“Swedish meatballs are actually based on a recipe King Charles XII brought home from Turkey in the early 18th century. Let's stick to the facts!” announced Sweden’s official Twitter account on April 28, starting a flurry that still continues after almost three weeks. At the time of writing, the tweet has racked up more than 8,000 retweets and 21,000 likes. The photo that accompanies it resembles the iconic menu item in the restaurants of IKEA, a Swedish furniture company with stores all over the world. It shows the round meatballs, known as kottbullar, under gravy, with lingonberries and mashed potatoes on the side.

Although the tweet attracted a flurry of comments from all over Europe and Turkey, food historians and gourmets have long been onto the link between the Turkish kofte and kottbullar.

The generic translation of kofte is meatballs, a word that falls far short of describing the great variety of the Turkish staple food. Specialists of Turkish and Levantine cuisine concur that “kofte” is neither solely meat nor always shaped like a ball. It is a versatile food that can be both vegan and vegetarian, as in pirasa koftesi, made of leek, or mercimek koftesi, made of lentils. Some versions of kofte are shaped like cylinders, fingers or almonds. So when Turks use the word, they can be referring to any dish of ground meat, liver or fish, or a vegetable pulp mixed with spices and herbs. These can be boiled as dumplings in a soup, fried or grilled.

Every Turkish city — and indeed almost every district of major cities like Istanbul — has a special kofte of its own. Unlike the kottbullar, which contains pork, they are most commonly made of veal, beef or lamb, or a mixture of the three. For a good recipe, it is crucial to have a good balance of meat fat. Kofte aficionados will swear that recipes that include any sort of gluten (bread and its varieties) are inferior. The traditional reason for adding breadcrumbs is to stretch the meat, which is expensive. The best kofte is made with fresh, properly ground and pounded meat that may include ground onions and spices.