I used to be a shakshuka fanatic — that is, before I visited Istanbul a few months ago.

There, menemen, a scrambled egg breakfast dish with tomatoes, peppers and sometimes, controversially, onions, was everywhere. At tiny restaurants, it is carefully prepared in cast-iron skillets; at hotel buffets, it appears smooth and nearly buttery in copper pots. Home cooks speak almost laughingly about how simple this go-to dish is.

“Menemen evokes excitement among people who eat it,” said Yigal Schleifer , a founder of Culinary Backstreets food tours. “It captures their culinary imagination and their taste buds.”

Its ingredients may recall shakshuka, but menemen has had a very different journey. As a dish born crossing borders , it shows, more than most, how food develops across cultures and regions.

The dish is named for the western town of Menemen, the agricultural heart of Turkey near Izmir on the Aegean Coast. In the early part of the 20th century, the food of the area was shaped by both the Greek farmers who lived there until the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, and the Turks who then returned from the Greek island of Crete, equipped with recipes that used oregano, basil, rosemary and thyme. Those herbs were boiled and eaten alone with olive oil, or eggs were cracked on top. This new vegetarian dish, with tomatoes and eggs, eventually became known as menemen and spread quickly throughout Turkey.