On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  Along with my reluctance to leave Beijing, the revolutions in the Middle East, dubbed the Arab Spring, were giving me pause. While Turkey remained stable, some speculated that the revolutions could galvanize certain ethnic Kurds in eastern Turkey to rise up, as they had in the past.

  But when I reflected on the first half of the trip, I realized that nothing could replace my experiences on the road. When I returned to my Persian friend’s restaurant in Beijing and sat down for a meal of stews and kebabs, it just wasn’t the same as dining with the Soltanis in Iran. The greens didn’t include tarragon, which couldn’t be found in China, and the bread, little round, pita-like pockets, was a distant approximation of the deliciously chewy sangek. Plus, I was curious to find out how the food would change as I moved west, and where noodles would reemerge. And I was no longer traveling through repressive dictatorships, but through a string of honeymoon-like destinations: Turkey, Greece, Italy. Craig noted his envy, as he watched me browse books and websites.

  “I went to Iran with you, and now I’m skipping the five-star part of your trip?” he said as I packed. In addition to my green backpack, I filled a small suitcase with knives, rolling pins, a wok, and a bunch of Chinese ingredients that my Turkish contacts requested: noodle-like mung bean vermicelli, Sichuan peppercorns, and squishy jellyfish in water, sealed in a bag.

  “You can always change your mind,” I said as Craig accompanied me in a taxi to the airport. Sometime during the first half of the trip, I’d abandoned my reservations about traveling with my husband. Sure, we’d had our issues, and I’d had to endure the occasional hamburger. But none of my worries materialized: everyone expected me to have my husband in tow, his presence hadn’t infringed on my autonomy, and he had tolerated the meals just fine. But while I had gotten used to the idea of more togetherness, Craig seemed to have become accustomed to time apart. He hummed to himself as we rode to the airport, and all his comments about my journey were upbeat. A new concern popped into my head: Was he going to miss me at all?

  On our way to the airport, I hid my doubts. Craig lugged my baggage to the check-in counter, and we hugged and kissed good-bye. Then I boarded a flight that in nine hours swept me over a route that had taken me almost four months to traverse by land.

  Still bleary-eyed when I landed at daybreak in the chilly early morning, and with smelly luggage (the jellyfish, predictably, had leaked), I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of Istanbul. Stepping out of the airport, I heard the call to prayer. On the ride into the city, the Sea of Marmara stretched out like an ocean on one side, while the crowded alleys and wooden Ottoman homes of the Old City sat behind an ancient wall. As the highway curved along the sea’s edge, the city opened before me, a hilly metropolis of historic buildings with European neoclassical flourishes. I thought I’d spied the Blue Mosque, with its limestone walls, skinny minarets, and pale blue domes, until I gazed over the hills and saw a landscape dotted with similarly picturesque mosques. The tranquil waters where the sea, the Bosporus River, and the Golden Horn met were lined with boats resting at the docks. What a contrast to the deserts of Iran and Central Asia, and what a sign that this half of the trip would be quite different.

  • • •

  The plans for the party in Istanbul had come together over the previous weeks, as I was making preparations in Beijing. I’d heard that connections were important in Turkey, just as they were in China and, not knowing a single Turk, I did some research and came across a website advertising food tours and cooking classes in Istanbul. I e-mailed the proprietor, Selin, explaining that I was a food writer and, like her, the owner of a cooking school, and that I was coming to Turkey. She responded right away. Over Skype I learned that more than twenty years separated us (“You are young enough to be my daughter!” she remarked), she had a noisy Jack Russell terrier named Yo-Yo, and she liked blue-and-white textiles (I’d asked what sort of gift I should bring her). “Dress like a cabbage—it is very cold,” she advised me before inviting me to her market tours and cooking classes and offering to introduce me to her extensive group of friends, who included the country’s top restaurateurs, chefs, and food writers. The least I could do, I told her, was cook a Chinese meal for her and her friends, an offer she enthusiastically accepted.

  Selin lived in an imposing building in , the equivalent of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But after entering the grand foyer and riding the steel-cage elevator, I was immediately set at ease when her apartment door opened and a zaftig woman with wavy brown hair and eyeglasses warmly greeted me with a hug. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked, as I settled into her kitchen, which had a large island counter cluttered with cutting boards. She brought me a cup of Nescafé, a drink that was more popular than the coffee that outsiders associated the country with. But still, the most popular drink was black tea, ubiquitous all over Turkey the way it had been in Iran.

  Selin hadn’t been kidding when she’d told me she liked blue-and-white things—an entire wall of her living room was filled with Oriental porcelain vases and dishes in various hues of blue that she’d inherited from her mother. The apartment, too, was an inheritance. Until a few decades before, her family had owned the entire building, and her mother had raised her on the ground floor. But as she got older and relatives died, the building had been parceled off into smaller units, some retained by the family (like Selin’s apartment) while others were sold; the rooms where she’d been raised had been converted into a bank.

  Over the next few days, I learned more about Selin’s background, which illustrated Turkey’s multicultural legacy. Her ancestors had been expelled from Spain during the Inquisition and had traveled across the Mediterranean to Istanbul after hearing that the sultan welcomed Jews. Though as many as 200,000 Jews lived in Istanbul during the Ottoman era, by the early twenty-first century their number had dwindled to less than twenty thousand—and it was continuing to shrink as Turkey grew more conservative. Though Selin had spent some time in Israel, she remained committed to Istanbul. And while she wasn’t observant, on holidays she did prepare traditional Sephardic dishes like phyllo dough stuffed with smoked eggplant and zucchini flan with dill.

  Selin was the only child of a woman who came of age during the era when Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, increased women’s rights. The mother was a successful businesswoman who’d imported European fashions and had divorced Selin’s father after she’d discovered his philandering. Burned by the experience, she raised Selin to be self-sufficient. But Selin’s independence had been undermined in college, after she was involved in a bad car accident while on a date. Only after multiple surgeries and years of bed rest did she recover and finish college. To the day I met her, Selin still walked with a limp and had a scar that ran around the outer edge of her eye. Even so, she managed to follow her mother’s independent footsteps, and she’d never had children or married.

  Selin introduced me to Can (pronounced Jan), her live-in boyfriend of five years. Though many Turkish Jews dated within the community, Selin did not. Like all her previous boyfriends, Can was Muslim. He was a middle-aged man who’d developed a ruddy complexion as an avid sailor on the Bosporus. She’d called Can her husband when we’d spoken via Skype, explaining when we met that it was usually easier to avail herself of the societal convention. With the cooking school thriving, she was the breadwinner in the relationship and had bought him a boat so he could run a sailing business. She wasn’t the least bit interested in marriage.

  “I don’t need the blessing of the government to approve my relationships,” Selin told me. “When you’re married, it becomes, ‘I am your possession, you are my possession.’ It’s more romantic not to be married.”

  Selin had gotten the idea to open a cooking school about a decade before, when she was working as a travel agent. She and her mother, while vacationing in New Orleans, had attended a Creole cooking class. Why didn’t they have anything like that in Istanbul? she’d wondered.


  When she returned to the travel agency, she shared the idea with her boss, who wasn’t receptive. Since 9/11, tourism had fallen, and sure enough, the agency soon folded. That gave Selin the push she needed to set up Turkish Flavours.

  As I’d done in Beijing a few years earlier, Selin had used her dinner parties as a model for her cooking classes. Growing up, she and her mother had invited friends over for international meals. “One night we would do Balinese, another night we would do Chinese,” she said. While she’d worked as a travel agent, Selin had made a side business of inviting acquaintances to her home and teaching them foreign dishes. A group of female plastic surgeons became her regulars. “I wrote out menus and had all the ingredients prepared. The women did the cooking. It was a cooking club,” she said. After the agency closed, she decided to revise her classes to attract foreign tourists, who began returning to Turkey. She remodeled her kitchen, knocking down a wall to open it to the dining room, and advertised her classes on the Internet. She guided guests through preparing a typical Turkish meal, which they then sat down to eat in her spacious dining room. To demystify the ingredients, she also developed culinary walking tours. In a few short years that dovetailed with the rise of the Internet and the worldwide boom in culinary tourism, Selin’s business became a success. She hosted hundreds of visitors per year, and an ever-increasing ranking on TripAdvisor.com meant she even occasionally beat out iconic Istanbul sites like the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya.

  “But I don’t want to rejoice too much because that brings bad luck,” Selin said on our first afternoon together. She fumbled with a bracelet that was adorned with the icon of a blue evil eye—the same talisman I’d seen across Central Asia and Iran. Changing the subject, she asked me about the menu for the Chinese meal I planned to cook. We went over my shopping list. “Are you sure you only want one kilo of chicken, one kilo of lamb?” she asked. “I must warn you, Turks eat a lot.”

  I assured her that the number of dishes would mean plenty of food for the twenty guests. While I didn’t know much about the Turkish appetite, I’d estimated for the biggest eaters at my cooking school—the Australians, Germans, and Americans.

  “I think I’ll buy double these quantities,” Selin told me. “Just in case.”

  When we returned from the pork butcher, I discovered she’d tripled—and in some cases quadrupled—the quantities I’d asked for. The shelves and drawers of her refrigerator were jammed with produce and meats, and more spilled onto a nearby counter.

  After cubing the pork belly, I parboiled the squares. Selin’s housekeeper grimaced. A middle-aged woman who wore a head scarf, she would be the only devout Muslim among the company that evening. “Don’t mind her,” Selin said breezily.

  Early in the afternoon, several of Selin’s female friends arrived. They, too, fretted over the quantities. As we prepped, the women kept asking if I’d bought enough food. Were two packages of vermicelli enough for the glass noodle salad? What about the chicken? That couldn’t possibly be enough for twenty people!

  They watched as I made a monstrous portion of fried rice that reminded me in size (but not taste) of the giant vats of plov in Central Asia. The wok that Selin had procured for the event had the diameter of a truck tire. Overflowing with rice, ground pork, shrimp, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, and eggs, it was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. “Is that enough?” somebody asked skeptically.

  “Are you sure there’s enough garlic in there?” another woman added, scrutinizing a different dish. “Turkish people like a lot of garlic!”

  “This dish needs more salt!” declared another of Selin’s friends, a food writer. In between dishes, she cornered me to invite—or rather, command—me to her home. “I’m going to have to lecture you on Turkish food. You see, no one else is going to tell you that you don’t know anything about Turkish food, but I have to set the record straight. And no one knows more about Turkish food than I.”

  I showed them how to make dumplings, patiently explaining as I kneaded and rolled out the dough for the skins and folded the dumplings. “Looks like our manti,” someone commented. That was intriguing, I thought. But before I could inquire further, one woman asked, “Don’t you think we should start cooking them now?” And then the food writer was at my side again, looking at me askance and pointing to the pot crammed with red-braised pork. “Will that be all the pork you’re serving?” she said.

  I forced a smile and told the food writer I appreciated her unexpected enthusiasm for pork but, yes, that was all I was making. “And the dumplings,” I added, turning to the second woman, “can wait!”

  That seemed to mellow everyone out. As we prepped, I learned that Chinese food had the good fortune of being haute cuisine in Turkey. Because the country had been closed to the rest of the world from the fall of the Ottoman Empire until the 1980s, it had received very few immigrants of any kind, and cheap takeout had never made an incursion here. Chinese food was still a rare luxury. “The three best cuisines in the world are French, Chinese, and Turkish,” one woman told me, a refrain I would hear throughout the country. Most Istanbullus associated Chinese cuisine with a fancy restaurant called Dragon that had thrived at a five-star hotel since the 1990s and had closed only recently.

  I also learned about the women, which went a long way to explaining how opinionated they were. The food writer was one of Turkey’s most successful. Another guest was Selin’s former boss, who was worldly, having grown up partly in London and having journeyed to the Far East. A mother-daughter duo owned a restaurant in the Old City that served the cuisine of their native Crete. Ayse, the mother, was divorced. “Everyone is divorced these days,” she said with a laugh. “It’s the fashionable thing to do.”

  With everyone helping, the cooking proceeded at a clip. At seven-thirty, when nearly all of the guests had arrived, my hardworking cooking assistants helped me line up the entire spread so that the feast could begin without delay.

  My own work done, I helped myself to a glass of red wine and chatted with Selin’s friends. A young woman named Didem had recently returned from New York City, where she’d attended the French Culinary Institute and interned at the upscale Eleven Madison Park. She’d recently opened a restaurant that reflected the ethos of Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and a pioneer of the organic food movement. Another woman, Semsa, ran a restaurant that catered to the neighborhood’s “ladies who lunch” crowd. Semsa had also been the name of the mute wife of our Turkmen host who’d slaughtered a sheep in our honor, but that was all the two women shared. The Turkish Semsa was a large-framed redhead, with arms that had been firmed by years of pastry making. When I asked her if she’d ever felt discriminated against as a woman in a male-dominated industry, she said, “Who would dare?” with a menace that instantly made me regret I’d asked.

  Much as these independent-minded women jibed with the outside perception of Turkey as a modern state, I also gleaned from them that the country wasn’t as progressive as the media and the government made it out to be. Since arriving, I’d already learned that pork was becoming more difficult to procure and Jews were leaving at an increased rate. Caught between East and West, Turkey was a precarious place, said Maisie, Selin’s former boss. The conservatives in the government, including the prime minister, wanted to enact measures to reduce drinking and force women to cover up. “If they get their way, we could go the way of Iran,” she said. “But we won’t put up with that!” Another woman pointed out that this group was fortunate in a country where a woman’s status depended greatly on her wealth, education, and locale. “This is a country where honor killings still happen,” she said.

  I was impressed with the serious yet lively conversations I could enjoy with these women, so different from the stilted interactions I’d had with other women on the road. And I was grateful to have their help in getting everything done on time. “You see, Turkish people are very impatient,” someone commented. The other thing about Turk
ish people, said another, was that they were very honest. So when I asked for their comments on the meal, I braced myself. After everyone deliberated, the verdict came back: though one or two of the dishes had been too spicy, everything else seemed to pass muster. And when I asked them what their favorite dish was, the response was unanimous: “We loved the pork belly!” they declared.

  • • •

  After the Chinese dinner party, I turned my attention to Turkish food. In her kitchen, Selin taught me homestyle dishes that were often stuffed: phyllo-dough pastries called borek were filled with cheese, vegetables, and meats and rolled into the shape of cigars, triangles, and coils before being baked or deep-fried. Split-belly eggplant, known as karniyarik, called for the long, sweet Asian version of the vegetable to be stuffed with ground beef and red pepper paste, the smooth, mild condiment that is one of the defining flavors of Turkish cuisine. After classes, though, Selin was tired. It was not so much cooking that energized her, I learned. It was being out and about on the streets of Istanbul.

  So one morning, I joined an American couple on one of Selin’s culinary walking tours. Over six hours, she overwhelmed us with samples of street food and alluring ingredients from vendors she’d befriended over her years living in Istanbul. We began on the Europe side, at the Spice Bazaar, and ended in Asia at an acclaimed restaurant. I quickly realized the key to Selin’s success: she had a natural product. Istanbul was blessed with a bounty that made it one of the world’s most interesting food destinations.

  I’d always been a fan of street food. It appealed to my inner child, my younger self who’d hated sitting down to grown-up dinners. I still felt there was no better way to learn about a city, and I was mildly suspicious of any culture that didn’t have street food. Plus, the exercise involved in hunting it down helped mitigate the calories I consumed, something that was especially true that day with Selin.