by Jen Lin-Liu
I’d heard that snacking and small dishes called meze were a big part of Turkish cuisine, but I hadn’t expected the diversity. Bites of seafood ranged from fried mussels bathed in a sauce of lemon, bread crumbs, and ground walnuts to pickled herring stuffed with olives and bell peppers. The intense sweets included fried balls of dough basted in thick honey to chewy squares of Turkish delight dusted with powdered sugar and infused with different fruits or exotic flavorings, such as mastic, a tree sap that tasted like earthy spearmint. And there were heavenly slices of flaky baklava crammed with pistachios and drenched in syrup, in a shop that smelled of warm butter.
In my first few days ambling about Istanbul on my own, I’d haphazardly run into culinary reminders of the places through which I’d passed. Endless five-pound tubs of plain yogurt piled atop one another in the refrigerator section of a supermarket reminded me of Central Asian pastures and Iranian storefronts. Down a small side street, I’d eaten breakfast at a restaurant whose disk-shaped flatbreads reminded me of those to the east. I even found an item that reminded me of Beijing—in the confectioneries, wispy noodle-like strands of sugar wrapped into mounds called “helva floss” were a carbon copy of an imperial Chinese dessert known as “dragon thread pastries.” Did the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, which stretched from Beijing to Asia Minor and beyond, have anything to do with it? Or was the culinary echo simply a product of the friendly relations and exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and the later Ming Dynasty?
My research didn’t turn up any definite connection, though I learned that Turks traced it as far east as Iran, which had a similar sweet called peshmek. And the foods Selin introduced raised more questions. At a little eatery selling baked goods, she pointed to a dish of large, flat sheets of pasta layered over a fluffy, light cheese filling that reminded me of ricotta. “I call this Turkish lasagna,” Selin said, as we tasted the small savory squares. This su borek was the first noodle dish I’d seen since the limp noodle soups in Iran, and while I learned in the coming weeks that noodles weren’t central to the Turkish diet, certain pasta dishes would reappear in alluring forms that hinted at ties to China and Italy.
At the Spice Bazaar, we stopped at a stall brimming with blocks and wheels of cheese. I’d associated cheese almost exclusively with Europe and the West, though, of course, that assumption had been challenged already with “imperial cheese” in China and paneer in Iran. Like the Iranians, Turks loved feta-like cheese, called beyaz peynir, which came in white blocks labeled with their salt and fat content, and, like wine, their ages and the names of the villages from which they hailed. Some varieties were herbed and braided; others reminded me of Greek halloumi and Swiss Gruyère. Selin pointed out a popular fatty sheep’s cheese that was harder and milder than the fetas and tasted like provolone; its name, , sounded like “kosher,” suggesting that it had originated within the Jewish community. Also on offer was a veined blue cheese from central Turkey that reminded me of French Roquefort.
Along with the cheese came bread, another harbinger of what awaited me to the west. Delivery boys hung European-looking baguettes in plastic bags on the doorknobs of residences near the bazaar. But Turkish bread also recalled the East. In front of the docks where we took a ferry to the Asian side, vendors pushed wooden carts stacked with bagel-like simit that reminded me once again of the bread we’d eaten in Xinjiang.
Once on the Asian side, we wove our way through the back alleys to a famous restaurant called Çiya. Over the years, it had become an institution, renowned in international food circles for the specialties from far-flung villages across Turkey that its founder, Musa, had brought back to Istanbul. The meal gave me a preview of what I’d encounter across the country. Bakers brushed long tongue-shaped pide, a flatbread, with ayran, the watery yogurt drink that was equally popular in Central Asia and Turkey. The bakers slid the pieces of bread into the oven, where they puffed like balloons. The pide slowly deflated at our table, where it was served with several meze, including the spicy red pepper dip called muhamara, a dish popular throughout the Middle East; yogurt with diced eggplant; and cold wild greens seasoned simply with lemon and olive oil. We weren’t prepared to sit down to a meal after our prodigious snacking, but that was what Selin intended, to stuff us until we were as fat as Kozma’s pigs.
The dishes continued in rapid succession. After the meze came a creamy white soup with garlic scapes (an ingredient I used in China) and threads of saffron. Next, kofte, crisp and savory lamb meatballs coated with bulgur; succulent lamb intestines stuffed with more ground lamb; and sautéed okra from a village in central Turkey. And before we could protest, dessert was placed in front of us, sweet balls of something we couldn’t identify even after tasting them. Selin divulged the secret ingredients: eggplants, tomatoes, and pumpkin that were dried before they were candied, topped with the clotted cream kaymak, which was as delicious as the dairy from the wilds of Kyrgyzstan.
Before I left Istanbul, I returned to Çiya one afternoon to meet Musa. As we snacked on flatbread and tarragon tea, he inquired about China, saying he was a fan of Communism, a comment I heard from a number of Turks and later Italians. I mentioned I was more American than Chinese, and anyway, China wasn’t so Communist anymore. He told me he’d recently started a magazine dedicated to tracing linkages between food and geography. Turkey’s vast number of small villages each had distinctive food traditions thanks to variations in climate and terrain, Musa said. While geography was important, what about history? I asked him. Hadn’t the movement of people also influenced diets? Sure, he said, before repeating the myth that I’d heard many times before: “Marco Polo definitely brought noodles from China to Italy! There is no question about that.” I smiled and took another sip of tarragon tea.
• • •
Another guest at the Chinese dinner was Batur, a friendly Turkish man in his late thirties who invited me to his restaurant kitchen. Asitane was near the Old Quarter next to Chora Church, which dated to the Byzantine era, when Istanbul and Rome were capitals of the Holy Roman Empire. The restaurant served Ottoman cuisine, catering to wealthy Turks and international jet-setters. Batur boasted that Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, had recently visited, as had the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. His head chef was a young woman who’d trained in France and recently returned to Turkey.
The spacious restaurant was an oasis of opulence—a contrast to many of the eateries on the Silk Road. Attendants shined the wooden floors and straightened the framed Arabic calligraphy hanging on the walls. The white tablecloths were crisp and anchored with vases that held delicate fuchsias. Green and purple velvet covered the plush armchairs. Handsome waiters, dressed simply in white button-down shirts and black slacks, made sure wine and water glasses were punctiliously refilled. Batur often padded through during the lunch and dinner rush to review the reservation list and chat with guests. In the evenings, a group of classical musicians played traditional stringed instruments.
In Istanbul, I met a number of female chefs, but none was quite like Batur’s head chef, Bengi (pronounced with a hard g). A tiny woman with delicate features who wore her hair in a ponytail, she made up in personality what she lacked in stature. Outside the kitchen, she often wore a leather jacket, and her voice was husky from chain-smoking. She was in the midst of getting an elaborate tattoo, one that covered her arm with an elongated vegetable garden, the colors of which were slowly being filled in. She channeled the personality of Gordon Ramsay, and when I checked her Facebook page not long after my journey I saw that she’d quoted the notorious British chef on her wall: “Cooking is the most massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard-on with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.”
Bengi didn’t have the typical background of a Turkish chef. Many hailed from families in which cooking was an inherited profession. Most restaurants in Istanbul specialized in either kebabs or seafood. Since the Ottoman Empire, kebab chefs often came from the to
wn of Bolu, 150 miles east of Istanbul. The seafood restaurants were generally staffed by Kurds from southeastern Turkey. Bengi, by contrast, was from Ankara, the country’s capital, and had grown up in an upper-middle-class household. Her mother was a doctor and her father was a politician, and they’d divorced when she was little. As an only child of parents with busy careers, Bengi had often prepared meals for herself.
“I always wanted to create stuff when I was young,” she told me. “But I wasn’t a good visual artist. So cooking was the way I could express myself.” She thought of cooking as a hobby, though, until her senior year of college. After countless hours writing her sociology thesis, she decided she didn’t want to spend her life at a desk. So after graduating, she opted for cooking school. Her mother was supportive, but her father was less than enthused. She’d graduated third in her class; it seemed a waste, he’d said as they lunched one afternoon at an esnaf lokantası a cafeteria-style eatery that catered to tradesmen. He pointed to the cook behind the counter, who was slapping ladles of stew onto trays. “You want to be that guy?” he said.
Because there were few established cooking schools in Turkey, Bengi went to Europe. Rather than enrolling in the Cordon Bleu or its ilk like most foreigners, though, Bengi attended a vocational school in Paris called École Grégoire-Ferrandi. Kitchen discipline was drilled into her—“it was the kind of place where the chefs screamed at you if you were late,” she said—and she interned at a one-star Michelin restaurant. Shortly thereafter, she returned to Turkey.
Just as Bengi arrived, Batur became the general manager at Asitane, which his father, a successful businessman, had opened almost two decades before. The restaurant had been a vanity project and had lost money for years. Other family members wanted to close it, but Batur hoped to turn it around. After assuming the position, though, he realized the job was more difficult than he’d thought. He’d never worked in a kitchen and the chefs, many of whom had cooked there for years, were resentful of their new boss. “I was dealing with chefs who would turn off their stoves in the middle of making a dish if their shift happened to be over. They acted like security guards at a bank, coming in at nine o’clock and leaving at six,” Batur said.
By happenstance, Batur and Bengi met through friends and he immediately hired her. She had the passion for cooking that Batur was looking for. Plus her upper-middle-class background and vocational training allowed her to relate to both the chefs and her boss, and she became a crucial link between them. Batur hired her as a line cook but, more important, as a “mole” who would help him figure out exactly what was going on.
The chefs, all men, were baffled by Bengi’s arrival, but they treated her well and with respect. Batur and Bengi found out later that this was because they suspected that Bengi was Batur’s girlfriend. “There was a cocky-man-ego thing going on in there. But I was already used to that kind of sexism,” Bengi told me, rolling her eyes. “Think about it: the sultans were always men.”
As Bengi reported back to Batur on who was doing his job and who wasn’t, the kitchen staff was plotting, too. Within a few months of Bengi’s arrival, a mutiny broke out: three chefs abruptly quit and left for another Ottoman restaurant across town—in the middle of Ramadan, the busiest time of year for dinner. With the remaining chefs and the dishwashers, who assumed cooking responsibilities, the kitchen just barely managed to eke through the holiday month. Not long after, Bengi was promoted to head chef. In the two years since she’d joined, the kitchen staff had stabilized, the restaurant had stopped losing money, and the international fame of Asitane had grown.
With its emphasis on Ottoman cuisine, Asitane had an allure that the fish and kebab restaurants didn’t have. When Batur’s father had first thought about opening a restaurant, Ottoman cuisine wasn’t on his mind. Sure, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries the Ottomans had ruled Turkey and the surrounding areas, including Greece, the Balkans, and parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and they had left a lasting influence on Turkey’s ethnic composition. Many Turks could trace their ancestors to those surrounding areas; I met descendants of Greeks, Bulgarians, Egyptians, Afghans, and Syrians. But the last century of Ottoman rule, as the empire dissolved, was mired in corruption and ineffectual rule, and Turks weren’t particularly proud of the past. Ataturk had swept Ottoman history under the rug and focused on the country’s ties to Central Asia; he trumpeted the fact that the first settlers in the Asia Minor peninsula had been Turkic nomads who came from the east. Ataturk also looked toward the West for inspiration: he promoted women’s rights, abandoned Arabic script in favor of the Roman alphabet, and had people take on surnames (Turks, like Persians and other nomadic groups in the region, traditionally went by first names only).
A friend of Batur’s father, an amateur historian, had always been interested in the Ottoman era and persuaded Batur’s father that the concept could work. After all, cooking was important to the Ottoman court—the kitchens, still on display to the public, took up ten domes in Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, where the Ottoman sultans lived. The Ottomans employed hundreds of chefs, each with his own area of specialty—soups, pilafs, kebabs, vegetables, fish, breads, pastries, helva (a Turkish sweet), syrups and jams, and beverages. The royal kitchens fed as many as ten thousand people a day and delivered meals around Istanbul to the well-connected. Cooking also had symbolic value. The ranks of Janissaries, the Ottoman military elite selected from various regions of the empire, made reference to the kitchen: commanders were known as “soupmen,” and other high-ranking officers were called “chief cook,” “baker,” and “pancake maker.” “Overturning the cauldron” is an expression still used to indicate a rebellion in the ranks.
There was one major obstacle to creating an Ottoman restaurant, though: there were few, if any, recipes. Chefs had guarded their dishes as secrets. Batur’s father’s friend began to piece together recipes by researching history books, Ottoman ledgers that recorded purchases, and the journals of visiting foreigners. Asitane’s menu included dates that indicated when the dish had been served in the palace.
Like most Turkish meals, dining at Asitane began with soups and meze. Next came a main course of meat or seafood, often accompanied by salad or savory pastries called borek. And finally, there were desserts, an extensive category that itself could contain many courses. Because some dishes dated as far back as the fifteenth century, few ingredients from the Americas were used—the absence of tomatoes and potatoes was conspicuous. And I noticed that nuts, pomegranates, dried fruits, and meats were used in greater quantities than in an average Turkish meal. Interestingly, the focus on these Old World ingredients made the food more similar to what I’d tasted in Iran and Central Asia, showing how influential commerce along the Silk Road had been to the food of earlier times. Along with kebabs, some of the restaurant’s most popular dishes had elements common to Persian food. The mutancana, braised leg of lamb stewed with apricots, raisins, and almonds, reminded me of the meat-and-dried-fruit khoreshts, while the roasted sea bass was flavored with a dressing of two Iranian cornerstones, rosewater and saffron. Pekmezli ayva dolmasi, quince stuffed with lamb, beef, and rice pilaf, was flavored with grape molasses, an ingredient I’d first seen at Nur’s home in Xinjiang, all the way back in China. One ingredient the kitchen had adjusted from Ottoman times was the cooking oil. Eschewing sheep’s tail fat, the chefs sautéed with olive oil and butter, to make the dishes more healthful and palatable. “We’re cooking for seventy-year-old Japanese tourists,” Batur said. “If you gave them sheep’s tail fat, they would have a heart attack.”
Over the last couple of years, Bengi had gone through the two-hundred-plus recipes on file. She’d experimented with different techniques to make meats more tender and succulent, sauces more playful (she’d created a pink béchamel sauce for one of the meat dishes, for example), and presentation more creative. “To be honest, I thought the food was shit when I arrived,” Bengi told me in her usual no-nonsense way. She h
ired younger, more passionate chefs, including two other women. Burcak (which means “wheat”) was a former artist with a lip piercing who’d recently graduated from a new culinary institute in Istanbul, while Esra was a recent high school graduate with a pale complexion who floated through the kitchen like a fairy, gracefully carrying heavy pots filled with stews. Also in the kitchen was another foreigner, a South African intern in his mid-twenties named Mark. A few of Asitane’s old-school chefs had managed to adjust to the new management, including one everyone called Uncle because of his seniority.
The ambience of the kitchen contrasted sharply with the sedate dining room. Safely separated by two sets of swinging doors, the kitchen was a cacophony of sound that competed with the raucous music blasting through the speakers. The sizzle of searing meat and sautéeing pilafs and the whirring hand blenders whipping up cold dips were punctuated by Talking Heads, Metallica, and early Michael Jackson, a sound track that got even Uncle dancing every so often.
Despite the emphasis on royal Ottoman cuisine, my favorite dishes were those that had stood the test of time. From Mark, the South African, I learned a basic rice pilaf preparation that was as delicious as the pilafs in Iran. After soaking the short-grain rice in water for several hours, he drained it and sautéed it in olive oil, salt, and a small sprinkle of sugar. He tossed in diced celeriac and a generous hunk of butter. (“Buttah’s the secret of restaurant cuisine,” he said with a wink.) He submerged the rice in chicken stock and allowed it to simmer until the water evaporated. As in Iran stewed meat or kebabs accompanied the rice. Mark and other chefs made variations on the basic pilaf that were just as delicious and nearly as diverse as Persian ones, incorporating nuts, eggplant, tomatoes, lentils, chicken livers, and dried fruit; my favorite combination was currants and pine nuts. Sometimes chefs added thin wheat noodles (as in Iran), ground bulgur, or orzo to thicken the pilaf’s texture.