Istanbul Food Tour: Snacks

Settling back into life in Paris, cakes to celebrate the Epiphany and the first day of winter sales in France all around, and I am still thinking about the snacks in Turkey.*

My Top 5 Turkish Snacks

5. Salep: If atole dropped the corn, procreated with cream of wheat, dabbled in a bit of horchata, and blended itself into silky latte smoothness, it would be salep. Named after the orchid root used to flavor it (the name is because it resembles fox testicles, check here if you want to know more), it's hot milk sweetened and mixed with this root powder and covered in cinnamon. If you're crossing the Gallatta Bridge and it's near-freezing out and wet, wet snow is covering your nearly impractical hat, it's the perfect thing to slurp on as you walk up the hill to Istikal Caddesi.

4. Simit: Like a bagel ring, but softer, and covered in sesame seeds that are toasty and yummy even if you hate sesame bagels. Sweetened with grape syrup. Sold in carts and on heads (why didn't I take a picture?) I like mine for breakfast with salty goat cheese and some halvah. And cay. (Thanks to Janet for sending me this picture!)

3. Cay: I have a certain reverence for tea-based cultures, and a certain disdain for those that aren't. While my ancestors quickly dumped the goods in the harbor, Turkish people have been drinking this stuff for centuries. I don't usually take sugar in my tea, but I did here. The cups can seduce you immediately and the stuff is so ubiquitous that you could leave Turkey a tea-drinker even if you didn't care for it upon arrival.

2. Lokum: Who didn't wonder about Turkish Delight after reading about it in the Narnia books? Who didn't immediately despise it after tasting it once, wrapped in aluminum, on the 1/8 of a shelf of British imports at their gourmet grocery? Who wouldn't then fall head-over-pistachios-in-love-with-it at Istanbul's spice bazaar?

1. Halvah: I have never liked halvah, even after reading a fascinating story once in the NY Times about eating it for Passover and there being, I don't know, I want to say one producer in all of NYC, or maybe even the US, but come on - halvah has never kept anyone from yearning for a chocolate bar.

Then I had the halvah at our breakfast buffet.

Like all things in this world, one goes to a country of origin and realizes "hey, there is more than one type of halvah!" The one pictured below to the right is probably at fault for the weight I gained in Istanbul - it crunched like a Butterfinger, called out to the smoky sesame-memory of all halvah that came before it, and ended with a blissfully light crunch of sweet and pistachio. The chocolate one didn't do it for me (on the left), but the other one? 8 pieces at Sunday's breakfast, and an actual sinking of disappointment the day before when there was none left. I might have to make a Parisian quest for it.

*It's a law here that they can only have sales twice a year when the government says - it's to make sure that small businesses don't get pushed out of business but mostly it looks like last year's stuff on racks and people bustling about like the Friday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. Since I still don't have my luggage, I bought myself another pair of boots today since 2/4 pairs of pants and my only boots are sitting in a luggage pile somewhere between here and Ataturk International Airport.

Istanbul Food Tour: Asitane

My piddly pipe dreams were realized at Asitane lunch: was it the request to borrow a pen (it was Liam who asked!)? The pictures of each course I tried to sneak? The way we ordered what were certainly the best dishes to order ...? I don't know what it was, and don't start to tell me it was for everyone - a girl can dream - but when the waiter brought me a comment card AND a little gift of orange jam, I thought yes indeed he thinks I'm a real food writer! Liam encouraged me to sign the comment card la fromagette, but I chose to play it coy and write, with as much professionalism as I could feign, "I look forward to sharing the details of our great meal with others."

I had thought that Ciya would be our best meal, but when we entered into this Ottoman restaurant with recipes over 500 years old (described in Lonely Planet as "Ottoman dishes devised for the 16th-century royal circumcision feast"), I knew this was going to be the best yet. I committed to ordering only dishes with an asterisk, indicating actual historical recipes (I don't know where the others came from, but they weren't Kool-Aid, so who knows). First off, a white bean spread with cinnamon slathered onto sesasme-spiced-warm-dinner rolls, sublimely creamy, light, fragrant and sweet. Accompanying this, I ordered root spinach with olive oil that was cooked to falling apart, slightly vinegared, some soft carrots in there and finished with olive oil. Liam ordered a warm Circassian cheese with mushrooms that tasted like smoked Gouda with the texture of feta and was too strong for me.

We both went old-school with our mains - Liam's lamb diced, melted in earthenware with dates, figs and apricots ("sweet main course OK?" the waiter confirmed after Liam went to this after his first choice wasn't available). I had Restiyye "homemade vermicelli with cheese, parsley and walnuts." Mine won - although together it was like a Sultan's variation on Swedish meatballs with egg noodles - like a pared-down kugel, sweet, light home-made egg noodles with cheese with the salt of feta and umami of Parmesan on top, with, of course, parsley and walnuts (and some chili - how we've missed thee!).

Although we were too full to finish our mains, I could not pass up Ottoman dessert. I asked the waiter to recommend between Quince Delight ("quince in syrup") and "pumpkin and fig delight with clotted cream" and he suggested the latter. Like our dessert plate from Ciya, they both seemed preserved in syrup (oh the research to do) - the pumpkin much softer ("more pumpkin-y" remarked Liam) than last night's and the fig ... like a Fig Newton (damn us Americans with our lack of any other fig reference) of the sweetest softest case, the texture going to liquid gold when you might expect grit, topped off with pure butter cream - another dessert to pass up an eclair for (see picture below)

NB: Due to my desire to return home with the orange jam, we checked the baggage. As it stands, I have yet to see the baggage due to a snowstorm in the Czech Republic, a variety of long lines, and general slowness at Air France. I'm not sure now that it was worth it. I'll report.

Istanbul Food Tour: Ciya

The New York Times warned us to bring a Turkish friend since there's no English menu, so we memorized a few names and double-checked that the Ciya at number 43 was the correct address.

Lots got lost in translation.

Is it better to re-tell how we saw it? To quote? Or, rather, to imagine what the staff there was thinking when we forged our ways in the uncharted silver urns of Anatolian cuisine?

All of the above.

"Self-service" they informed us several times, so up we went to the dishes of warm starters. We eyed a greens dish, one with browned onions, the other with red pepper. Pointed at both. Both? he questioned with a quizzical eye turned toward us and another toward the server. Waiter pointed, seemed to confirm both, said something about pilaf and after we agreed to yogurt sauce, I grabbed the dishes. Eyes raise, again. This time to the woman across the way. Grabbing the damn dishes, carrying themselves... she seemed to sigh. Frowns all around. Back to our seats.

Two plates of dark greens and all we can do is moan that this is like Chez Panisse in Istanbul visiting an ancient cousin. Onions caramelized to sweetness and browned for depth, greens "cooked to perfection" (is there a better way to describe when greens are cooked well?) The yogurt sauce the first I've tasted this good since the days of Zia's Cafe in San Diego (known prior to 9/11 as Zia's Afghan Cafe).

As I'm pondering the benefits of well-cooked greens, Liam is braving the self-service cold salads. Suddenly, an English-speaking staff member appears. Dolmas, meatballs, some dips on his plate when he returns (plate delivered by staff). I'm not sure if I can explain this in English without the name of the dish or lacking the knowledge of Paula Wolfert, but one was an eggplant so snowy white and smoky that it shimmered like the snow atop the minarets. The other I can only say was nut, kind of spicy, and so good you didn't want to ruin it with bread. Dolmas were thin cigarettes of rice and sweet, not chewy like the ones I usually have - in this country they have displays of "vine leaves" with the variety of a fromagerie.

"Do you have dessert?" Liam asks our original server, who nods, and then proceeds to the back of the restaurant to repeat to the English-speaking staff the word "dessert." We are guided to the street-facing window where trays of iridescent fruits await us - except they are not all fruits and I'm not even sure how these sweets are made (I have a list of research days long about Turkish food that is not easily done with a few Google hits on 'Turkish sweets'). "pumpkin" he says pointing at huge orange hunks that look jellied, "tomato" at another, drier, mauve slab. "No olive," I say, pointing at the large black forms in front of me. "Walnut" sighs the woman behind me, and so, I pointed to one of most (pictured below).

How quickly I am smitten. It doesn't take much to lure me with pumpkin, but this was slivered and shivered in your mouth with a crackle of sweetness. The walnut was by far our favorite, black like it came from an olive can and sliced at the top as though it hid pimentos, but when you cut into it it had the star shape of walnut skin and layers of meat inside with the faint taste of wine or sherry and slathered in a butter cream that erased all of my neurotic, self-conscious memories of nods meaning no and questions equaling statements and a general throwing-up-of-hands of understood self-service dining norms on both ends.

While we ate, surrounded by write-ups in Food and Wine, Saveur, New York Times (these are just the ones in English that I recognized), I wondered how others fared here, and curiously, why this wasn't in any guidebook. It was despairingly hard to find - a "quick boat-ride to Asia" sounds romantic and easy enough, but we walked around for nearly an hour with no map and a simple wish, asking a taxi driver, simit vendor, and tchochke kiosk before we got directions to led us to the market street that led us there. These desserts though, almost enough to make a gal forget buche de noel and macarons.