When an English cookbook tells you what to do, it gives orders: "Chop the onion. Add the oil." Turkish recipes almost never do this. Instead they describe what gets done — "the onion is chopped, the oil is added" — using a construction called the impersonal passive, built from the passive suffix plus the aorist tense. This is the single most important pattern to recognise in any set of Turkish instructions, and a recipe is its natural home. The recipe below is an original recipe written for this guide — a simple menemen (Turkish scrambled eggs with tomatoes and peppers), the kind of thing every household actually makes. Read it through, then work step by step.
The recipe — Menemen
Menemen Tarifi
Menemen Recipe
Önce soğan ve biber ince ince doğranır.
First the onion and pepper are chopped finely.
Tavada biraz zeytinyağı ısıtılır.
A little olive oil is heated in the pan.
Sonra doğranan biberler yağa eklenir ve kavrulur.
Then the chopped peppers are added to the oil and sautéed.
Domatesler küçük küçük kesilir ve tavaya konur.
The tomatoes are cut into small pieces and put in the pan.
Karışım birkaç dakika pişirilir.
The mixture is cooked for a few minutes.
Üzerine tuz ve pul biber serpilir.
Salt and red-pepper flakes are sprinkled on top.
En son yumurtalar kırılır ve karıştırılır.
Last of all the eggs are cracked and stirred in.
Menemen sıcak sıcak, taze ekmekle servis edilir.
The menemen is served piping hot, with fresh bread.
Step by step
Title — "Menemen Tarifi." A bare izafet noun phrase: menemen (the dish) modifies tarif (recipe), and the possessed noun takes the third-person suffix -i → tarifi, literally "the recipe of menemen." Turkish builds this kind of "X recipe" the reverse of English emphasis: the thing comes first, the head noun last. See nouns/izafet-indefinite.
Step 1 — "Önce soğan ve biber ince ince doğranır." Here is the whole pattern in miniature. The verb is doğranır = doğra- ("to chop") + the passive -n- + the aorist -ır: "is chopped." Nobody is named as the chopper — that is the impersonal part. English would say "chop the onion," but Turkish describes the onion as undergoing the action. Önce ("first") opens the sequence. The doubled adjective ince ince ("finely, into thin pieces") is reduplication used adverbially — repeating ince ("thin") intensifies and adverbialises it. Note too that soğan ("onion") sits in the bare nominative, not the accusative: because the verb is passive, the chopped thing is the grammatical subject, not an object, so it takes no -ı ending.
Step 2 — "Tavada biraz zeytinyağı ısıtılır." Isıtılır = ısıt- ("to heat") + passive -ıl- + aorist -ır: "is heated." Watch the passive allomorph: stems ending in a consonant other than l take -Il- (ısıt-ıl-), while vowel-final stems take -n- (doğra-n-) and l-final stems take -In-. Tavada = tava ("pan") + the locative -da ("in the pan"), and biraz ("a little") quantifies the oil. The dotless ı in ısıtılır matters: this whole word is built on back, unrounded vowels, so vowel harmony keeps every suffix vowel as ı, never i.
Step 3 — "Sonra doğranan biberler yağa eklenir ve kavrulur." Two passive aorists chained with ve ("and"): eklenir ("is added") and kavrulur ("is sautéed/roasted"). Sonra ("then, afterward") marks the next step. The phrase doğranan biberler ("the chopped peppers") tucks a relative clause in front of the noun: doğra-n-an is the -An participle of the same passive verb, so it means "(that have been) chopped." Yağa = yağ ("oil/fat") + the dative -a ("to the oil"), because you add things to something — the dative marks the destination.
Step 4 — "Domatesler küçük küçük kesilir ve tavaya konur." Kesilir = kes- ("to cut") + passive -il- + aorist -ir: "is cut." Konur is the passive aorist of the irregular koymak ("to put") → kon-ur ("is put"). Another reduplicated adverb, küçük küçük ("into small pieces"), parallels ince ince from Step 1. Tavaya is again the dative — things are put to/into the pan. The plural domatesler ("the tomatoes") is the subject of the passive, so once more no accusative ending.
Step 5 — "Karışım birkaç dakika pişirilir." Pişirilir = pişir- ("to cook") + passive -il- + aorist -ir: "is cooked." Karışım ("the mixture") is a deverbal noun from karış- ("to mix"). Birkaç dakika ("a few minutes") is a bare duration phrase — Turkish needs no preposition like English "for"; the time span simply sits before the verb as an adverbial.
Step 6 — "Üzerine tuz ve pul biber serpilir." Serpilir = serp- ("to sprinkle") + passive -il- + aorist -ir: "is sprinkled." Üzerine = üzer ("top, surface") + the third-person possessive -i + dative -ne → "onto its top, on top of it" — a possessed spatial noun doing the work English does with the preposition "on." Pul biber ("red-pepper flakes," literally "flake pepper") is a compound noun.
Step 7 — "En son yumurtalar kırılır ve karıştırılır." En son ("last of all") closes the sequence — en is the superlative particle, so en son is literally "the most last." Kırılır = kır- ("to break/crack") + passive -ıl- + aorist -ır: "is cracked." Karıştırılır stacks more morphology: karış- ("to mix") + causative -tır- + passive -ıl- + aorist -ır → "is stirred (in)." That double suffix (causative then passive) is common in recipes and worth noticing.
Step 8 — "Menemen sıcak sıcak, taze ekmekle servis edilir." The finishing line. Servis edilir is a compound verb — servis (the noun "service") + edilmek (the passive of etmek "to do") → "is served." Many Turkish verbs are built this way, with a noun plus etmek; their passive uses edilmek. The reduplicated sıcak sıcak ("nice and hot, piping hot") adverbialises sıcak ("hot"). Finally ekmekle = ekmek ("bread") + the instrumental -le ("with bread") — vowel harmony makes it -le, not -la, after the front vowel.
Why Turkish prefers the passive here
To an English speaker the impersonal passive feels oddly detached — "the onion is chopped" sounds like a science report, not a kitchen. But this is precisely the right register in Turkish. A recipe is a generic, timeless instruction: it is not addressed to one particular cook at one moment, but states how the dish is always made. The aorist tense is the tense of general truths and habits, and the passive removes any specific "you," so doğranır means "one chops / it gets chopped, as a rule." This is the same logic behind public signs and product instructions. See pragmatics/generic-statements and register/instructions-recipes.
The big trap for English speakers is reaching for the imperative you form. You can give a recipe in the informal imperative (doğra "chop!", ekle "add!") or the polite one (doğrayın, ekleyin), and spoken instructions from a friend often do exactly that. But written recipes, packaging, and formal procedures overwhelmingly use the passive aorist. Defaulting to imperatives in a written recipe marks you instantly as a non-native — it is grammatical, just the wrong register.
Common mistakes
❌ Önce soğanı doğra, sonra yağı ekle.
Not wrong grammatically, but the imperative is the spoken register; written recipes use the passive aorist.
✅ Önce soğan doğranır, sonra yağ eklenir.
First the onion is chopped, then the oil is added.
❌ Soğanı ince ince doğranır.
Incorrect — with the passive, the chopped thing is the subject, so it takes no accusative -ı.
✅ Soğan ince ince doğranır.
The onion is chopped finely.
❌ Biber yağa eklenir için kavrulur.
Incorrect — 'için' is not how you chain steps; use 've' or just sequence them.
✅ Biber yağa eklenir ve kavrulur.
The pepper is added to the oil and sautéed.
❌ Yumurtalar kırınır.
Incorrect passive — after the consonant -r, the passive is -ıl-, not -n-: kır → kırılır.
✅ Yumurtalar kırılır.
The eggs are cracked.
Key takeaways
- Turkish recipes use the impersonal passive aorist: passive suffix (-Il / -In / -n) + aorist (-Ir / -Ar). Doğra → doğranır, ekle → eklenir, pişir → pişirilir.
- The thing being acted on is the grammatical subject, so it takes no accusative ending: soğan doğranır, not soğanı doğranır.
- Choose the passive allomorph by the stem ending: vowel → -n-, l → -In-, other consonant → -Il-.
- Sequence steps with önce / sonra / daha sonra / en son, and chain actions within a step with ve.
- The imperative (doğra, ekleyin) is fine in speech, but written recipes use the passive — defaulting to "you" imperatives marks you as a learner.
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Start learning Turkish→Related Topics
- Instructions, Recipes, ManualsB2 — How Turkish writes procedures — the impersonal-passive aorist of recipes and manuals versus the casual imperative of a friend reading you a recipe.
- Impersonal and Generic StatementsB2 — How Turkish says 'one', 'you', or 'people in general' — chiefly through the impersonal passive of intransitive verbs.
- Generics, Rules, and InstructionsB2 — How Turkish states general truths, public rules, and how-to instructions — overwhelmingly with the aorist and the impersonal passive, almost never with 'you'.
- Sequencing: sonra, ayrıca, ondan sonra, üstelikB1 — Text-organizing connectives that order and stack points in Turkish — then, besides, moreover, first of all, finally — and why üstelik adds attitude that neutral ayrıca does not.