Restaurant Day: From Helsinki to the world

It's pretty much an urban food-lover's dream: a four-times yearly "holiday" that turns an entire city into a festival of pop-up restaurants, with amateur (and some professional) chefs setting up shop in parks and on sidewalks, and opening their homes to strangers, to cook and serve favorite dishes, from Korean bibimbap to French macarons.

Started in Helsinki, Finland, four years ago, the event known as "Restaurant Day" has spread around the globe, though sadly for this Istanbul-based American, it has yet to get much traction in either Turkey or the United States. Mouth watering all the while, I interviewed a co-founder of the event and numerous participants about how Restaurant Day creates community through food -- and ended up digging in to its broader impacts on urban citizenship as well.

Read my articles for The Atlantic's CityLab and for Zester Daily about Restaurant Day:

• Restaurant Day Has Become a Big Deal, Just Not in the U.S.

• These Pop-Up Eateries Are Worth A Global Trip

Attention, eaters! This year's Restaurant Day events will be held Feb. 15, May 16, Aug. 16, and Nov. 21.

Rethinking (and reviving) the Mediterranean diet

It’s not what most people think of when they envision the famously light, healthy “Mediterranean diet.” But hearty dishes like smoked game meats; the mélange of cabbage, fish, eggs, cheese, olive oil, pepper, garlic and sweet wine dubbed monokythron (literally, “one-pot”); and the fermented fish sauce garum were once common fare in the region whose traditional dietary patterns are now seen by many as a global model for better eating.

Evidence that the Mediterranean diet as we now know it was not predominant in the region during the long Byzantine era (roughly the years 330 to 1453) has been gathered by Dr. Ilias Anagnostakis from the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens. His findings have sparked controversy in his home country, he says...

Read the rest of my article, “‘Traditional’” Mediterranean Diet Isn’t What You Think,” on Zester Daily.

Find out more about the Consulate General of Greece in Istanbul's ongoing lecture series “Food, Spirits and Gastronomic Traditions in the Eastern Mediterranean” (scroll down for English).

Adventures in Turkish cooking

Travel throughout southeastern Turkey in the height of summer and you’re likely to see rooftops, courtyards and gardens blanketed with color — row after row of peppers, eggplant and other vegetables drying in the sun.

Later rehydrated to be stuffed or stewed, dried vegetables are an essential ingredient in the traditional Turkish kitchen, but one that can be difficult to replicate for urban dwellers without a balcony or even a sunny window to call their own.

How to reconnect residents of Turkey’s large cities with the rich culinary culture of their rural roots is just one of the questions being posed by a new Istanbul-based group seeking to re-envision and rebrand Turkish cuisine, in much the same way as the New Nordic culinary movement has both celebrated and changed Scandinavian cooking...

Read the rest of my article about the innovative Gastronomika collective on Zester Daily: "Reinventing Turkish Traditions For A New Generation"

Fishy business in Istanbul

Back in the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual for fishermen plying the waters off Istanbul to land tuna weighing hundreds of pounds, or to have one of the massive fish leap out of the sea and over the prow of their boat. Dolphins cavorted alongside fishing vessels that hauled in lobster, oysters, razor clams, four kinds of crab and eight varieties of mussels.

“Fishermen in their 70s and 80s tell stories depicting Istanbul like an island in the middle of the ocean. It’s as if we’ve moved to a totally different place since then,” says Defne Koryürek, the founder of Slow Food Istanbul, which has organized an annual holiday to draw attention to the city’s rapidly depleting waterways and to try and reverse the tide.

Celebrated each October with fishing competitions, film screenings, children’s art activities, talks, and special meals, the holiday is named after one of Istanbul’s favorite fish, the fatty, flavorful — but now endangered — lüfer (bluefish)...

I've been following the issue of overfishing in Istanbul and the fight to save the lüfer for a few years now, previously covering the start of the campaign to increase the minimum catch size; the inaugural Lüfer Bayramı; and the dangerous world of illegal fishing for Treehugger.com.

Now you can read the rest of my latest article on this subject, "Istanbul Chefs Band Together To Save Their Favorite Fish," on Zester Daily.

Seeds of hope for Istanbul's urban agriculture?

Looking out across today's concrete-covered expanses, it's hard to imagine that Istanbul was once a city of gardens -- and not all that long ago, either.

In Ottoman times, according to researcher Aleksandar Sopov, there were bostan (market gardens) all along the ridge passing through Istanbul's old city, many associated with that area's large mosques, and fed by water from the Valens Aqueduct. As recently as 1900, Istanbul was home to more than 1,200 bostan covering as many as 12 square kilometers. Highly productive and tended with sustainable techniques passed down through generations, many of these gardens continued providing food for the local population until mass urbanization kicked off in the 1960s and 1970s.

These days, only a scant few bostan remain in the city. The extensive gardens at the base of the old city walls are under threat from development, as I wrote last summer for The Atlantic's CityLab. Now, so too is the farmland in Gümüşdere, on Istanbul's Black Sea coast and close to the path of the third bridge being built over the Bosphorus Strait.

But the rapid transformation of the city has also sparked a movement to plant new gardens as a form of resistance, with community-based groups of volunteers taking over empty lots and trying to revive urban food-growing.

Read my articles for Culinary Backstreets and Zester Dailyon these interlinked developments:

• Farming on the Edge: Istanbul's Threatened Urban Agriculture

• Traditional Market Gardens Take Root Again In Istanbul (pdf, or read full text below)

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Traditional Market Gardens Take Root Again In Istanbul

by Jennifer Hattam

The purple skin of the Kavak fig is so thin that the fruit can be eaten whole, without peeling – and so fragile that it cannot be transported long distances. One of the few places this Istanbul delicacy is grown is a small market garden (known as a bostan in Turkish) in Rümeli Kavağı, a windswept waterfront settlement near where the Bosphorus Strait opens out into the Black Sea.

“It’s probably the last historical bostan along the Bosphorus, just 100 meters from the water. It’s registered as green space, but threatened with development because of the third Bosphorus bridge being built nearby,” explains Aleksandar Sopov, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate in history and Middle Eastern studies who is researching Istanbul’s Ottoman-era agriculture.

Fruits and vegetables were once widely grown within city limits, with many neighborhoods becoming well known for their specialty produce. Istanbul old-timers still wax poetic about the flavorful romaine lettuce of Yedikule, near the Byzantine city walls; the fragrant strawberries grown in the Bosphorus village of Arnavutköy; and the cucumbers from Çengelköy, along the Asian side of the strait, and from Langa, now part of the gritty central-city Aksaray neighborhood.

As recently as 1900, historical sources indicate, Istanbul was home to more than 1,200 market gardens covering as many as 12 square kilometers. Today, most have been plowed under and paved over – and most of those that remain face the threat of a similar fate. But the wheels of urbanization and development that began churning vigorously in the 1970s and 1980s have more recently also spurred a grass-roots resurgence in urban food growing.

The Tarlataban garden in the Rümeli Hisarı neighborhood was among the first in this new wave.

“When a Starbucks was opened at Boğazici University, there was a protest against the increasing food prices and commercialization on campus and some of us said, ‘Let’s see if we can grow our own food instead,’” garden volunteer Pınar Ercan recalls as she sits on a tarp picking chard seeds from a stack of dried stalks and gathering them in a jar. “We didn’t know if we could do it or not.”

Three years later, the small plot of land on a woody, remote corner of the university campus supplies produce to a student-run collective kitchen and serves as a laboratory for seed saving, composting and other sustainability initiatives. From a distance, the growing area looks like a wild tangle of plants, but move in closer and bright purple eggplants, red tomatoes and green peppers emerge from their vines, while robust melon and squash flourish in the undergrowth. (Crop diversity and rotation are notable characteristics of traditional bostan, which typically yield 15 to 20 different types of produce a year.)

A small group of volunteers tends the Tarlataban garden each week using techniques derived from the environmentally friendly practice of permaculture. Learning as they go, they have recently been sharing the knowledge they have acquired with students from other local universities who want to start similar projects on their campuses.

Istanbul’s new urban-gardening movement got a dramatic boost last year, when mass protests broke out in response to the threatened destruction of a centrally located green space to make way for a shopping mall. During the week or so that demonstrators occupied Gezi Park, some of them planted a small vegetable garden along its northern edge. After the park was cleared by police, similar gardens began to pop up around the city.

“Many places were cultivated after Gezi – empty plots of land owned by city municipalities and often threatened by development,” Sopov says.

In the Cihangir neighborhood, a short walk from Gezi Park, the Roma Bostan sits on a vacant hillside with a million-dollar view of the city, next to a staircase often crowded with young beer drinkers and littered with the broken bottles they leave behind. A sign on the fence surrounding its cornstalks and cabbage heads reads: “In the summer of 2013, this area was cleared of garbage for the first time. The soil was treated, planting beds created, and vegetables and healing herbs planted from local seeds... It is kept alive by the collective effort of neighborhood residents. We await your support to keep it clean and protected...”

Across the water, on the Asian side of the city, residents of the Kadıköy district have rallied, so far successfully, to keep their postage-stamp-sized Moda Gezi Bostan from being covered with asphalt for a parking lot.

“It’s all totally free – people plant and take whatever they want,” says a local who ambles up to chat with a visitor.

Small in scale and tended by hobbyists, these community plots can’t make up for the destruction of the historical bostan whose gardeners passed down a lifetime of knowledge from one generation to the next and fed the city for so many years with the produce they grew to sell at local markets. But the Tarlataban garden’s Ercan and others hope they might just be able to point Istanbul in a new direction.

“We understood after Gezi that we can be an example,” she says. “We’re trying to make what we need for ourselves, and the garden is a way to show people a more sustainable model for living.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 10 October 2014.

Garden party

With the world's largest collection of living plants, and its scientists working around the globe to preserve biodiversity, the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London is internationally renowned for its conservation work. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that its 300-acre grounds harbor the ingredients for some darn good cocktails...

While visiting London earlier this summer, I ventured out to the Kew Gardens with a journalist friend from the International New York Times to partake in an impossible-to-resist combination: fancy cocktails, fresh air, and a fantastic setting. As we sipped on Kew-cumbers, Rose Gardens, Gooseberry & Fennels, and Strawberry Cups -- all gin-based drinks concocted from fresh botanicals and seasonal fruits that grow in Kew Gardens -- we chatted with Gin Garden founder Jo Farish about her enviable job creating plant-based pop-up bars at all kinds of interesting places in and around London.

Read my article for Zester Daily, "Cocktails Get Royal Treatment In Gin Garden Pop-Up Bar," as a pdf, or see below for the full text.

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Cocktails Get the Royal Treatment in a Pop-Up Gin Garden

by Jennifer Hattam

With the world’s largest collection of living plants, and its scientists working around the globe to preserve biodiversity, the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London is internationally renowned for its conservation work. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that its 300-acre grounds harbor the ingredients for some darn good cocktails.

“Sweet cicely, or garden myrrh, is very fragrant, but it also has a natural sweetness so it’s good to pair with rhubarb,” says Jo Farish, founder of the Gin Garden, as she hands over a Strawberry Cup. The beguiling early summer concoction of strawberry-infused gin, homemade rhubarb-and-sweet-cicely cordial, and lemon juice is garnished with fresh strawberries, cucumber and edible flowers.

The Gin Garden’s summer residence at Kew Gardens, where Farish and her team have turned a small greenhouse into a jungle-like bar serving up gin cocktails and tonics on weekends (Friday through Sunday) and British bank holidays, offers plenty of inspiration for mixologists.

“We’re taste-testing new ingredients as they come into season – we’ve been infusing cherry gin, with more fruits and berries coming up, and the lavender and Roman chamomile growing over there will be used in drinks when they’re ready,” Farish says.

The cocktail menu, which changes weekly, “uses bits and pieces from the Kew Gardens, but we can’t use too much,” she admits. “The ingredients are all things that are grown here, but these plants have to be preserved.”

Serving drinks based on what’s growing nearby is the focus of the Gin Garden, which Farish started up in fall 2012 after a successful trial run making apple martinis for an event at a historic house and garden run by the U.K.’s National Trust from the apples, lavender and honey from the property’s grounds.

Her company, which has taken its traveling botanical bar to museums, flower shows, design fairs and other locations in and around London, melds Farish’s background in event planning and garden design – and, she says, some very British sensibilities.

“British people are real gardeners and lots of people make their own gin. The two go hand in hand,” Farish says. “People are used to preserving [food] and having something to get through the winter.” She assures urban dwellers with more limited space that plenty of cocktail ingredients are easy to cultivate in a window box.

In addition to its pop-up bars, the Gin Garden also offers workshops on growing botanical ingredients at home and making infusions and syrups.

To make the infused gin that forms the base of their refreshing Kew-cumber cocktail, for example, Farish recommends slicing up cucumbers like you would for a sandwich, filling up a Mason jar halfway with the vegetables, and topping it off with gin.

“Sip it the next morning and see how it tastes,” Farish says. “If the flavor isn’t strong enough, just close the jar up and try it again the next morning.”

A Gooseberry & Fennel cocktail is made from gin infused with the fennel that grows wild along the coast of Norfolk, in the east of England. The drink has a subtly acidic bite – and plenty of health benefits. “Gooseberries have vitamins A, B, C and antioxidants; they were actually used to ward off scurvy before citrus fruit was available in the U.K.,” Farish says.

The temporary Gin and Tonics Garden at Kew is part of the botanic garden’s summertime “Plantasia” festival, which includes a variety of activities, from a healing plants tour to a barefoot walk. The activities are aimed at introducing visitors to plants’ benefits “for body, mind, and soul.”

The passiflora tincture in the Rose Garden cocktail, for example, is said to be good for anxiety, while the namesake ingredient in the Elderflower Fizz is believed to improve resistance to allergens. Angelica root, one of the six botanicals in the No. 3 London Dry Gin used to make the Kew cocktails, has long been employed in traditional medicine as a treatment for digestive issues.

“Nearly all plants have some kind of health benefit,” says Farish, who prefers to use a masticating, or cold-press, juicer for serious cocktail-making because it preserves more of the nutrients in fruits, vegetables and herbs.

Some of the Gin Garden’s drinks get an extra boost from a spritz of aromatic water before serving. The water is applied over the top of the glass with an old-fashioned perfume atomizer. Made by the London-based company The Herball, these aromatic waters are distilled using the same method as gin itself, retaining the complete essence of herbs and flowers like the chamomile spritzed over the Strawberry Cup or the geranium, rose and lavender that add a floral twist to the otherwise classic G&T.

“There are so many botanicals you can use with gin. It’s pretty limitless,” Farish says, mentioning her recent discovery of a small distillery in Cornwall that makes a violet leaf gin. “You really have free reign with ingredients compared to other drinks.”

Though gin is often thought of as a summertime tipple, Farish is already thinking ahead to the chillier seasons to come after the Kew pop-up bar closes its doors Sept. 7. “I’d like to do a winter gin garden,” she says. “Gin makes a great hot toddy with warming winter herbs and spices like ginger, sage and thyme.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 28 August 2014. 

A sweet but fading tradition

The Altan Şekerleme candy shop was a frequent and favorite stop during my time as a tour guide for Istanbul Eats’ culinary walks, but what happened in the candy-making operation upstairs was always a closely guarded secret. At a recent press event at the Istanbul Culinary Arts Center, however, I finally had the chance to see how those glistening hard candies were made, and to return for a chat with one of the master şekerci (confectioners) carrying on a tradition that dates back, with little change, to Ottoman times:

Inside a weathered storefront surrounded by hardware shops, colorful gems gleam in the dim light – large jars full of hard candies flavored with sesame, cinnamon, rose, orange, bergamot and lemon.

Proprietor Hakan Altanoğlu and his forefathers have been making and selling the Turkish candy called akide şekeri at this shop in Istanbul’s Fatih district since 1865, but the bite-size treat’s history goes back to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The empire’s elite Janissary soldiers “presented the grand vizier, other dignitaries and their own officers with gifts of akide sweets as a symbol of their loyalty to sultan and state,” a tradition deriving from an alternate meaning of the candy’s name, writes Mary Işın in her book “Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts.” Akide then became, as it remains today for many, “the sweet of choice” at circumcisions, weddings and the Şeker Bayram (literally, “Sugar Holiday”), the three-day festival that will mark the end of Ramadan this year from July 28 to 30.

In the early Ottoman days, the candy, whose name derived from the Syrian Arabic word (akîda) for “to knot” or “to thicken,” was made from grape juice, boiled down into a thick, malleable molasses. Today, the typical sweetener is refined sugar and much akide is machine-manufactured, but a few traditional şekerci (candy-makers) continue to make it the same laborious way it’s been done for centuries.

Showing off a burn scar on his arm that he says dates back to the 1970s, longtime şekerci Hüseyin Aksoy stirs a wooden spoon through a copper pot of boiling water and sugar – with just a pinch of cream of tartar – in the kitchen of the Istanbul Culinary Arts Center (YESAM), occasionally sweeping the inside of the pot with a wooden brush to prevent burning. (This is also a good technique to use when making stews, notes YESAM coordinator Banu Özden.)

When the sugar mixture has reduced to his satisfaction, Aksoy carries the copper pot over to a spotless marble slab and pours its contents out onto the smooth surface to cool, periodically poking at the sticky edges and flipping them over with a spatula. With the candy still as hot as 70 degrees Celsius, he winces slightly as he folds in a small bowlful of flavoring—some lemon salt and lemon oil, ground to paste with a mortar and pestle; or perhaps some mastic resin.

Made from the gum of the mastic (mastiha) tree, the resin’s piney flavor is an acquired taste but one important to many Turkish desserts. Another traditional flavor that has, thankfully, gone out of fashion is musk, a secretion of the musk deer imported from Nepal and Tibet. One of the most popular varieties of akide in Ottoman times, musk, Işın writes, was “appreciated as much as a mark of wealth and power as for its fragrance.”

Back at YESAM, the real show starts. Aksoy takes the multicolored lump that has resulted from his folding and kneading, drapes it over a rounded metal bar, and then begins to pull the ends like taffy, tossing them back over the bar repeatedly until the candy gets thicker and its color transforms from glistening caramel speckled with white into a glorious opaque blonde hue.

“The more you do it, the more your hands and fingers get calloused to the heat,” he explains, laughing a bit as he admits that when he was learning the trade 45 years ago, he once dropped the hot candy during the pulling process. “The master şekerci’s wife hit me with a broomstick for ruining the batch.”

Next, Aksoy presses out a sheet of the newly blended mix, adds a layer of unflavored candy he’s kept in reserve, and rolls the two into a thick cylinder. Tugging at one end of the tube, he pulls out thin ropes, cuts them off with scissors, and passes them to an assistant to roll into smooth dowels. The whole process must be done quickly, or the candy’s consistency becomes too hard to be useable. Taking a handful of the now-firm candy sticks, Aksoy taps them level on top of a square metal bar set above a bowl, then strikes them rapid-fire with one edge of his scissors to produce tiny cylinders of the finished akide, each with a golden roll of color inside.

Though each of the four to five 10-kilogram batches of akide that Aksoy makes every day yields more than 1,000 candies, a machine can turn out 2,500 kilos daily. He insists the taste and consistency of machine-made akide just isn’t the same as handmade, but şekerci like Aksoy and the Altanoğlu family are part of a dying breed.

“Young people aren’t learning this trade anymore; they don’t like the work, and there are other options for them now,” Aksoy says. “After us, there won’t be any more şekerci.”

This article was originally published under the title “Turkish Candy Entices Through the Ages” by Zester Daily (RIP) on 18 July 2014 (view/download pdf).

Making soup for Syria

When faced with almost 1 million needy people, a bowl of soup – even a large vat – doesn't go a very long way.

But Barbara Massaad refuses to let the daunting scale of the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon deter her from doing her small part to help – one bowl of soup at a time...

I first heard of the "Soup for Syria" project on Twitter and contacted Beirut-based Slow Food member and author Barbara Massaad about her plans to use a soup cookbook as a fundraising tool to help fight the growing food insecurity among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Though her project can only affect the lives of a small number of the now 9 million people displaced (internally and externally) by the Syrian crisis, her determination to do something was inspiring to hear in the face of so much hopelessness about the situation.

With Lebanon overwhelmed by refugees and now seeking to limit their number, and a potential drought threatening to worsen the already disastrous state of food production in Syria itself, anything and everything that can be done to alleviate food insecurity for refugees and those who remain in Syria matters.

Read the rest of my article, "'Soup For Syria' Dips Into Refugees' Culinary Lore," on Zester Daily.

In the Migrant Kitchen

Sara moves around the large kitchen with laser-like focus, filling a tea glass of water to add to a heaping pot of saffron rice with one hand while sautéing a pan of tart, red dried berries, walnuts, raisins and slivered almonds with the other. The resulting dish, zereshk polow (barberry rice), is a popular one in Sara’s home country of Iran, but not so easy to make in neighboring Turkey, where she is living as a refugee...

When the International Organization for Migration’s Turkey office and the food website Culinary Backstreets first organized their "Migrant Kitchen" events last year, the rare chance to eat authentic Ethiopian, Filipino, and other foreign cuisines in Istanbul brought variety-starved expat foodies (myself included) out in droves. This year, I got the chance to peek into the kitchen while Sara, an Iranian refugee, cooked up a traditional feast, and to talk to her about her family's struggles in Turkey and the role food plays in creating a little sense of home in a strange and not always welcoming land.

Read the rest of my article, "Refugees Speak In The Universal Language Of Food In Turkey," on Zester Daily.

Amid strife, Turks break fast together for Ramadan

On the first night of Ramadan last month, thousands of people gathered on İstiklal Caddesi in central Istanbul. They laid down newspapers and tablecloths in a long line stretching nearly half a kilometer – then sat down on the ground to break their fast in the middle of the city’s busiest pedestrian boulevard.

Passing food and drinks from hand to hand, participants called out to people walking by, “Is anyone hungry? Is anyone thirsty?” and leaped up to distribute water, dates, baklava and other traditional fast-breaking items. As the meal wrapped up, young men toting large garbage bags chanted, “Trash! Trash! Trash!” as they worked their way through the crowd collecting refuse.

Ramadan, the month when observant Muslims traditionally fast from dawn till dusk, ended this year on August 7, but not before coming against a backdrop of weeks of street protests in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey. The very iftar meal that breaks the day’s fast became a forum for Turkish people to express their dissatisfaction with the direction they feel the country is taking.

“Ramadan used to be a time for community, for people to come together and get to know each other, but with rapid urbanization and the social isolation that’s come with that, people have started to [either] stay in their homes for iftar or attend expensive [fast-breaking] meals at restaurants or hotels,” says Abdurrahim Özer, a member of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims. This loosely organized group of pious activists has coalesced in opposition to what they see as the too-close relationship between religion and wealth under Turkey’s current government.

Two years ago, members of the group organized small public meals during Ramadan outside of luxury hotels where local dignitaries, business leaders and celebrities often host and attend lavish iftar dinners. Just one fast-breaking meal at a top hotel can cost nearly a quarter of the monthly minimum wage. Much food is often wasted during Ramadan, and many people (up to 25% of Turks, according to one recent news report) actually gain weight during the fasting month.

Ramadan “shouldn’t be about eating expensive foods; it should be about understanding and helping the poor, the hungry, the needy,” Özer says.

The ongoing demonstrations this year have reinvigorated the earlier effort to protest the commercialization of Ramadan, drawing people of various segments of society and levels of religious belief to share in the yeryüzü sofrası, or “earth tables.” (According to Turkish food writer Aylin Öney Tan, the “earth tables” hearken back to the original meaning of “sofra,” which comes from the Arabic word for a traveler’s provisions, eaten on a cloth or mat placed on the ground.)

Following the first people’s iftar this year on İstiklal Caddesi, a thoroughfare that has hosted regular protests this summer, yeryüzü sofrası spread throughout the city, with individuals and groups organizing them each night in different locations – often places with symbolic importance due to conflicts in the area or threats facing historic heritage.

After a public forum related to the ongoing protests was attacked by people with sticks and knives in the Kocamustafapaşa neighborhood of Istanbul, a communal iftar was held in the area the next night, drawing more than 1,000 people. Another was organized inside the Yedikule bostan, a series of centuries-old market gardens around the city walls that are in the process of being razed to build a landscaped park with tea gardens and an artificial river. Outside of Istanbul, a yeryüzü iftarı was held along the banks of the Tigris River in Hasankeyf, an ancient town in Southeast Turkey that faces being submerged under the waters of a hydroelectric dam.

The people’s iftars are part of a tradition that predates Islam itself, according to Özer. “This goes back to the Prophet Abraham, who shared his food with other people who sat around his table,” he says.

During Ottoman times in Turkey, “rich people would open their homes for the iftar meal,” says Mary Işın, the author of the recent book Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts, and a writer on Turkish culinary history who has lived in the country since 1973. “They made huge amounts of food, mostly for friends and neighbors and colleagues, but theoretically anyone could turn up and be fed.” The sultan’s palace may have done similarly, if reports by foreign observers documenting life in Istanbul at the time are accurate.

That tradition has morphed in recent years into massive municipality-organized iftar tents set up in central locations around Turkish cities to offer free meals to the public, but members of Özer’s group and their allies are critical of the way such charity has been commercialized.

“Outside Kocatepe Camii, the main mosque in Ankara, there’s a huge banner saying who sponsored the iftar that night. That’s not Islamic. There is a saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, ‘You need to give with your one hand and the other hand should not know about it,’” Özer says. “We believe that wealth comes from God and people who have wealth are obligated to share it. If they use that as a way of boasting, then it diminishes the act [of charity] in the eyes of God.”

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[SIDEBAR]

A typical iftar table

The elements of the iftar meal in Turkey have changed relatively little over the centuries. Many people still have a date – believed to be the preferred fast-breaking food of the Prophet Mohammed – as their first bite of sustenance after abstaining from dawn to dusk.

“The iftar meal is traditionally served in two sections – you start off with tiny little sauces, dates, olives, spoonfuls of jam and other bits and bobs to nibble to assuage your hunger,” says culinary history writer Mary Işın. “Then you have the evening prayer, a little rest and maybe a smoke, and then the proper meal itself: soups, stews, roasts and pilav [rice].”

Sweets, especially baklava and the milky dessert güllaç, are also closely tied to Ramadan in Turkey because of their importance in Ottoman cuisine. The period following the end of Ramadan is actually called Şeker Bayramı, or “Holiday of Sweets.”

This article was originally published on Zester Daily (RIP) on 13 August 2013.

A zest for good food and quality journalism

With my latest article, about the Turkish dessert aşure, I joined the contributors' team at Zester Daily, an award-winning online destination for food, wine, and travel journalism. I'll be writing for them at least once a month about culinary culture in Istanbul, Turkey, and wherever else I roam.

Founded three years ago by former L.A. Times writer Corie Brown, Zester seeks to "promote spirited, intelligent dialogue about what we eat and drink." Corie's commitment to an international focus, to professional writing, and to creating new models for funding journalism at a time when all three often seem to be in short supply have me excited to be on board.

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A Pudding For All That Comes From Turkey’s Melting Pot

by Jennifer Hattam

Steam rose from the two heavy pots perched on top of twin cooking-gas cylinders, the scent of orange peels and apples wafting through the crisp morning air at Istanbul’s first organic farmers market. At that moment, the aromatic contents resembled soup, or even mulled wine, but as the hours passed, they would jell into a pudding called aşure, a dish seen by some as the epitome of the Turkish “melting pot.”

A common sight on Istanbul tables in recent weeks, aşure, which some believe to be the world’s oldest dessert, is an unusual blend of savory and sweet. While the base ingredients – wheat, rice, white beans, chickpeas – remain generally the same, each cook has her own repertoire of ways to add what one Turkish friend calls “the excitement”: pomegranate seeds, dried mulberries, lemon peel, molasses, rosewater, anise, or other fruits, nuts and spices.

“It doesn’t matter what you put in aşure. What matters is that you make aşure and share it,” says Şemsa Denizsel, the chef/owner of Kantin, a critically acclaimed restaurant in Istanbul’s chic Nişantaşı district. “You distribute aşure to share the wealth, with the hope of having that wealth again in the years to come.”

By giving away most of the aşure she makes at Kantin to fellow shopkeepers in her neighborhood, Denizsel is following a tradition that dates back centuries.

“The Ottoman sultan’s mother would direct the cooks in preparing aşure, and it would be distributed to the palace inhabitants, dignitaries and the common people,” says Dr. Özge Samancı, a food historian at Yeditepe University’s Gastronomy & Culinary Arts Department. The palace aşure was served in a porcelain ewer and strained smooth, a style still sometimes seen in Turkey under the name süzme aşure.

Aşure is rooted in even earlier pagan traditions related to the harvest season and wishes for future abundance, Samancı added, but the dish encompasses almost as many cultures and beliefs as it does ingredients.

In Muslim countries, aşure is most frequently cooked to mark Ashura, the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharrem. In 2012, it fell between Nov. 15 and Dec. 13. This date is of particular importance to Shiite Muslims, as it commemorates the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein, an event that contributed to the Shiite-Sunni split in the religion. But many Muslims, Jews and Christians in and around the Middle East also believe that Ashura was the date when Noah’s Ark finally hit dry land, and that the grateful survivors of the great flood cooked a dish similar to aşure – often called “Noah’s pudding” in English – out of what was left of their supplies. Many members of all three religions follow suit today, with Armenians, for example, cooking a version of the dish called anoush abour (“sweet soup”) for New Year’s or on Jan. 6, when they celebrate Christmas.

That broad range of rituals and meanings makes aşure a better metaphor for Turkey’s historic cultural diversity than the oft-used “mosaic,” according to Mustafa Avkıran, a Turkish actor and director who has periodically staged a theatrical musical, “Ashura,” since 2004. It features folksongs on the theme of migration in a dozen languages currently or previously spoken in Anatolia, including Turkish, Armenian, Arabic, Greek and Ladino. Each performance ended with – what else? – the distribution of aşure to audience members.

“When making aşure, you melt all these grains and legumes, all these fruits together in a pot – it’s like a society. All these religions, these beliefs; it all goes in this pot,” says Defne Koryürek, the founder of Slow Food Istanbul, who organized an aşure-making (and, of course, sharing) event recently at the farmers’ market for the international Slow Food organization’s Terra Madre Day.

The Terra Madre Day aşure incorporated ingredients from all four corners of Turkey and was made based on Denizsel’s recipe (see below). “My grandmother used to make aşure, but by the time I realized its importance, my mother and grandmother had both passed on, so I had to develop my own recipe,” she says.

That kind of gap is what Koryürek is working to close through Slow Food Istanbul’s latest project, which seeks to create a multi-generational network of (initially) women “coming together in a kitchen around a pot” to share the knowledge about how to sustain ourselves when it comes to food that she says is so often lost in the hustle and bustle of modern urban life.

That bubbling pot of aşure, with all the hands-on work it requires, appears to be the perfect place to start.

“Making aşure takes time; it’s laborious. You need to peel all the chestnuts one by one. That takes many hands,” Denizsel says. “It takes six to eight hours to cook. You need someone to gossip with – that way the time flies.”

This article was originally published along with an aşure recipe from Istanbul chef Şemsa Denizsel on Zester Daily (RIP) on 26 December 2012.