by Jen Lin-Liu
To stave off the guests’ hunger as I hurried, Asli brought out bread and cheese, a good entrée to a Turkish meal but a distinctly un-Chinese one. After I sent out chili oil with plates of pan-fried dumplings, I got a report: “They’re saying it’s too spicy, too spicy.” I changed the sauce for a spicy tofu dish to a sweet-and-sour one and sent that out along with several other dishes, including fish-fragrant eggplant. “They want yogurt with the eggplant,” Anna, another waitress, reported, explaining that eggplant dishes always came with yogurt in Turkey.
Halfway through the meal, I went to check on the guests and was relieved to discover that all the food had been eaten, but my relief quickly gave way to panic: had I not made enough? “They’re not complaining, that’s the most important thing,” Anna said. By the time the last dish had been sent out, I was so exhausted that I could barely stand. I felt better when I heard the feedback on dessert, a Chinese imperial dish of candied apples. “They give it five stars!” Asli said approvingly.
• • •
Save for su borek, the Turkish lasagna that Selin had pointed out at an Istanbul bazaar, fresh noodles had proved elusive in Turkey, even though I’d heard that the dried variety was common. I’d been told that certain villages near the Black Sea and Cappadocia specialized in making pasta by hand, but after passing through many small towns and two major culinary destinations—Istanbul and Gaziantep—I’d yet to find a noodle maker in action. Professional women no longer had time to do that kind of labor, Selin and her friends had told me. The restaurants I visited in Istanbul offered very few noodle dishes, and at the Ottoman restaurant Asitane, not a single noodle dish graced the menu. Batur said that the fall menu usually featured triangles of pirouhi (a cousin of Eastern and Central Europe’s pierogi), a dish that appeared sparingly in imperial records and was thought to have come from the Caucasus with women who’d ended up in Ottoman harems.
In both Istanbul and Gaziantep, I’d found chefs who were amazingly adept with dough. The granny dishwashers at Asitane rolled out sheets of yufka to a thinness that was only surpassed by Bayram and his baklava chefs and the maker of that amazing gossamer katmer in Gaziantep. But for all their artistry with phyllo, they weren’t making noodles. I felt like I was getting warmer when I visited a friend of Filiz, who added small triangles of baked dough to her soup. She’d even planned to make homemade vermicelli, she said, but her cooking docket was too full. I’d eaten bits of wheat vermicelli folded into rice pilaf a couple of times throughout Turkey, a treatment I’d heard was also common to Iran. But a dish where pasta played second fiddle to rice could hardly be considered a noodle dish. No one had served me even the dried pasta, called eriste, that I’d seen in supermarkets from the Uighur region of China to Turkey. I’d been told it was only filler food, served as a side with a slap of butter like a baked potato. As in Iran, it was not considered fitting for guests. So, while noodles did exist, it seemed clear from my time in Iran and Turkey that neither country made them a priority.
Yet certain food historians and writers have argued that Turkey might have been among the first places where noodles were made, because some of the earliest evidence of wheat has been found in southwestern Turkey, as well as the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Delta. In any case, there was one pasta dish I knew Turks still made by hand, and I was determined to learn it: manti, tiny meat dumplings. Everyone knew of them and told me how common the dish was, but strangely, as with noodles, I rarely saw it on menus. Perhaps it was Turkey’s macaroni and cheese and had yet to hit its restaurant revival? It was difficult even finding someone willing to teach me the dish. “I don’t have the patience to fold those little things,” Selin said, pinching her fingers together to demonstrate. She said that when the guests asked to learn manti, she outsourced the lesson to someone else.
Finally, in Bodrum, I’d found Asli, who thankfully knew how to make manti and was willing to teach me. The morning after the Chinese dinner, we set to work. We used the dough left over from the Chinese dumplings I’d made the previous day. The dough was just the right consistency. Like other skilled pasta makers I’d met, Asli had a three-foot-long rolling pin. She played with the shorter rolling pin I’d brought from China, and, marveling at how much easier it was to use, began rolling out a sheet of dough with it. She flattened the dough to about the same thinness I’d use for dumpling wrappers and cut it into squares just shy of an inch. She placed a tiny dollop of meat filling, made simply of ground lamb, minced onions, salt, and pepper, in the center of each square, then folded it into a triangle and clasped together the two opposite edges.
As we worked, she told me that perhaps the reason I hadn’t seen manti on my journey was that it was mostly cooked in villages. Manti was a bonding activity among women; usually it was a whole-day affair, and when they were served, they were served in abundance. Sometimes they were boiled in broth while other times they were served in sauce, as Asli would do today. After we pressed together several hundred minuscule dumplings, each no bigger than my pinkie nail, Asli boiled them quickly and drained them. She topped them with a sauce made of yogurt, crushed garlic, mint, and ground chili peppers and served them in shallow bowls like the ones for Italian pasta.
Of all the dumplings on my trip, it was manti that most reminded me of chuchura, the Uighur dumplings I’d learned to make at the religious woman Hayal’s home in Kashgar—which in turn reminded me of Chinese wontons. And the name—manti—sounded most like manta, the larger steamed dumplings I’d also learned to prepare in Kashgar, a name that, in turn, reminded me of a Chinese word for steamed buns, mantou. And while I’d yet to reach Italy, the manti seemed to bear resemblance to tortellini as well. Had manti migrated with Silk Road travelers all the way from China?
Some food historians think so. As Alan Davidson writes in The Oxford Companion to Food, “Filled pasta has proved less vulnerable to encroachment by pilaf than ordinary noodles.” Perhaps manti had become widespread across the Silk Road because “the combination of a meat or similar filling and a cereal envelope was convenient for nomadic cultures and more generally for people with very simple cooking facilities. One cooking pot would do, and the filling could be varied according to what was available.” I was also inclined to think that the Mongolian conquerors who’d swept across the Silk Road had something to do with the transmission of the dumplings, as they were integral to cuisines all the way to Central Europe, the western edge of Genghis Khan’s empire. Similar dumplings had even reached the eastern fringes of the empire, in the form of mandu, a beef dumpling in Korea, and manju, a steamed bread in Japan. Still, the roots of the name—mantou—are vague. In Mandarin, it sounds like “barbarian head.” Could that be a reference to the Mongolians themselves?
In any case, there on the Aegean coast, thousands of miles from where my journey began, the delicious little dumplings certainly reminded me of dishes that spanned back to China. And a comment of Asli’s echoed as well: “Tradition says that forty should fit on a spoon. Mothers-in-law judge their daughters-in-law accordingly.”
Asli was no one’s idea of a servile daughter-in-law. She’d been raised in a family that had believed in Ataturk’s reforms and that respected women as much as men. Her mother-in-law was not much a part of her life; she and her husband, Haluk, had left his family behind in Istanbul to build the restaurant in Bodrum.
Much as it stoked my nascent fantasy of working with Craig, I was mindful of how such an arrangement had played out in Asli’s case. Though the couple co-owned the restaurant, she was the boss and her husband played a supporting role. Asli also did the bulk of the work. Cooking aside, she took care of the accounting and marketing and responded to e-mails and phone inquiries. When their son returned from school, she looked after him. When Haluk wasn’t off painting or reading, he often sat at the bar with a glass of wine, munching on finger-length cucumbers. I asked Asli if she wanted him to be in the kitchen more, the way I wanted Craig in the kitchen with me.
“No, never!” she responded. “I was married to someone before who liked to cook, and that didn’t work out very well. One cook is enough for a household.”
Perhaps that was where I’d been mistaken—maybe Asli was right. But did it mean that a woman’s greater autonomy in a relationship invariably meant that she carried the heavier burden?
Early one evening, when Asli and I were cooking, two women stopped by for wine. They were both from Istanbul and lived part-time at villas they owned at the resort. They looked on as Asli and I made a bulgur pilaf. Patsy Cline sang “[You Are] Always on My Mind” over the stereo, followed by an album of Frank Sinatra tunes. Asli directed me as I sautéed the bulgur in sunflower oil rather than olive oil, in deference to the provenance of the dish, before adding minced green peppers, onions, and tomatoes. She added water and chopped, peeled tomatoes and brought the mixture to a simmer before covering the pot and allowing the bulgur to steam.
“If you want to add cumin, that’s optional,” she said.
“I add cumin,” said one of the women, as she smoked a cigarette. She spoke with a British accent and had deep blue eyes passed down from her Russian Caucasus ancestors.
“I never add cumin,” said the other.
I was used to the opinionated nature of Turkish women by then, and in Bodrum they were even more so. Bodrum was known as “Ladies’ Paradise” and had a reputation for offering women an escape from the constraints of Islam. These two women, like many others, had moved to the seaside town after divorcing. Asli, still married, was an anomaly. “Not long after I moved here, I ran into a friend, and she said, ‘Welcome! Have you gotten a divorce, too?’” she recalled.
“Divorce rates are an indication that women aren’t putting up with men anymore,” said the British-accented woman. “Turkish women are ten years ahead of the men. We’re more open-minded. Men are traditional.”
Her friend agreed but argued that this was a shift. “In the olden days, we used to worship our husbands.”
“I never got that far!” Asli said.
The friend added, “I used to cut my ex-husband’s toenails. I used to take the pits out of grapes for him!”
I mentioned that I’d seen a huge range in female autonomy across Turkey, from the women on the coast who ran their own businesses and didn’t put up with much to those in the east, who weren’t allowed to socialize freely in restaurants or even in their own homes. Asli and our visitors said it came down to a woman’s social class and education. “If you’re not educated, there’s a much bigger gap. Men in Turkey respect women who are educated, or at least they can’t be easily taken advantage of,” Asli said.
Her cell phone rang. It was Haluk, who wanted to know what time she was coming home and what was for dinner. Asli told him that if he wanted to eat, it was best that he come to the restaurant, because we were still cooking.
“You see, Turkish men want their wives at home,” Asli said. “But he knows he doesn’t have a chance with me. I’m lucky to have him as my husband.”
As the bulgur finished steaming, the women left and Haluk showed up, in search of dinner. As he looked on, Asli showed me how to make sac kavurma, strips of beef stir-fried with red bell peppers and onions. Sac referred to a pot that resembled a wok, and Asli suspected that the dish itself had originated in China. It was still commonly served at rest stops that lined the highway. “In any case, it’s a very ancient way of cooking meat,” she said.
“It has a nomadic taste,” Haluk added. “And nomadic Chinese . . . are Turks!”
Asli laughed. Despite her gruff demeanor and a certain moroseness that she and Haluk shared, they had a nice relationship, particularly in a land littered with divorces. Yes, Asli seemed to shoulder a greater share of the burden, but their arrangement seemed to work for them. Every so often, I caught a glimpse of one reaching for the other’s hand or a shared tender glance.
As we ate, I asked Haluk about his views on Turkey. “After World War II, Turkey started becoming a country of the Western world,” he said. “But we’ve never been truly respected by the West. Instead, we are a manipulated state, in the middle, even with our strong historical relations with the world. Turkey is a bridge, the slogan goes. But we’re more than just a bridge. We’re a nation.”
“We’ll never get into the EU,” Asli said. “It’s a Christian club! They won’t take us in.”
“If they let in the Czechs, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, we should be let in as well,” Haluk argued.
The conversation was rendered somewhat moot several months later, as the European Union collapsed into chaos and Greece and Italy found themselves in dire financial straits. Perhaps it was better that they weren’t part of the EU, Turks began to believe.
Even in the moment, Asli had moved on from thinking about politics to serving dessert, hunks of roast candied pumpkin with dollops of creamy kaymak.
“Do you like my pumpkin?” she asked Haluk. “That’s what’s most important.”
• • •
From the resort, the three glimmering Greek islands in the Aegean beckoned like sirens in The Odyssey. The islands were my passage west to Italy. For two hundred dollars, I could have boarded a plane and arrived in Italy two hours later. But flying didn’t seem right after my overland travel; I wanted to journey the way the old adventurers had before planes. So I opted for more costly arrangements that involved a speedboat, an overnight ferry, a dash across mainland Greece by bus, and yet another overnight ferry.
My goal was to arrive in Italy by Easter, just three days away when I set out. Early in the morning, I boarded a speedboat at the Bodrum harbor. The thirteen-mile journey to Greece took less time than the lengthy border formalities on either side; passports were scrutinized carefully before passengers were allowed through the official gates of Europe.
I stepped onto the tiny Greek island of Kos and ambled about town as I waited for my overnight ferry to Athens. The blue-and-white striped Greek flag replaced the red-and-white Turkish flag. The Greek alphabet appeared in place of Roman script. While there were two mosques on the island, there were many more churches, their steeples graced with the Greek Orthodox cross. Signs of Greece’s economic meltdown the year before were everywhere—virtually every other store was shuttered or empty.
I asked around for a restaurant serving good local fare and ended up at Mummy’s Cooking, a family-run tavern on a quiet street. Mummy, a stout, grandmotherly lady, showed me around the kitchen, opening the lids of various pots that contained vegetable stews, which in this Lenten season were more plentiful than usual. But I was starved for pork, my appetite piqued by the salamis and ham hocks hanging in the delis, filling the air with their sweet, smoky essence, and the abundant signs for pork souvlaki, pork gyros, and bacon sandwiches.
Mummy’s son seated me and promptly brought a plate with a huge braised pork chop smothered in cheese, tomatoes, and onions. I asked him what the dish was called. “This is Mama’s pork! No name for the dish!” he said, kissing the tips of his fingers and spreading them with a flourish. The rice-and-vermicelli pilaf and stuffed grape leaves that accompanied the pork reminded me of Turkey. And after lunch, as I walked around town, I saw all kinds of familiar treats. At a café, the little unfiltered cups of strong coffee were called Greek coffee. At confectionery shops, the powdered-sugar-dusted jellies were Greek delights. Spinach-stuffed phyllo triangles were not borek but spanakopita. At the bars, men guzzled shots of ouzo that smelled suspiciously like rakı. The Turkish candy helva was rechristened haitoglou. Meats roasted on vertical spits went by souvlaki and gyro rather than kebab. I also came across plenty of yogurt on menus, and after ordering it at one café, I devoured the enormous dessert glass of creamy dairy that arrived, topped with honey and whipped cream. The yogurt had been so good all along the Silk Road, in fact, that I had a hard time enjoying it elsewhere and especially in America, where exorbitant “Greek” yogurts began invading supermarke
ts.
Waiting for the ferry, I fell into conversation with a friendly Greek woman. Greeks and Turks, she told me, were essentially the same. She was certainly as friendly and hospitable as the Turks, insistently offering me an entire box of chocolate cookies she’d brought when she learned how far I was traveling. “When I went to Turkey,” she told me, “it didn’t feel like I was in a foreign country at all. Everything was so familiar.”
“What about the religion?” I asked.
“Sure, that’s what makes us different. But I don’t understand. Why can’t people of different religions live together?” she said. In the reverse of many stories I’d heard in Turkey, she told me that her grandfather had been born in Turkey but had been forced to move to Greece because he was Christian.
The ferry, an eight-story behemoth with restaurants, a casino, and private cabins, was fully packed with passengers trying to make it home for the holidays. It seemed to be particularly popular with Greek truckers, who brought their vehicles on board, and pet owners, who carried their dogs and cats in crates. I’d been lucky to get a cabin. I fell asleep easily, lulled by the gentle rocking of the ocean, but awoke past midnight as the waves grew rough. I walked around the ship, swaying to and fro like a drunkard, grasping the rails to steady my balance. The passengers and attendants were all still asleep in the common areas, as if a spell had been cast over the entire boat. I cursed my decision to take the ferry but returned to my cabin and eventually fell asleep, too.
The ferry docked near Athens just as dawn broke, casting a honey-orange hue over the industrial edge of the ancient city. With the morning to spare, I took the train into town and headed to the Acropolis. But it was closed that morning for Good Friday, and aimlessly wandering around, I stumbled into a huge market nearby. It was filled with shoppers, who made it plain that sheep were as important to Greeks on Easter as they were to Muslims on Eid. I was whacked in the face more than once by the limbs of a lamb carcass carried on the back of a barrel-chested shopper. Housewares stalls did a brisk business selling large rotisserie grills. The meat aside, the market featured beautiful olives that ranged from deep purple to pale green, along with generous hunks of cheese and jars of honey. After buying samples of each, I caught a taxi to the bus station, and not a moment too soon. The bus pulled out of the station just after I boarded, and as I sank into my seat I was hit with a brutal migraine. My reflexive skill of dozing off on uncomfortable modes of transit came to the rescue.