Istanbul
I’m eating with my friend Engin Akin, a food writer—more like a food guru—whose new book Essential Turkish Cuisine was published a few months ago in the United States and is already getting terrific notices. She’s regularly quoted in top food sections like that of the New York Times, and I wrote about her, too, ten years ago, when I was last in Istanbul to do an article for Bon Appetit on Turkish food. Apparently, it took her a decade to figure me out: “You don’t really know much about food, do you, Lee?” she says in response to my question about tomatoes and onions balancing each other out. “You can learn a lot on the internet,” she explains.
We’re sitting in the middle-class neighborhood of Fatih, at Istanbul’s most famous pide restaurant, Fatih Karadeniz Pidecisi, serving what’s basically a Turkish version of pizza. “I hate it when it’s put that way,” says Engin. “It’s pide!”
She’s right, of course. Pizza is a flat piece of dough with toppings baked in the oven, and pide is dough wrapped around itself with the meat or whatever else, like cheese, stuffed inside. Sometimes it’s open, like a boat, and sometimes—even better, in my opinion—it’s closed so when you cut it open the heat steams out and warms you before the food does. It’s the perfect lunch for a cold, snowy day in Istanbul.
The owner, Mustafa Yazici, serves us some of his delicious homemade lemonade and explains how the proprietors of London’s two pide restaurants came here to learn their trade. Turks? I ask. “One is owned by Koreans,” he says. We’re sitting close to the oven in a small room with a few other tables—an attractive young woman in a headscarf whose inattentive boyfriend won’t get off his cellphone, a middle-aged perhaps down on his luck guy happy to have a warm meal, and a couple that recognizes Engin.
Almost everyone in town knows Engin, especially if they’re in the food business. After lunch, we trudge through the snow to a kebab restaurant nearby in the Kurdish bazaar where the owner is given no choice but to improvise a private smoking room for her on the third floor.
“I was the first person to review this place,” she says, pointing to a framed yellowing clip from Vatan, the paper for which she writes her weekly column, surrounded by other raves for the restaurant’s grilled meats. The way Engin sees it, the carcasses hanging in the window are a good thing. “It’s too much for lots of people, not just Americans but lots of Turks, too—they don’t want to know where it’s from. But if you eat it, you should know where it’s from.”
Engin wants to know where all food is from and where it’s going, especially Turkish food. She isn’t just a food writer and master chef. She’s also an anthropologist and historian of Ottoman and Turkish cuisine. Essential Turkish Cuisine is based on her Turkish-language book, “From Tents to the Palace,” which describes how the simple food of the nomadic Turkic peoples became worthy of an empire. Part of it is that as an empire grows larger, it has access to different ingredients, vegetables, fruits, spices, and herbs that previously weren’t available. “Landscape and geography invariably affect how a cuisine grows,” she explains. “The Sultan’s kitchen had the ability to acquire the best ingredients”—from an empire stretching at times from the Persian Gulf to North Africa.
Now we’ve moved on to another restaurant, Hunkar, which means Sultan, in the Nisantasi neighborhood. This place passes Engin’s test for good honest Turkish food, and we order a couple of lamb dishes, shrimp, leeks, artichokes, quinces for dessert. Time, as Engin explains, was as important to Ottoman cuisine as space. The history of Turkish food is about perfecting certain techniques, over more than half a millennium, she explains. “Turkish food looks easy, but it isn’t. And the techniques in Ottoman cuisine had to become more precise,” says Engin. “The palace was preparing meals for 5000 people a day—soldiers, gardeners, whatever. And some precise recipes date back hundreds of years. “They’re in some of the manuscripts of the Ottoman archives,” she says. “The Ottomans kept great records.”
To make her point, she orders ashure, a dessert with fruit, nuts and grains, and explains that recipe is provided in an archive describing the circumcision ceremony of Sultan Suleiman. “The listing describes who was there, what was served, and how it was prepared,” says Engin. “A dish has a history.”
Engin describes something of a recent, past rupture in the history of Turkish food, which she attributes to certain aspects of modernization. “People, women, were becoming professionals, becoming doctors and lawyers, so there was less time to cook, less time to learn how to do it.” She notes it’s not easy to make borek, a phyllo-dough pastry stuffed with cheese or meat or spinach, on the run. The fine crust itself takes a lot of time and preparation and practice. “For a certain period, the only people who had time to cook were moms and whatever help people might have.”
It’s different now, says Engin. Maybe that’s partly because Turks are less anxious about modernity, or find it no longer necessary to prove that Turkey is a modern democracy. Indeed, when someone at a nearby table complains that the current government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made it more difficult to drink alcohol, I note that we’ve just been served a few terrific glasses of red wine. Ok, maybe not here, says my interlocutor, but elsewhere in Turkey. We have dry counties in the United States, too, I note—that’s democracy.
The other reason of course that Turks are spending more time in the kitchen and terrific Turkish restaurants is because of Engin, who kept reminding everyone, Turks and non-Turks, how special this food is and has been, for a very long time.
