuffed dishes largely associated with Ottoman cuisine. It mainly includes vegetables and leaves, and occasionally seafood, offal, fruits, and meats, that are hollowed out or wrapped, then filled with a mixture of rice, minced meat, herbs, and spices. The leaf-wrapped type can be specifically known as sarma, but colloquially dolma is used for both.
Dolma has spread during the Ottoman Empire, becoming a staple food across the modern cuisines of post-Ottoman regions and nations.
Etymology and terminology The word dolma is of Turkish origin and means "something stuffed" or "filled". It derives from the verb dolmak ("to get filled or stuffed"), which itself ultimately derives from the Old Turkic tolmak. Gerard Clauson identifies the verbal root tol- ("to be filled, or full") as widely attested in early Turkic texts and as surviving across the modern Turkic languages with similar meanings.
One of the earliest attestations of the word dolma appears in Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, Turcicæ, Arabicæ, Persicæ (1680) by Franciscus a Mesgnien Meninski, where the Ottoman Turkish word (dolma) is recorded with the Latin definition ripieno ("stuffed" or "filled"). The earliest written mention of dolma in English dates to the late 19th century, appearing in James William Redhouse’s A Turkish and English Lexicon (1890), which defines it as "an act of filling" and "a dish of meat, fruit, or vegetable, filled with rice, forcemeat, etc."
In addition to modern Turkish, dolma is the standard spelling in Azerbaijani and the romanization of the Western Armenian spelling դոլմա, which in Eastern Armenian is տոլմա (tolma). It is also called derevapatat in Western Armenian, which literally means rolled leaves. Name forms related to dolma in other languages include (ntolmás), (ḍulma), Persian dolmeh, (ṭolma), (tulma), Turkmen dolâma, and Swedish dolme.
In Turkey, a distinction is made between dolma ("stuffed thing"), referring to hollowed vegetables filled with a stuffing, and sarma ("rolled/wrapped thing"), in which the filling is wrapped in edible leaves such as vine or cabbage leaves. In other languages from former Ottoman territories and beyond, these distinctions often overlap, where dolma is used more broadly, including for wrapped leaves that would be classified as sarma in Turkish. In some post-Ottoman countries, dolma is referred to by a native term meaning "stuffed", such as γεμιστά (gemista) in Greek, (maḥshī) in Arabic, umpluți in Romanian, töltött in Hungarian, punjena in Serbo-Croatian, mbushur in Albanian, polneti in Macedonian, pulneni in Bulgarian, memulah in Hebrew, and rellenada in Judeo-Spanish. In Arabic-speaking countries, native names are often blended with Turkish terms, such as maḥshī yabraq or maḥshī brag in Syrian and Kuwaiti Arabic, a combination of the Turkish word yaprak ("leaf") and the Arabic maḥshī ("stuffed").
In Armenia, a wild grapevine can be found, called toli in Armenian, the name of which is derived from the Urartian word uduli, meaning "grape" or "vine". Like in the other languages, the etymology of the Armenian dolma or tolma is borrowed from Ottoman Turkish and, according to Armenian scholars, it is additionally influenced by the old root toli.
Meatless varieties of dolma are known in Turkish as yalancı dolma ("fake" or "counterfeit dolma"), typically filled with seasoned rice. The term reflects an older culinary convention when vegetarian dishes were regarded as substitutes rather than "genuine" dishes in medieval Islamic societies, as Islam does not prescribe abstention from meat on any occasion. Arabs referred to such dishes as muzawwaj ("counterfeit"). Related forms of the term are used in several other languages, including Arabic يالانجي (yalanji), Greek ντολμαδάκια γιαλαντζί (ntolmadákia gialantzí), Armenian յալանչի դոլմա (yalanchi tolma), and Georgian იალანჩი ტოლმა (ialanchi tolma).
History
Origin Although its exact origin is disputed, dolma is mainly associated with an array of stuffed vegetables that originated in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire. The concept is believed to have been invented in the Ottoman palace kitchens during the 15th century, where Ottoman chefs perfected the stuffing of vegetables. Dolma has changed little since Ottoman times, during which recipes for both meat-and-rice fillings, meatless and olive oil-based varieties first appeared.
According to Gil Marks, many credit the Ottoman Turks for the innovation of the dish, who have developed diverse versions and spread the concept. Marks notes that they may have been inspired by manti, a type of dumpling found in many Central Asian cuisines. The Oxford Companion to Food argues that the distribution and the name of the dish indicates that dolma belongs to the court cuisine of the Ottoman Empire, where stuffed vegetables were first treated as a regular culinary genre in Istanbul. The book points out that the Ottoman origin of the dish is obscured to an extent by the fact that it may be referred to by a native name is some countries.
Claudia Roden has suggested that the dish may have been adopted from the Greeks, though she also observes that "stuffed vegetables were obviously developed as a 'court cuisine', invented and prepared for a rich and powerful leisured class to excite their curiosity and titillate their palates, as well as to satisfy their desire for ostentation."
William Pokhlebkin, a culinary historian specialist, contends that the dish's inception traces back to Armenian culinary heritage. The Oxford Companion to Food also notes that, according to some, dolma may have originated in Armenia from where it later spread to Turkey.
The earliest known reference to dolma as a dish appears in the 16th-century Persian book Mâddet ol-Hayât, which observes that cabbage dolmeh is "commonly prepared in the land of the Rûm (Turkey) but not well known in Iran".
Early stuffed dishes
According to Charles Perry, it was relatively recently that stuffed vegetables became a characteristic food of the Eastern Mediterranean, when the Ottoman Turks made them a regular culinary category 500 years ago. He observes that medieval Arabic cookbooks contained many recipes for stuffed dishes, but rarely stuffed vegetables. Claudia Roden argues that stuffed vegetables do not appear in the early Arabic and Persian cookbooks, but seem to have been known during the Ottoman Empire, where they were possibly developed in this period. The Oxford Companion to Food also notes that vegetables were stuffed in pre-Ottoman times, but only sporadically.
The earliest recorded use of stuffing as a cooking technique appears in the Roman cookbook Apicius from late antiquity. The recipes involve stuffing a variety of animals, including chickens, pigs, boars, sheep, hares, and dormouses, as well as fish, such as calamari, cuttlefish, and sardines, and even pumpkins. The fillings generally consisted of forcemeat. The cookbook also provides the earliest recipe for stuffed vegetables, which involves cucumbers stuffed with forcemeat, then cooked in broth or wine sauce.
The practice of stuffing was also known in Central Asia, where fillings (usually meat) were enclosed in thin dough to form dumplings such as manti. Several kinds of stuffed and wrapped intestine dishes are mentioned in the 11th-century dictionary of Turkic languages Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, with the fillings containing meat, spices, and sometimes liver. One variety called sogut is stuffed with rice in addition to meat and spices, providing the first written information about stuffed dishes containing rice. An Uyghur imperial doctor named Hu Sihui, who served for the Chinese Emperor during the Yuan dynasty, compiled a recipe for stuffed eggplants called qiézi mántou in his 13th-century cookbook and medical text Yinshan Zhengyao. The dish consisted of eggplants stuffed with minced meats, sheep's fat, onions, and mandarin orange peel, which was then steamed and finished with garlic, cream or yogurt, and ground basil.
In the Middle East, stuffing as a technique existed by the Abbasid period, appearing in Kitab al-Tabikh, a 10th-century compilation of the Baghdad court cuisine by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. The stuffed dishes appeared in many forms, precisely sausages, meats, pastries (e.g. sānbusaj), and sweets (e.g. crepes). The fillings were based on meat and herbs, while the stuffed sweets were filled with nuts only. Food historian Clifford Wright argues that the Abbasids possibly learned stuffing from the Persians.
Stuffed vegetables first appeared in the region in the 13th-century Syrian cookbook Kitab al-Wuslah ila l-habib, although limited to eggplant and snake melon. They were filled with meat, and cooked in broth, fat, and aromatics.
In the western Arab world from the same century, namely North Africa and Moorish Spain (Al-Andalus), the cookbook Kitāb al-ṭabīẖ contained 50 recipes on stuffed and wrapped dishes, with eggplant being the primary vegetable used for stuffing. By the 13th century, the eastern and western Arab world had been politically separated for five centuries, and the cuisines evolved in their own directions. The characteristic savory stuffing in the east was usually meat or nuts, while in the west, eggs and cheese were common fillings. Other western Arabic stuffed dishes involved pies, pastries, meats, and fish.
Stuffed vine leaves are not mentioned in medieval cookbooks. According to Andrew Dalby, stuffed vine leaves seem to have been used in wrapped foods during the late Roman and early Byzantine times, considering them to be the predecessors of modern dolmades. Rena Salaman provides an example to this, arguing that the Pontic Greeks had a dish called keftethes during the Byzantine period, which were apparently vine leaves filled with small pieces of meat. In Ancient Greece, thrion was a fig leaf stuffed with sweetened cheese. Eugenia Ricotti argues that rice, a key ingredient in modern stuffed vine leaves, did not exist in Ancient Greece. Margareta Aslan similarly argues that rice was not widely used during the Roman and Byzantine times. Moreover, rice had not been an ingredient among the dolma of the Safavid Dynasty.
Ottoman period
During the Ottoman Empire, vegetables became one of the hallmarks of the Ottoman cuisine, especially eggplants. They were so numerous and highly regarded that one observer commented in the 19th century that it was "on the preparation of vegetables that the Turkish cook expends all his art". Most Ottoman families had gardens where they grew their own vegetables and fruits, and in season, market prices were low.
Stuffed vegetables, collectively known as dolma, became one of the most loved and diverse categories of the empire's cuisine. They evolved from just onions and apples in the 15th century to a wide range of vegetables and leaves over the following centuries, with meatless and dairyless varieties becoming mainstream by the late 18th century. By the 17th century, Istanbul had 50 cookshops known as dolmacı that specialized in several stuffed vegetables.
Priscilla Mary Işın argues that the innovation of dolma recipes was driven by the imperial court. The establishment of the Ottoman palace kitchen, known as Matbah-ı Âmire, created a competitive environment where cooks constantly experimented with flavors and techniques to impress the Sultan and his council. The size of the Ottoman Empire further accelerated this creativity, where it connected different geographies and agricultural traditions. Işın points out that "vegetables from across these regions flowed into Istanbul's kitchens, where they were hollowed out, filled, and reimagined".