thyme – Sue's Turkish Adventures

The Imam Fainted

Susan — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 07:32:00 +0000

I have never lived in a place in which people are more involved with food. Wherever I go, at whatever time of day, I see coffee shops, restaurants and cafes full of people. Fresh fruit and vegetable stands burst with color in every neighborhood, more so in the poorer areas. Simits, pretzel-like bagels, are sold from carts everywhere in the city. Once I commented to a rather indifferent store clerk that I was going to eat at a nearby restaurant. He immediately brightened up, came out from behind his counter and spent ten minutes describing the menu and advising me exactly which items to order.

“How often do Turks eat out?” I asked, and the reply was, well, perhaps five or six times a week. You are probably wondering, are Turks fat? The answer is no. It is not uncommon to see someone carrying an extra few extra pounds, but you do not see obese Turks. Why not? I think it’s a combination of reasons. First, portions in restaurants are not oversized. Second, restaurant food—indeed all Turkish food—involves a myriad of vegetables. Third, this is an outdoor culture, and Turks perhaps get out and walk more than Americans. And perhaps smoking plays a role. More Turks than Americans seems to smoke although, thankfully, the practice has been banned in restaurants.

People ask me if Turkish food is spicy. Yes, spices are used, but no, Turkish food is not “hot.” One of the mostly commonly used spices is kekik, thyme. Other popular seasonings are garlic, parsley, onion, lemon, sweet peppers and oregano. Sumak, a reddish powder made from the berries of sumac bushes, is used on salads for astringency, like lemon or lime. Another much-employed ingredient is nar, pomegranate molasses, a wonder ingredient that makes both sweet and savory foods taste better. There was an interesting article about pomegranate molasses last year in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/dining/24power.html

Speaking of unusual new tastes, I am getting used to rose flavoring. I have tasted this in India, mostly in beverages, and it has always been a less-than-pleasant surprise. I need a heads-up if I am going to be drinking something that tastes like perfume. Here in Turkey, however, the flavor is used more subtly.

The first time I tried it was an accident. Sankar and I were out for our evening gelato, and, looking at the array of available flavors, I asked what gul was. “Turkish flavor,” came the enigmatic reply and I impulsively said, “I’ll have it.”

At the first bite, I said, “Oh, it’s rose,” and Sankar frowned, “Why don’t you get something you’re sure of?” To prove myself, I finished the cone, and moved one step closer to accepting this flavor. It is common here, and that helps. My dishwashing liquid smells like roses. Occasionally we are served some baklava or other honey-based dessert that tastes rose-y. And I recently bought a jar of rose jam, which is great on toast. It has the same texture as strawberry jam, which begs the question, am I really eating little chunks of roses?!

After finding a simple Turkish cookbook, this week I assembled all the ingredients and made the very first dish I consumed in Turkey back in January, a soup called ezogelin ҁorbasa. The recipe calls for bright orange lentils, almost fluorescent in hue, which cooked up much more quickly than I expected, as did the bulgur. Most of the soup’s ingredients are ordinary: chicken broth, onion, and a little butter. But I recalled tiny black flecks in the soup that appeared to add greatly, but mysteriously, to the flavor. Were they some kind of pepper? Turns out the flecks are dried mint leaves. I bought a packet at the store and used two teaspoonfuls in the soup. You should be here to take a lovely, herby taste. Mmm.

Eggplant is also a new phenomenon here, and I’ve grown to love its silky texture and subtle taste. Growing up in the Midwest, I have little experience with eggplant. I will go to a cooking class in a few weeks and hopefully learn how to prepare this vegetable. One of the most popular eggplant dishes here is dubbed imam bayildi, eggplant stuffed with onion, garlic, tomatoes and parsley. Its name means, “the imam fainted,” in competing stories, either because the eggplant was so tasty or because the olive oil used to make it was so expensive! Here is a photo of that dish, taken at the famous Sirkeci Train Station restaurant in Old Istanbul, the last stop on the Orient Express.

We began to realize the logistics of Turkish vegetable consumption when we visited the Mediterranean coast a few weeks ago. The tomato is the king of Turkish cuisine. It is eaten at every meal, in many, many forms. Chopped up with cucumber, parsley and lemon juice or made into other kinds of salad. Pounded into salsas or chutneys. Used in soups and stews. For breakfast, peeled and sliced, served with cucumbers and white cheese.

But Turkey does not have the kind of climate that supports growing tomatoes outside year-round. With seventy five million people, each eating, let us say conservatively, one tomato per day, that is of course 75 million tomatoes needed each and every day, summer and winter.

Thus the economy of the temperate towns on the Mediterranean coast and perhaps elsewhere, whose main business is growing greenhouse tomatoes. We drove through town after town where the only industry we saw was greenhouses, and when we found ourselves at an elevation, these towns presented strange skylines indeed.

The taste is fine, though purists might disagree. I think they are better than winter tomatoes back home, though not as good as their sun-ripened cousins.

We are going into the most major Turkish holiday next week. It is called Kurban Bayram, and commemorates Abraham’s willingness to slay his son, Isaac, to please God. Instead, a ram was slain, and—not to spoil anyone’s appetite after this food-filled essay—there will be reenactments of this all over Turkey next week. And some fresh lamb as well. More next weekend!

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Food–and everything else

Susan — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:43:00 +0000

Special salad at Canli Balik restaurant in Amasra. It contains 26 different ingredients.

My day starts with Nestlé, the Swiss company that in the 1970s promoted infant formula in developing countries in which clean drinking water was unavailable. That company somehow has its name on a majority of the breakfast cereals here, including those that carry the Quaker brand in the U.S. At first I vowed to continue my lifetime boycott of the company, but few other cereals were available and I am a conservative when it comes to breakfast, and I soon caved. I suppose I could have switched to a Turkish breakfast: tomatoes, cucumbers, olives and white cheese. Interesting, isn’t it, that Turks take in their breakfast nutrients in natural form whereas we Americans consume them as additives?

On my morning “Nesfit” flakes goes long-life milk, which tastes the same as pasteurized milk at home, yet consists of a mere one tenth percent fat. Coffee is from Costa Rican beans brought from home; despite the famed Turkish coffee, this is a country of tea drinkers, and when you order a regular cup of coffee at a restaurant, you are inevitably brought (grrr) Nescafe. Sometimes we toast bread. I have a jar of luscious raspberry jam that has Turkish, Cyrillic and English characters it, the Cyrillic making it marketable in Bulgaria, Russia, Azerbaijan and some of the “stan” countries. As I spread it on my toast, I picture a misty, densely wooded area near the Black Sea, and women in long scarves picking fruit.

Before lunch I often walk down the hill to a little bakkal where I find unwrapped loaves of fresh bread stashed in a wooden bin, for only one Turkish lira, about 60 cents. A lunch favorite is tuna salad from a recipe my Libyan friend, Zack, gave me. I call it “knock your socks off tuna salad.” It contains tuna (Dardanelle brand, another geography lesson), cilantro, tomatoes, cucumber and hot sauce, and I will send you the recipe on request. Peach season seems to be ending here, and we’re getting varieties of grapes, including some small green ones that are surprisingly sweet.

The other day I saw large black raisins packaged on Styrofoam trays covered with plastic. I bought a pack, but then, driving home, realized they might have seeds. Most of the grapes here have seeds. “Yes, they do,” Umit replied. “But they are so good for your bones—and for your blood.” Umit is my unofficial nutritionist. I looked it up and indeed grape seeds are high in antioxidants. So our raisins go crunch, but it’s all texture; the seeds don’t have any flavor.

That day I also bought some poppy seeds. I had thought they were unavailable in Turkey. “Mavi” means blue, and the label, kind of alarmingly, reads “hashhash mavi.”

We haven’t been very adventurous about supper yet; perhaps that is part of our adjustment: we are tentative even about what we eat. Lots of rice; chicken or beef or sometimes fish (levret, fresh sea bass is a treat). My convection oven does an incredible job of roasting cut-up potatoes (coated with olive oil and garam masala), something I would cook on the grill at home. Can you believe my nine-year-old oven back home has the convection feature, but I have never tried it?

We were about to buy a little gas grill and figured we’d put it on our apartment’s small back balcony, but then wondered if that kind of thing might be considered a fire hazard. We didn’t think we could really grill meat in secret. We asked our uber neighbor, the one that kind of runs things in our building, and he suggested placing it down in the apartment garden. The idea of running up and down from the third floor, plates of food and utensils in hand, kind of killed the fun, and I think we will do without.

Ramazan (the Turks use a z) ended a couple weeks ago. It was an interesting month. Back in Yemen thirty years ago, I felt sorry for the women, who fasted but also had to cook the big iftar meal at the end of every day as well as the meal eaten just before sunrise. That while also feeding and caring for young children, who don’t fast until adolescence. Well, in Turkey, women are working outside the home and are quite assertive. Ramazan is the month of fasting, but, you heard it here first, it is also the month of takeout. We discovered this when the kids arrived and we went to get some wonderful, grilled chicken from a nearby specialty market. Nothing doing: the fasting Turks had beaten us to it.

It was funny to see commercial establishments hopping on the Ramazan bandwagon. Down by The Boss I came across a big, lighted sign urging Turks to come to Pizza Hut for iftar and listing all the great “value items” on its “special menu.” But I can’t really blame them: what restaurant wouldn’t want to attract customers who haven’t eaten for fourteen hours? And 3M gave each of its employees a cheesy, corporate-looking box of candy for the holiday that follows Ramazan, so much like company Christmas gifts in the States.

It was also nice to see nuance, which is the great benefit of being on the ground in a Muslim country. The man who, to the dismay of his parents, refused for years to fast, but now in his mid-thirties makes it his only religious observance of the year. The couple we know that disdains anything religious in public life and does not favor extending full rights to women who wear the headscarf. . . yet the husband was the one of only a few at his company that did the fast. Just like us, people here are inconsistent and unpredictable in how they let religion into their lives.

A few weeks ago we took a vapor (ferry) over to the Asia side and went with some Turkish friends to a restaurant called Ciya that was written up in The New Yorker this past April. The restaurant is reviving Turkish food from several generations ago, and it is said that Turks sometimes burst into tears of sentimentality as they eat food they recall from their grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’ kitchens. We drank the thyme tea that was mentioned in the article, but our conversation prevented me from noting down the various dishes we were eating. We will go back.

Here in Turkey, I often feel like I come from a country with no history, that the past somehow broke off for all of those who made the move across the ocean. I yearn in vain to be part of some continuous, ancient lineage, heir to some traditional wisdom. But a rare good deed I did during these months of self-absorption helped me think differently. When Umit’s birthday came around in mid-August, I assembled the ingredients and baked him and his parents a carrot cake. Baking is not a tradition here; homes have up until recently not been equipped with ovens. Commercial bread bakeries exist, but for desserts, Turks traditionally eat baklava-type sweets that don’t require baking.

I wanted to produce something from my own country—and also use those hard-won measuring spoons. The cake turned out well, and Umit and his family raved about it. Hearing their compliments, I realized I did indeed have something to be proud of, and I was pleased to inform him, “My family has been baking for at least a hundred and fifty years.”

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