"Turkish food is very regional. The ingredients may be the same, but way it's cooked is always different."
When in Istanbul, or anywhere else in what was known to nineteenth century travel-writers as Asia Minor, I take a lead from my friend Gamze Ineceli, documentary maker and authority on the gastronomy of her native land.
In October 2020, with lockdown just eased in the UK as the pandemic loosened its grip, those of us who had been waiting for the lifting of restrictions on travel (give or take certificates and proofs of this and that) were free to do so.
It had been forty years since I first visited the golden city of Istanbul and watched the migration of storks, eagles and other avian travellers on their way to their breeding grounds in Africa across the Bosphorus, the narrow stretch of water that separates Europe from Asia.
At the time, I was a natural history artist - botany and birds - but already developing a new career writing a cookery-column for a hunting-shooting-fishing magazine. Which led, in due course, to a generous-enough publisher's advance to allow me fill in the gaps for the book I'd always wanted to write, European Peasant Cookery, a subject I'd been researching, albeit unconsciously, all my life.
This time, Gamze, by now a trusted and beloved friend, promises a trip to the home-territory of her ancestors, the Sufi and Bektaşi villages surrounding Cappadocia. İn Istanbul, Gamze and husband Arda live in a 1930's apartment block in the old foreigner's district in Beyoglu. Visible from one side of the apartment is the Galata Tower, once moated but now an open space, part-pedestrianised with people shopping or sitting outside at cafe tables. And on the other, a glorious view across steeply-descending rooftops to the Sea of Marmara.
"We’re a trading nation,” says Gamze. “Istanbul is and always has been a city of foreigners.” All the trading nations - French, Italian, German, Russian - built themselves magnificent embassies and competed for influence first with the Ottoman sultans, and then with Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern nation.
A chef in an earlier life, Gamze now works wonders cooking and testing recipes in a tiny kitchen no bigger than a ship's galley. Which makes supper on the balcony one of those leisurely end-of-the-day joys of which memories are made. The central element is Rakı poured over ice, diluted with its own volume of water, to which the only essential accompaniment is Beyaz Peynir, a brine-aged sheep’s milk cheese, and something good to go with it - a simple fava-bean puree or tomatoes dressed with plenty of olive oil. And as a special treat, ordered up from a local restaurant, there's Çiğ Köfte, bite-sized balls of finely-chopped raw steak kneaded with bulgur spiced with chilli and eaten from the fingers, one hand only, rolled in a lettuce leaf - no easy trick to master.
Tomorrow, we'll be on the road to the uplands of Anatolia, Asian Turkey, on an eight hour drive through the mountains and across the plain to Cappodocia, where my friend is researching a six-part documentary on the ancient ways and knowledge of farmers of the villages. Coming from a Sufi family herself, member of an ancient mystic congregation, she's well-placed for the work of recording village memories.
Today, however, we are to cross to the Asian side of the Sea of Marmara on one of three-tiered ferries for a visit to the market, a bustling warren of open-fronted stalls selling fresh vegetables and fruit, meat, chickens, fish, pulses, grains, lokum, baklava, multiple varieties of white curd cheese, cured and dried beef pastırma and all manner of pulses, grains and spices weighed to order from open sacks.
For lunch, we consider one of the grilled-mackerel counters on the bridge, but settle for the most popular of the market's restaurants for freshly-baked pide blistered black in a tandoor, and the in-house pilav, long-grain rice cooked like a risotto, with little scraps of rice-shaped pasta browned in butter.
"This you will find everywhere, but every region is different. Every household, even."
"Can you tell from where, just by looking?"
"Of course."
A dish of white beans in tomato and red pepper sauce, mildly fiery, is dotted with tiny kofte and chunks of quince. There's a touch of sweetness, too, that I can't identify.
"Pomegranite molasses. We don't use pomegranite seeds to decorate our food. We're more interested in the sharp sweet-sour flavour it adds to the taste."
Most unusual of the dishes, at least for me, is bite-sized cubes of lamb cooked with okra, red pepper paste and yogurt in which the okra's sticky juice curdles the yogurt and thickens the sauce. For dessert - necessary to accompany little cups of sweetened Turkish coffee - there's ‘Şöbiyet’ clotted cream and pistachio-stuffed baklava, very buttery and feathery, soaked in syrup flavoured with rosewater.
Next week, travels in Cappadocia…meanwhile, paid subscribers will be in happy receipt of a recipe for lamb with okra or possibly beans with pomegranite molasses - please post requests in the comments.
Meanwhile, there are a couple of new fruit and veg prints - aubergines and figs - on https://www.elisabethluard.org/shop
Love the little boy and his kofte - brilliant. Am spending a lot of time among 19th century travellers in Asia Minor in London Library - mostly archeologists looking for Greco-Roman, but they do talk about what's growing and what they ate...so I send pics of the pages to Gamze and she recognises what's still there (much unchanged, earthquake excepted...).
Okey dokey. I had Gamze check names/spellings etc...Turkish not easy. The beans dish reminded me of Boston baked but without the bacon.