Tirit

Tirit, also known as trit, is a cheap, wholesome and filling Turkish dish prepared to avoid wasting dry bread and inexpensive animal parts produced in the course of butchery. It is prepared by soaking broken-up stale bread in a broth prepared from offal, the resulting mixture then being seasoned with ground pepper and onion. Further refinements include the addition of various types of cheese and yogurt - as recorded in certain Hatay cookery books.[1] Tirit sometimes features also in the cuisine of Mecca, where the story is told that the morale of a community hungry from famine brought about by a drought was boosted by being sustained by this dish until the return of times of greater plenty.

The origins of Tirit can be traced back centuries to cooking techniques practiced on the steppes of Central Asia, where similar dishes were prepared using lamb and leftovers of various kinds - often including stale bread - re. which see also kuurdak.

Khash is a similar frugal and sustaining offal-based dish eaten in many countries in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, including the southern Caucasus.[2]

The practice of creating a tasty dish by eking-out inexpensive offal with even cheaper forms of starch may also be observed in the preparation of haggis and the simpler forms of white pudding, in which the northern staple oatmeal fulfills the function of the stale bread used to make tirit.

The forms of tirit involving cheese also bear some comparison to the barley-based, Tibetan staple Tsampa.