Talking turkey
Mengen is a small town in the northern Turkish province of Bolu. Each year, early in August, it holds a cooking festival. The surrounding villages have their own food stalls; head chefs from half the top hotels in Istanbul turn up; there are competitions, displays, hawkers selling sweetcorn and meatballs, a pan of mince big enough to feed the whole town and speeches by local dignitaries.
It happens here because Mengen is the home of Turkish professional cooking and also, even today, of most of the country's senior chefs.
During the Ottoman Empire, Bolu cooks worked for rich patrons, for sultans, pashas and merchants, and sons learnt their craft from fathers.
The demand for private servants disappeared after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when Turkey became a republic. Then, the best Mengen chefs switched to hotels, restaurants, even canteens. Their cuisine lost its refinement as it merged with domestic and other regional influences. Guide books and gourmets alike still distinguish between Ottoman (haute cuisine) and Turkish (by implication, less sophisticated) cooking.
It is the equivalent of a culinary contest pitting Escoffier against the rest of French cooking and it diminishes unnecessarily the wealth and variety of styles that can be found in a country that is almost as large as the UK and France combined.
The comparison does, however, highlight the lack of structure in Turkey's restaurant world. There are far more eating shops and bistros in the centre of Istanbul than London, but no qualifications, no formal training for chefs, except among the Mengen fraternity.
During the Sultanate, professional cooks had their own guild. The "yamak", or scullery boy, worked for two years before he was admitted as an apprentice.
Inside the large hotels, echoes of the old system remain. Apprentices, not college graduates with NVQs, are at the bottom of the heap. Promotion is slow and painful, discipline rigorous. Seláuk Kuzu is head chef at the Renaissance Polat Istanbul hotel. In his mid-30s, he's the youngest executive chef of a major hotel in the city, and he claims that if he hadn't left Turkey as a young man he would still be a middle-ranking cook.
"When I was 23 I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a bald, middle-aged man, so I changed direction, went to Spain, worked and studied for a two-year cooking diploma."
He has reaped the rewards of his enterprise. He was the first chef to write a column in a Turkish newspaper - the circulation of Yeni Uzyil has risen from 250,000 to 600,000 since he became a contributor - and he is also the only chef with his own TV slot.
Kuzu is keen to adopt the "simplify and lighten" creed which has taken over European kitchens. "I'm trying to make Turkish cooking simple, fresh and easy to eat, using less fat and less tomato paste."
The suggestion is that it can be over-refined and too rich. In fact, it doesn't have to be either. Its diversity compares to that of France, Italy or China. It has absorbed influences from the Balkans, Western Europe, the Middle and Far East.
Restaurants and eating houses fall into a dozen overlapping categories. Some may focus on a single dish, deep-fried mussels on skewers, tripe soupor rice puddings, or a single type of kebab or börek (warm cheese or meat pasties). Others may veer towards fish. Kumkapi, a small district of Istanbul, alone has around 100 fish restaurants, and in Istiklan Boulevard, Istanbul's answer to Oxford Street, you can see lamb, chicken and quail roasted over gigantic charcoal beds, kebabcI and köfteci, pudding shops, soup kitchens, lahmacun take-aways, a food mall (part of an old fish market), kuru yemis selling sweetmeats and dozens of bufe.
Within these separate categories, quality varies every bit as much as it does in England. Iskembe áorbasi may come out of a packet; 99% of the chickens come from intensive farms; tomato concentrate often compensates for fresh tomato purée; two-thirds of the saffron in the world-famous Egyptian Market is allegedly adulterated; and a lot of the fish displayed under glass at Kumkapi wouldbe thrown out of Billingsgate or banned by EU regulations.
But the best is outstanding.
Yoghurt (gourmets prefer sheep's) is unparalleled. It's used in soups, on skender and ayla kebabs with tomato, pepper and melted butter, for puddings and pastries, and in condensed form as a stuffing. Cacik (pronounced jajuk), containing grated cucumber, salt, garlic and sometimes mint, sometimes caraway, is served as a salad. A sweet meze, karğa beyni, or "crows' brains" is made by beating concentrated raisin juice into it until it turns a smooth, creamy brown.
Red peppers, both sweet and hot, are an essential flavouring. The cheapest contain both colouring and preservative and, according to one bazaar seller, "they are bought by second- and third-rate restaurants." Salted and retaining a little moisture, they can be used as part of a marinade, during cooking or as a final seasoning, especially for soups.
Sun-dried ürfa, dark reddish-brown, are hot; ipek pulbiber from Maras in south-eastern Turkey, are quite mild, looking somewhat like red, freeze-dried coffee, very fruity, and are the most expensive.
As much as the ingredients themselves, the subtlety with which they are handled is essential. As with Indian spices, the Ottoman cooks liked to blend them with the skill of a perfumer, so that no single flavour or aroma dominated. An experienced chef may put two or three types of pepper into a single guveá (stew); and taste highlights are common: the cumin in a good köfte, cinnamon on pastries, Iranian saffron or cloves in some pilafs.
The Turkish meal does not have the strict order of a classic European dinner. Mezes are often translated as hors d'oeuvre, but they are really snacks to accompany raki, the country's aniseed alcohol. Soup is eaten for breakfast in the cities and countryside and, at any other time of the day, often as a meal in itself. Salads (haricot bean, tomato, cucumber, lettuce) are put on the table as a matter of course, like bread. Coban salatasI, shepherd's salad, is the most popular: peeled and chopped tomatoes and ridge cucumber, spring onions, mildish fresh green chilli and broadleaf parsley tossed in a seasoned dressing of oil, lemon juice and vinegar.
Turkish cooks tamper with fish as little as possible. Grilled, it is flavoured with herbs, such as tiny bay leaves; fried, it may be dipped in cornflour for extra crispness. Fresh anchovies in olive oil are a passion. Sardines may be wrapped in vine leaves. Mussels are stuffed.
You won't find any trace of blood in a Turkish kebab or spit roast, which means that there's a tendency in all but the best restaurants for grilled or roasted meat to be dry.
Kebabs often take their name from sauce, or yoghurt or bread accompanying them. Pot-roasted kebabs, such as tas kebab, lamb cooked with onion and tomatoes, is the classic stew. Guveá or clay pan cooking is similar in that the meat and vegetables bake under a lid without any stock.
Vegetables are the soul of Turkish cooking. A chef can happily discuss the shape of an aubergine, its variety and size, its sex even, when discussing a particular dish. In the classic repertoire, 15 ways of stuffing vegetables with meat are given, and a whole class of braising vegetables in water and olive oil exists too.
Sweet pastries and puddings reflect the Turkish love for sugar - it's a hidden seasoning in many savouries also. Yufka, the baklava pastry, is used for many sweetmeats, but tel kadayif, resembling shredded wheat, runs a close second. Kaymak is very similar to clotted cream, but the rice pudding has a unique texture and flavour because of the addition of mastic.
Unlike Western cooking, Turkish food has evolved very little in over a century. It can seem sickly, or stodgy sometimes, but it is never less than well flavoured. At its best it teaches lessons the West has either forgotten or has still to learn. And the worst is a sight better than it is in other, more developed countries.
