On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  “It’s amazing, I tell you,” Mark said. “All we do with rice in South Africa is boil it.”

  From one of the grandmotherly dishwashers, I learned how to make borek of the highest refinement. Rather than buying the dough, as many households and restaurants did, the staff at Asitane kneaded and rolled out their own enormous circles of phyllo, known as yufka in Turkey. They were even more adept with the pin than Andrea and Chef Zhang, rocking and rolling the baton over the dough until it was super-thin, wispy, and translucent. Dividing a sheet into quarters, the dishwasher spread cheese-and-leek mixture atop each and rolled the pastries into long ropes, enclosing the filling. After sealing the edges with egg white, she coiled them into the round, flower-like shapes that gave the pastry its name, rose borek. After it was deep-fried, the pastry was served with honey. The sweet-and-savory flavors and the crispness of the yufka remained permanently emblazoned in my memory.

  From Uncle, I learned how to make kofte, the meat patties common across Turkey. The everyday dish was too lowly to be on the menu, but it was served for staff meals. The particular version I learned was called kadinbudu kofte, or “lady’s thigh kofte.” Uncle mixed minced beef with black pepper, parsley, and mint. He added a combination of cooked and uncooked rice, which gave the kofte the right texture, he told me; as in China, mouth feel was paramount. He shaped the mixture into patties and dipped them into flour and egg, then fried them in hot oil. It was like a succulent fried meatloaf and, thankfully, it didn’t remind me of my thighs.

  • • •

  One morning when I was talking with Batur and Bengi in a second-floor office, an assistant called Batur to say that another visitor had arrived. Puzzled, they went down to meet the woman, who introduced herself as a graduate student at a university in Denmark who was researching the kebab. She was hoping he could answer a few questions.

  The kebab was to Turks what fish and chips was to Brits, and I sensed that Turks resented the dish because it was one of the few things the world knew of their cuisine. The kebab had spread across the world in the form of the doner, a revolving spit of pressed lamb or chicken that was often served at street-side stands.

  In truth, I hadn’t given the kebab much thought before the trip. To me, it was just meat on a stick, delicious but lacking in finesse. I’d never been a fan of the doner, though I’d had it in places as far and wide as New York, Berlin, and Beijing. I always wondered exactly what parts of the animal were in it and how long it had languished on the rotisserie. I hesitated over the mystery sauce that varied from stall to stall, and I didn’t like the limp lettuce and bland tomatoes that generally came with it.

  But kebabs had been a part of my journey from the very beginning, and I had gained greater appreciation for them as I’d traveled. In China, Muslim street-side vendors strung skinny pieces of mutton on thin wooden sticks and roasted them over coals, sprinkling them with chili pepper and cumin. It was the perfect late-night snack and usually went for less than a quarter a stick. As I traveled west, the meat was a constant companion, even as noodles became rarer. The meat got chunkier and the sticks larger and wider. Shashlyk, as it was called in Central Asia, was often served with plov and downed with plenty of tea, occasionally beer. In Iran, I’d watched Mrs. Soltani shape minced beef and lamb onto wide metal skewers, and accompany the meat with saffron-tinged rice, a generous pat of butter, and a roasted tomato. In Turkey, I learned that kebabs were more varied and delicious than I’d imagined.

  At Asitane, Batur explained to the Danish student some of the basics. “Well, let me first explain, we don’t serve kebabs here. Or at least, not what you think of as a kebab. Doner kebabs are street food in our culture. We don’t eat them in fancy restaurants or at home.” He went on to explain that many of the doner kebab stands in Europe were run not by Turks but by Arabs or Iranians.

  The Dane seemed baffled, and I was perplexed, too, especially the more I learned about kebabs. One of Asitane’s most touted, called the “Fatty Apron” kebab, blended minced lamb and beef with mint, pine nuts, coriander seeds, and cumin, all of it wrapped in the thin, fatty membrane of a sheep’s intestine. A chef, usually Mark, grilled the meat until it plumped into a juicy burger before topping it with demi-glace. Even more alluring was the kaz kebab, rice pilaf flavored with succulent slices of slow-roasted goose and pine nuts, all of which was wrapped in phyllo dough and baked into something resembling a savory pie. But, as delicious as it was, where was the stick? Where was the spit? After several days in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but pull Batur aside to ask, just as the graduate student had, what exactly was a kebab?

  “Oh, back to square one,” Batur said with a sigh. But despite trying for several minutes, even he couldn’t produce a succinct definition, and only after referring to a pile of cookbooks and food encyclopedias did he conclude that it depended on where you were. In western Turkey and the Black Sea region, a kebab was “any sort of meat grilled over a fire.” On the Mediterranean Coast near Syria, a kebab was “anything—meat, vegetables, or fruit—cooked over a fire.” Batur finally produced his own definition. “It’s any sort of meat—fish, chicken, beef, or lamb—that is grilled, baked, or roasted without added water”—in contrast to stews or braises. “It is always served with an accompaniment,” such as pilaf or bread. To Batur, these were the defining attributes: “Something grilled on a stick isn’t necessarily a kebab. It’s cooked over a fire of some kind, and has to be served with something else.” Like other dishes I’d learned about, including noodles, names and definitions varied, depending on where you were, how you viewed the dish, and what was important to a particular place.

  One evening, after I’d spent the day cooking at Asitane, Selin suggested that we go out for kebabs. A shop around the corner from her home served some of Istanbul’s best, she said. Behind the counter at the unassuming eatery was a long, revolving spit and a burly owner with crossed arms who refused to divulge much about his product. He commanded us upstairs to the dining area, where just moments after we were seated, plates of thinly sliced lamb arrived, basted in its own fat. The meat met Batur’s definition—it was served with an accompaniment: the glistening lamb slices rested on cubes of toasted flatbread, smothered in a tomato sauce, thick yogurt, and butter. I dug in with a fork and knife, following Turkish protocol, as there was no polite way to eat the dish with one’s hands. I finished every last bite, reveling in the tender meat and the smooth, tangy sauce. I soaked up the last smudges of gravy with the bread, wiping the plate clean. The kebab was called the Iskender, which in Turkish means Alexander, as in Alexander the Great, for reasons Selin could not explain. Still, it seemed an appropriate name for the greatest kebab I’d ever tasted.

  • • •

  I enjoyed my time at Asitane, but I grew increasingly aware that the emphasis on antiquated dishes was a huge source of frustration for Bengi. One afternoon, between the lunch and dinner rush, we tested a recipe for an Ottoman cabbage soup. Bengi had me chop up some heads of cabbage, then sauté them with leeks and lemon juice. We poured in several quarts of stock and, after it had simmered, she beat several egg yolks with beyaz peynir, the feta-like cheese, and tempered it into the soup. Bengi handed me a spoon and helped herself to some as well, dipping in the ladle and picking out a piece of cabbage with her bare hand.

  “Do you eat with your hands?” she asked. Occasionally, sure, I told her. “That’s good,” she said, nodding approvingly. “Not touching your food . . . that’s like cybersex!”

  Bengi shook in some salt and pepper, added more lemon juice, and again sampled some cabbage with her hands. She picked up a spoon, tasted the broth, and frowned. “What do you think?” she asked.

  It was bland, I told her.

  She nodded. “That’s what’s so annoying about these recipes,” she grumbled. Another day she railed about adhering to the restaurant’s strict Ottoman regime. “It makes my life boring. Sometimes I just want to bang my head against the wall! I c
an’t use strawberries because they didn’t eat them. They thought that anything red was poisonous. I’ve played with the chemistry, I’ve modified the techniques. I’m at the point where they are the best version that they’re ever going to be. It’s not going any further.”

  One afternoon, Batur rushed from the dining room to the kitchen and pulled a bag of saffron from a drawer. An international CEO out in the dining room had been interested in seeing the product they used, he explained.

  “He told me he bought some saffron from the Spice Bazaar yesterday, but it can’t be as good as ours,” he told us. “His probably came from Iran in a truck driver’s socks.”

  Batur held out his saffron for me to sniff, and my nose was filled with an intoxicating, subtly sweet, earthy fragrance. It was, in fact, more potent than Persian saffron, the most reputed in the world. “It’s from Kashmir, from a friend who sends it through a diplomatic pouch,” Batur said, with a mischievous grin. He told Bengi to vacuum pack a bunch of threads in a small bag for the CEO.

  “That’s not enough,” he said when she handed him the bag. He uttered a Turkish adage that embodied a mentality I knew well from the Chinese: “You can’t take without giving first!”

  Batur returned to the kitchen with a piece of paper that he folded up and tucked into his shirt pocket. “I got his information,” he said with a smile, patting his pocket. “That’s more valuable than all the money this restaurant makes. You never know when those contacts will come in handy.”

  Bengi wasn’t interested in networking. She kept her head down and concentrated on the food. After the rush one day, she showed me how she liked to cook. She butchered a couple of ducks that a supplier had brought as samples, blood dripping from her hands onto the white tiles of the kitchen floor. “I’m bleeding! I’m having my period!” she joked unabashedly, as she rushed for paper towels. After cleaning up, she returned her attention to the ducks. She reached under the skin to rub the meat with salt, pepper, and Sichuan peppercorns I’d brought from China. (She’d become obsessed with them, occasionally popping them into her mouth like mints.) Ladling goose fat into a pan, she expertly pan-fried the duck meat until the skin had crisped. For another dish, she used some extra whitefish that she had on hard. She went to the office and proudly showed me her knife case, pulling out various models: a super-light, Japanese slicing knife, a German one used for filleting with an extra-flexible blade, and a small paring tool. She expertly boned the fish in several minutes flat, then took half the fillets and pan-fried them with butter, sumac, and parsley before finishing them in the oven. She sliced the rest of the fish into pieces thinner than sashimi and sprinkled them with orange and lemon juice, parsley, and minced red onion, and served it raw.

  I asked Bengi what kind of restaurant she’d like to run. “A place without classification,” she said without hesitating. I wasn’t surprised when she told me a couple of months later that she’d put in her notice at Asitane. She hadn’t decided what she would do next. Maybe she would go east to learn about Asian cuisines, or maybe she would work with a few partners to open a French boulangerie. Or maybe she would create something that blended East and West.

  But before I finished my time at Asitane and before Bengi quit, we went out one afternoon with Batur and Mark. Although they were proponents of fine dining, they, like many chefs, felt that it was in the back alleys of the city, in the small eateries and stalls that dotted the streets and lined the riverfront, where the food was most authentic and at its best.

  At the Spice Bazaar, Batur led us through a labyrinth of lanes to his favorite stand for kokorec, grilled lamb’s intestines. I’d seen the dish all over town but hadn’t had the nerve to try it. Though some Turks didn’t think of it as a kebab, it met Batur’s definition: the offal, which looked like thick rubber bands, was strung on a spit and slowly rotated over a fire; the vendor sliced thin pieces of intestine, seasoned them with salt, pepper, and chili flakes, and stuffed them into an accompaniment, a long bun. It was like a crispy, chewy, spicy hot dog, and after going without chili peppers through Central Asia and Iran, I appreciated the kick. I could even enjoy the ayran, which helped the spice go down. Afterward, we strolled to Batur’s favorite candy shop. The line of customers had once stretched out the door, he told us, before “Nestlé arrived and people forgot what good candy tasted like.” (I liked that in Turkey even adults were passionate about candy and had their favorite stores.) I bought a box of delicately powdered Turkish delight, and then we wandered into a dessert parlor. Batur ordered a round of muhallebi, a sweet pudding made with chicken.

  “Chicken?” Mark said dubiously.

  Indeed, the dessert contained poultry—super-thin shreds of it, the blandest of meats adding texture, not taste, to the thick, cinnamon-flavored rice pudding that was the very definition of comfort food. As we left, satiated, I thought about the array of foods I’d sampled. In a country that bridged East and West, many things remained entirely Turkish.

  10.

  Craig and I were separated for much less time than I thought we’d be. It took only a few phone calls in which I described the food and the people to convince him to fly to Istanbul. Perhaps he had missed me, I thought happily. My new network of friends helped me set up the perfect vacation, just in time for his arrival. Through Selin’s friends, a beautiful studio in the Old Quarter was arranged. Bengi, Batur, and Selin treated us to delicious meals, during which we guzzled rakı and ate meze doused in olive oil and lemon. We toured the Topkapı Palace with its sprawling kitchens, shopped for spices in the bazaars, and tossed simit to the seagulls on the ferry across the Bosporus. It was all a welcome antidote to the stress of Central Asia and Iran, and the food, the gorgeous sites, and, most important, the friends made it my favorite stop on the Silk Road so far.

  So it was with reluctance that we left Istanbul. But it was important to explore the rest of the country; the city was as representative of Turkey as New York City was of America. Very early one morning, we left the quiet Old Quarter just as the call to prayer began. At the airport, we boarded a flight filled with men in cheap suits and a smattering of women, all in head scarves and long coats. We were scheduled to arrive in Van, on Turkey’s eastern fringe, in time for breakfast.

  Eastern Turkey wasn’t much of a tourist destination. Most travelers stuck to the west, venturing no farther than the stone chimneys of Cappadocia. “There’s nothing in Van!” my Istanbul friends told me with bemusement. Well, nothing except for Kurdish separatists, whom they warned me to avoid.

  With a population of thirty million (half of whom lived in Turkey, the rest in surrounding countries), the Kurds were the world’s largest ethnic group without nationhood. Though it was difficult to differentiate Kurds by their physical appearance, they spoke their own language, Kurdish, and largely kept to themselves in tight-knit rural communities. Relations between Kurds and Turks were tense. Turks tended to look down on Kurds, who were usually poorer, less educated, and more devoutly Muslim. (“A good Kurd is a dead Kurd,” said one Turk I’d met, who until that moment had seemed pleasant and mild-mannered.) Discriminatory practices like banning Kurdish-language media and instruction in schools had spurred a separatist movement, sparking acts of terrorism across Turkey and turning the southeastern part of the country into a war zone in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 2000s, the Turkish government signed a peace treaty with the separatists, and calm was largely restored. But around the time I arrived, the Arab Spring had galvanized the ethnic minority. Protests so far had been mostly peaceful, but many predicted it was only a matter of time before they turned violent, and the government had tightened security in the east.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to go. Van, on the border of Iran, was famous for its breakfast. The surrounding villages each produced their own honey, cheese, and breads, which they brought to sell in Van. Back in the 1930s, one enterprising Kurd had decided to showcase the foods, and the first breakfast joint was born. Others followed, and b
y the time we visited, one alley containing a bunch of restaurants had been dubbed Breakfast Street. They were largely the domain of men, who stopped in for hearty meals and copious cups of tea before work.

  Never mind that I had a theory about breakfast: I was pretty certain that any culture that emphasized breakfast did not traditionally have a good cuisine. One only had to look at the Germans and the English. By contrast, the world’s best cuisines had boring breakfasts. The Chinese ate leftovers and congee. Italians, I would soon discover, consumed dry crackers. Even in France, breakfast was a simple croissant—delicious, yes, but simple—a far cry from their elaborate lunches and dinners.

  But we’d come to Van for breakfast, and once I’d stubbornly insisted to my Istanbul friends that I was going, they’d sighed and out came a flood of recommendations. So we knew to push past the hired touts and make a beeline for a place called Sütçü Kenan.

  As we entered the echoey hall, a waiter pointed us to the second floor. But since we had our baggage, we opted for a table just short of the stairs. The waiter shrugged helplessly, unable to communicate. Later in the trip, after we were invariably escorted to second or third floors of restaurants across eastern Turkey, I noticed the absence of women on the first floor of eateries. They were invariably tucked away upstairs in the “family” section, almost always wearing head scarves or the black chadors that reminded me of Iran.

  Unaware of our faux pas, we made ourselves comfortable and ordered up a large meal. I’d fasted all morning, chiding Craig for eating the airplane meal, and I was beyond famished. The waiter laid down flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers, and feta, a spread that reminded me of our perfunctory breakfasts in Iran. But then came plates of soft herbed cheeses, olives, tangy honey, clotted cream sprinkled with crushed walnuts, and a paste called kavut, made of cracked wheat toasted in oil over a low fire. It looked and smelled like the paste that had nursed me back to health in Uzbekistan. I spread honey, kaymak, and kavut over the flatbread, a combination that was tangy, creamy, sweet, and instantly worth the four-thirty wake-up call. The waiters also brought a small cast-iron plate of menemen, Turkish omelet with tomato paste and diced vegetables. With numerous refills of strong black tea, my hunger was satiated.