Category: Turkey

Sugar Duck! (Or: Best Souvenir Ever)

Our best souvenir of Turkey was not a rug, a set of tea cups or some blue evil-eye charm.

It was the newest member of our happy household, this sweet little guy:

Well, hello there!

We’ve named him Sugar Duck.

This is why:

Hellllooooo!

See, we had dinner at a cheapie restaurant in Edirne where they had the red chili in these nifty flip-top caddies on the table: glass bottom, bright-green flip-top dome.

A couple days later, in Istanbul, we nipped (I was going to say ‘ducked’) into a restaurant-supply place just as it was closing, and they had the exact same form as the Edirne model, but in three colors…and with adorable eyes!

And labeled, in Turkish and English, sugar duck.

As Peter points out, we probably wouldn’t love him half as much if we didn’t know this adorable name. Heck, we probably wouldn’t even have put sugar in him.

Best of all, he’s made in Turkey.

Peter’s first thought was, Oh, we’ll use a better spoon. But then he appreciated just how flawlessly designed the Sugar Duck was. The spoon is his tongue, you see.

Yeth, it ith my tongue. Why are you laughing?

The only down side of our new Turkish pet: We definitely use more sugar than we used to.

Summer Break #4: Greece and Turkey: Best Bites

File all this under Things I Wish I’d Eaten More Of.

1. Fresh mizithra
We drove to the next little town to visit the place that makes the killer sheep’s-milk yogurt, with its nice crusty top.

I’ve read rapturous descriptions of fresh ricotta, but I didn’t really believe it until they fed us the mizithra, scooped fresh out of the vat and still warm.

Happy little clouds

Mizithra is, in this form, basically ricotta. It’s also made from the whey from a sturdier cheese (in this case, feta), so it’s soft and jiggly, not too intense.

Having it warm is like eating little dairy clouds–but not so ethereal. More primal. I think people might love it so much because it reminds them of nursing?

2. Ladotiri
Same bat place, same bat channel. Same ‘Oh, now I understand!’ moment.

Why didn't I eat that last chunk?!

Ladotiri is literally ‘oil cheese.’ It’s a specialty of Lesvos, cured in olive oil. It’s normally kind of rubbery and salty and doesn’t seem particularly interesting.

This stuff, though, fresh–ah-ha. It was nutty, like gruyere. A tiny bit grainy, mostly smooth.

3. Ouzo
OK, actually, this was more of a visual thing than a taste thing. They make a lot of ouzo–most of the ouzo–on Lesvos. It’s great. I don’t drink all that much these days, but I always wish I’d drunk more ouzo so I could look at the bottles.

Ouzo Mini, which may be the best ouzo of Lesvos, is also conveniently the cutest. It has a hip new label:

The modern Mini girl

And Ouzo Matis, another brand with babes on the label…well, they cut right to the chase. We’re not sure if this is new, or we only just noticed, but here’s Peter noticing:

Can you find the boobs in this photo?

What’s he noticing? Va-va-voom!

Waiter, another ice cube, please!

OK, so the photo is not the greatest. But yes, peer dreamily through your ouzo bottle, and you’ll see a girl in a red bikini (or blue, should you choose) on the inside.

3. Obscenely ripe fruit

Waiting for the early train in Soufli, we breakfasted on figs from in front of the stationmaster’s house. You know how everyone leers about figs? How they’re vaguely dirty-looking?

Dirty, dirty, dirty

These weren’t even purple on the outside, and they were the dirtiest figs I’ve ever eaten.

Then, in Turkey, a nice old man gave me a tomato. It was hot from the sun. He smiled and kept walking. I cupped that tomato in my hand the whole rest of our walk–it felt like one of my own organs.

We ate it the next morning for breakfast, gulped over the sink.

Tomato porn

Maybe the best tomato of my life? Almost all goo, perfect acid-sweet balance. No need for salt at all.

Days later, Peter said, “Agh! Why didn’t we save the seeds?!”

4. Hot sausage
No innuendo intended.

We were in Komotini, our first real stop after Eressos. Whole new part of Greece. The town is 50 percent Turkish, complete with a mosque and an Ottoman-era cemetery.

The streets were empty, which was partly due to Ramadan, and partly due to it being 108 degrees. One restaurant in the market was open, and fed us this:

There was a lot more when the plate first came.

We marveled at the sensation of hot chili in our throats. The Greeks aren’t so into spicy-hot, and we hadn’t tasted it for weeks. The sausage was spiced like basturma, which is to say, intensely, with coriander and pepper and more. It was a mix of beef and lamb. It was superb.

5. Turkish ice cream
I love Mado ice cream. To Turks, it’s probably only as exciting as Haagen-Dazs, but to me, it’s the most fantastic ice-cream brand, the height of luxury. It’s all goat’s-milk, and the fruit flavors (which I think are fruit-only, no dairy, but who knows?) are so intense, it feels like the fruit is communicating directly with your brain, bypassing your tongue entirely.

In Edirne, we sat at the Mado cafe and had ridiculous Mado treats. Just for Peter, it seems, they have the ‘Red Fruits Passion’ (or some such) sundae on the menu. Sour cherry, raspberry and strawberry, plus raspberry goo, and some clotted cream for good measure.

Madondurmadondurmadondurmado

I had a nice orange-creamsicle-ish thing with pistachios, but whatever. Need more red fruits, please.

6. Hazelnut meringue
Sorry, no photo. I bought it on the Istanbul ferry, along with my tulip-glass of tea.

I know from flying Turkish Airlines, which is neck-and-neck with Emirates for the best-food-in-coach prize, that Turkey produces like most of the world’s hazelnuts. They call it a miracle nut, and serve it instead of peanuts.

So I grabbed a hazelnut meringue cookie, and it must have been 99% hazelnuts, because it was more like an energy bar than a meringue or any cookie, really. So intense.

But then again, everything tastes more intense when you’re traveling. But then again again, America is the Land of Bland. These tastes will tide me over till my next adventure.

Summer Break #3: Does Turkey Produce the World’s Weirdest Drink?

Want a real mind-bending experience when you travel?

Don’t worry so much about what to eat. Focus on the odd things there are to drink.

That’s where you get into severe mind-warping territory.

Exhibit A: Salgam Suyu

(Sorry–there’s a little cedilla under the s, and also under a c farther down. I’ve taught myself a lot about code in a decade, but never mastered those special characters.)

Salgam suyu is a Turkish purple carrot drink. Apparently it’s fairly common at juice stands in certain parts of Turkey that I haven’t been to.

I think if I encountered it in a juice stand, I’d be pretty giddy and think it was cool.

But I saw it as a packaged product, in a grocery store–and that was even more mind-blowing. It’s like it proved it was a major part of the culture, not just some health nut’s invention.

Looking innocent on the grocery store shelf

“Is that a…carrot? That’s purple?” I said, squinting at the label. I flipped it around to look at the ingredients. Yup, purple carrot.

At the checkout, the lady looked unimpressed with it, like it was a totally normal thing. I guess, for her, it is. Which is the mind-blowing part.

It’s really beautiful stuff:

Looking lurid out on the street

By now, you’re probably wondering about the taste. The label said in capital letters BEST SERVED COLD.

But we had no fridge. We popped it open near the end of a long walk, standing on the top of a windy dyke at the edge of Edirne, with the massive Sinan mosque on the hill above us.

Peter gulped as I read out the ingredients: “Purple carrot, wheat, turnip, salt, red chili, pepper…”

“Huh. All those things really come through,” he said, scrunching up his face. “In that order.”

I took a swig. It was bracing. I wished it were cold. But for electrolyte replacement or whatever, and in lieu of food, it was pretty fantastic.

This product really made me rethink everything I knew about Turkey, Turkish food and Turks in general. Granted, I’m no expert to start with (the only Turkish I know is cok güzel, and I learned that from an Eartha Kitt song), but this made me realize there’s just so much I don’t know, there and nearly everywhere I go.

Like, what is the significance of this drink? Do grownups drink it? Do kids drink it? Does your mom tell you to drink it when you’re sick with something in particular? Do dudes drink it to feel studlier? Does it go with certain foods? Do you drink at night? In the morning? Is it old-fashioned? Or suddenly cool again? Is this a good brand? The only brand? Do people scoff at seeing it packaged at all?

I have no real answers, but I do see the word afrodizyak on the packager’s website. And, according to the ad, it makes you do backflips.

Each dish in every culture has all this resonance, but we barely begin to learn any of it when we travel. We can read up on some of the most famous dishes–it’s bachelor food, it’s court food, it’s imported-from-China-on-the-silk-road food… But a lot is just never even discussed, until someone thinks to ask.

It’s true for food, but it’s doubly true for drinks, because they’re almost always, by definition, a secondary thing.

Drinks also tend to be more personal, like breakfast–we have our routines, and we don’t want to mess them up (just think of your morning coffee).

And, more practically, travelers often shy away from water-based things for health reasons.

But one huge selling point about trying new drinks is: they’re cheap! Even if something’s disgusting and you’ll never put it in your mouth again, you only spent a couple bucks, max, on it. But you will have seen, for a gulp or two, a whole side of a culture you never knew before.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever had to drink in another country?

Summer Break #1: Name That Fruit! (A Mediterranean Mystery)

Help me out here, Internet. I’m trying to identify a mystery fruit. Or maybe fruits.

There are three stories to tell:

Incident #1: Lebanon
A nice Druze woman on a bus in the Chouf mountains in Lebanon told me her favorite fruit was Persian aprict–mishmish ajami. She said it stayed green, and was both sweet and sour, and was not very fuzzy.

Sadly, I was scheduled to leave Lebanon just a couple of days later, and had no time to look for this fantastic fruit.

In lieu of a picture of that fruit, or of that woman, here at least is a nice photo of Peter with a Druze man.

Peter's Photo Pro Tips: Always compliment a man on his mustache.

Incident #2: Greece
After the fantastic ladies at our favorite restaurant in Eressos showed us how to make Easter lamb, they pointed to a crate of fruit and told us to help ourselves.

They called the fruit milorodaxino–literally, “apple peach.” From far away, all piled in the crate, the fruit did look like kind of crappy little Golden Delicious apples. Up close, though…best nectarine ever:

The mystery apple peach

And, as you can see, green all the way through.

Was this the phantom Persian apricot, by another name? The farmer who grew the fruit was there outside the restaurant, all burly forearms like Popeye and a mustache to beat the band. He was the only one that grew this fruit, he said. End of story.

Incident #3: Astoria, New York
When we returned to NYC, one of the 24-hour produce stores (yes, we have more than one) had these “honeydew nectarines” in stock:

Honeydew Nectarines

They looked the same, but they were kinda crappy–a little mealy, not intense flavor. The woman who runs the store admitted they were not at their best. It was hard to tell whether it was not the same fruit at all, or just a typically poor American rendition of it.

And because she’s Greek, Peter asked her if she knew if these were the same as the milorodaxino. No, no, she said–those are part apple, and these were part melon.

Er, I think she’s wrong on both counts, because that would be like serious fruit miscegenation, so unfortunately I have to discount her as an unreliable source. But I appreciate that she makes an effort to source new and interesting fruits and veg–we also got these neat bulbous cucumbers from her, and some great liver-colored heirloom tomatoes.

Second data point: After writing all this, I flipped over an old issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and it had an illustration of peaches and nectarines. The Honeydew variety was on there. The issue was from 2002–so this isn’t a new strain.

Further data point: Turkey
Check out these marzipan fruits in a storefront in Istanbul. A couple of them look like they could be the mysterious fruit.

Check out the top row, next to the "kivi"

Ala elma = “ala apple” according to Google translate, which is maybe just the variety name of an apple, like Gala?

Or this one:

Check out the greenish things...

Papaz erik = “pastor plum”

Obviously, the fact that these were rendered in marzipan makes it especially difficult. In retrospect, Peter and I should’ve gone to the adjacent market and looked for the real-fruit equivalents, instead of getting distracted by an antiques store.

So gardeners, travelers, botanists, Lebanese fruit-lovers: tell me what you know. Have you eaten any of these things? Are they all the same? Are they different?

Bottom line, really, is: Did I miss the Best Fruit Ever by not getting those mishmish ajami in Lebanon in the first place?

(If you like stories about cross-cultural plant identification, also check out my old story about purslane[PDF]. That one took years to solve. Now that the internet is more full of information, I expect to solve this question in minutes. Right? Hello? Anyone?)

Greece Food Photos #2: Off the Truck, Off the Tree

The Greece adventures continued, with some village foraging.

Peter bought peaches from a truck, because he could:

Peach Truck

I bought sour cherries, because I could. We made a mess, and then made compote, to go with our local yogurt for breakfast.

Sour Cherry Compote Process

Truth be told, the cherries were not from a truck, but from the produce stand. A four-foot-tall old Greek woman grabbed me by the elbow and pointed and said, “Visino! Not sweet! Special!” Handily, I have learned the word for sour cherry in many languages, so I jumped right on that. Here’s the compote, with a mug of extra juice off on the right. Just looking at it makes my salivary glands twinge in longing.

Sour Cherry Compote

We didn’t buy chickens from a truck, even though we could have.

Chicken Truck

Nor did we buy vegetables. But we ogled them, you bet.

Produce Truck

And we ate our share of French fries that originally came from this truck, a potato processor from the next town down. Every day we watched them deliver tons of precut fries to all the local restaurants. And every night we gobbled them down. Beautiful Photoshopping, guys.

Potatoes

Every morning, a truck drove around selling fish. The loudspeakers made it sound like the revolution was starting. This little guy got left behind when progress marched in.

Lost Sardine

Near the end of our stay, we foraged for figs. These are Aydine figs, brought by families when they fled from Aydin in southwestern Turkey in the early 20th century. Lucky for us, they ripen earlier than other varieties, and there’s a giant tree in a vacant lot.

Fig

What fruit would you carry with you if you had to flee?

See Greece Photos #1
See all Greece photos on Flickr

Summer Trip: The Food

About the time I was eating the most amazing mussels in the world, on the beach in Greece, I realized I should cut a teensy bit of slack to all those lazy food writers who overuse the phrase “a revelation” to describe whatever they’re eating. (I loathe this, for the record.)

I’m not saying the hand of God reached down and chucked me under the chin while I was eating, but I did have a moment of “a-ha” that was close to revelatory.

The next thought I had was: Maybe American food writers use “a revelation” so often because Americans have such awful food. In a cosmopolitan place like NYC, you can eat duck confit, medium-rare pork chops, assorted artisanal cheeses, and fresh veggies of all kinds, but very often you’re just eating a flawless simulacrum of the real thing…and probably paying a lot for it.

I use the prefix “art” to describe this, as in “an art pork chop.” Not at all to disparage the field of art or the process or art-making, but a food item that resembles food in every way but flavor may as well be an object placed on a plinth and lit with halogen bulbs. Then people can come peer at it and call it “cunning” in their critical reviews.

Because our food production system is so fucked up, and our palates so stunted by a relative lack of food tradition and our demand for cheap over tasty, we Americans eat art food all the time–and a lot of the time we don’t even know it.

It’s not till you eat a mussel that is briny and sexy like an oyster, but also sweet like a scallop, and sitting in a gorgeous translucent green shell that you realize exactly why people like mussels so much. It’s not till you eat a green fig off the tree that you realize what all the hype is about. And of course there’s always the “real tomato” issue.

So part of the problem I have with food writers having “revelations” all over the damn place is that they’re just showing exactly how little experience they have eating good food. If you’re having a revelation in print over some duck confit, it means you haven’t eaten good duck confit before. And shouldn’t that be just the barest qualification for getting paid to write about food?

Also, of course, food writers are always getting rapturous about their meals in France. Every food magazine every month has something about France–even Saveur, which is the most worldly of mags, and I admire them for it, still does the fallback “X region in France is amazing” story every couple of months.

I know France is great and all, but again, food writers are just revealing how un-stamped their passports are if all they’ve got to talk about is the charming village market and the authoritative French woman who prepares a revelatory lunch with her strong, assured hands.

Anyway, what I ate on my trip, which was soooo much more adventurous, and for which I was a million times better informed than even the most highly paid professionals:

1) Those motherf***ing mussels. We went back and had them a second time, and they weren’t as good–maybe they’d been overcooked, maybe they were not as fresh. It was good to know at least that Greeks in Eressos weren’t sitting around smugly eating mussels behind our backs every day.

2) Quick salt-cured sardines. Also in Greece, from a nice old lady in the village of Andissa. They were plump and succulent. A little obscene, like if you really did bite off your husband’s nice plump lip and ate it.

3) Pigeon in Cairo. I’ve already mentioned it, but that was truly, truly delectable. (And not a single bite of birdshot–there’s an urban legend in the city that all the pigeon comes from the shooting club, and friend-of-a-friend broke a tooth on birdshot once.) The pigeon gets stuffed with rice or freekeh (cracked green wheat), then it gets simmered for a while to cook the stuffing, and then it gets plopped down in a searing hot pan, to crisp up the skin. The broth from the simmering is served on the side in a mug, and it’s incredibly peppery and delicious. I would drink just the broth, but the resto has a policy that you also must order pigeon–but once you do, it’s all-you-can-drink broth.

4) Malta plums in Turkey. Not that these were the world’s most delicious fruit–just that I’d never had them before, and they were sweet and fascinating. They’re the color of apricots and have big, slippery seeds in the center, and they’re outrageously sticky. In the same day, I also got to sample some fresh chickpeas. Cool-looking, but enh.

5) Olive-oil-stewed sea beans, served cold, at Ciya in Istanbul. Every time, this restaurant has something delightful. They were still a little crispy-bouncy in texture, and the sort of salty you know comes from the inside rather than being added in the kitchen. (Incidentally, this is why Mediterranean fish are so delicious, claimed the fish grill man at our resto in Eressos.)

6) Ayran in Syria and Turkey. I’ve had it a lot before, but it’s always remarkable just how thirst-quenching salty, watered-down yogurt can be.

7) The world’s sweetest yogurt in Ayvalik, Turkey. We were eating a basic little lunch while waiting for the ferry, and I saw the guys at the next table had big plates of homemade yogurt. We got some for ourselves, and it was dairy-product heaven–light, not heavy like Greek strained stuff, and sweet-sour, and with a nice crusty layer of cream on top. Costa in Greece insisted it was because the Turks put sugar in everything–or at least used grape must to start the souring process. Which is interesting on its own. (On a separate dairy-product topic, I saw rennet for sale in a grocery store in Ayvalik–made by the major milk producer, and in a little bottle, right there next to the premade cheese. Great that there’s an assumption your average shopper would make cheese at home.)

8) Everything in Syria.

9) Apricots right off the tree in Greece, and even a few cherries. The local cherries (some we actually paid for, from the fruit stand) were exactly the sort of thing that make people say “a revelation.” They just kept tasting and tasting and tasting and tasting.

10) Best. Beans. Ever. in Istanbul. Fittingly, the name of the restaurant was ‘bean.’ At first, we ordered only one serving, and the waiter looked nervous. After I’d had a couple spoonfuls of Peter’s, and ordered my own, he looked relieved. Order and balance were restored. These beans were perfectly tender, just so they gave a bit when you bit into them, but held their shape. And they were swimming in this tomato-ish sauce that can only be described as pure umami. I have no idea what the magic ingredient was, but it did make me realize I hadn’t eaten pork in many, many weeks. Because that kind of tastiness I associate with pork bits, and here, they’d managed to get it by other means.

11) Assorted other things: kalkan (turbot) in Istanbul, baklava in Istanbul, borek in Istanbul, ice cream in Istanbul. Oh, and did I mention the man selling sardines, who had a beautiful silvery pile, but also a bucket of live ones, and periodically he’d grab a live one and throw it down on top of the silvery mound, where it would jump and thrash, as if to say, “These fish are soooo fresh…” Maybe a little sadistic, but a genius sales technique (right up there with the bra vendors I saw on the street in Cairo, tossing the biggest bras up in the air like pizza dough).

**For the record, Peter and I decided we’re against Turkey getting into the EU. Sure, some people might be a little less poor, or something. But it will inevitably make food worse, as produce-starved northerners demand Turkey’s farms yield bigger and more stuff. Currently, tomatoes are sweeter and cucumbers are crispier than anywhere but Syria, and I don’t want that to get fucked up by greenhouses. (Egypt, incidentally, has started using greenhouses–retarded, considering the one thing Egypt doesn’t lack is sun and dry weather. The tomatoes now suck.) Also, Turkey is already perfectly functional in other respects: you can drink the water, and you can even buy train tickets online. They don’t need the damn EU.

That is all. Must go eat breakfast/lunch. Probably no revelations to be had, alas.

Turkey: On Toilets

Duh: Persian cats come from Persia.

I only realized this when we were in northern Syria and the cats were starting to look quite a lot shaggier and fluffier than all the lean, mean Cairene felines, which look just like temple paintings say they should.

Double duh: Turkish toilets come from Turkey.

This only dawned on me in Antakya, just after we’d crossed the border from Syria and checked into our cheapie hotel right by the bus station. In itself, this was quite exciting–normal travel rules dictate that the hotels by bus stations be utter flophouses. This one had spotless tile floors and posters of alpine heaven adorning the walls next to a carefully dusted tchotchke case.

We dumped our stuff, and I walked to the shared bathrooms–and started laughing like an idiot. It’s not like I hadn’t seen a million squat toilets already on my trip. But here we were in Turkey–experiencing all its cultural contributions to world civilization! And I’m not being sarcastic–I kind of like squat toilets. Very efficient…as long as your knees are strong and you have a decent sense of balance. I even enjoy the challenge of using one on a moving train.

Then I walked over to the shared shower room, and laughed again. Who would’ve guessed? Turkish baths come from Turkey too! I was delighted to see the grand technology of the hammam scaled down for home use.

Granted, there was a rudimentary little shower head in the square, tile-floor room, but it was clearly a retrofit to the basic Turkish bath setup: a marble basin, a tap, a drain in the floor and a shallow wide-mouth bowl (purple plastic, in this case, but exactly the same shape as the silver ones they use in fancy hammams). Sadly, the usual burly masseuse in nylon thong underwear was not a part of this home hammam, so I was on my own.

I toyed with the shower for a second, but the water was on the unpleasant side of lukewarm. So I gave Turkish bath tech a chance–and boy was I glad I did. If you’re going to take a bath with nippy water, it’s surprisingly pleasant to soap yourself up and just dump that water over your head again and again and again and again and again….

A million douses later, I finally toweled off, slipped on my clean caftan and stepped into my flip-flops. (Our $20/night hotel room actually came stocked with two pairs of plastic bath slippers…but only in men’s sizes, and they were a little bit stinky. It’s the thought that counts.) I floated back to my room on that mellow, limbs-turned-to-jelly post-hammam buzz. Guess I didn’t need the burly attendant to scrub me down after all.

Here’s Peter enjoying his free slippers, and a cold Efes. (The bathrobe: model’s own.)

Cheap hotel in Turkey