people and places: May 2008 Archives

Did you know that 2008 is the official year of Feta cheese?

Neither did we, until we read it in the in-flight magazine on our way from Thessaloniki to Crete for a conference on ‘the Eastern Mediterranean diet'.  This strengthened our resolve to find a Feta-maker and learn all about this crumbly white cheese, which most of us know from its prominent role in the ubiquitous ‘Greek salad’.  And why is it getting its own special year this year?

We ended up spending about five weeks in Turkey, and we wish it had been a lot longer.  The thing about Turkey is that it's big.  Really big.  This means that the various regions can be really quite different, with their own distinct characters, geographies and of course cuisines - and that meant that we had to try and get to as many different corners as we could.  

As the distances are so large, this meant staying in a lot of different places, but quite often not for very long.  Some of them were pretty forgettable, but got us where we wanted to go the next day.  But some of them have been wonderful - beautiful places run by interesting, hospitable and incredibly generous people.  We wish we'd had more time, and we'll definitely be coming back.  So here's our list of the places we're most likely to come back to ...

It would be a gross misrepresentation to suggest that Turkish food is all about kebabs.  It really isn't.  Sure, they're famous - ask the average man in the UK street to name a Turkish dish, and he'll probably tell you about döner kebabs.  (Fair enough - nothing else tastes quite so good when all the pubs have shut.)  But as we've discovered, Turkish cuisine is really all about everything but kebabs - the finely spiced Ottoman rice dishes, the seafood of the north, the spices and sweets of the south-east, the olive-oil-braised vegetables and wild herbs of the Aegean. Don't get me started.

But having said that, there's a lot of kebabs in Turkey.  And sooner or later, you're going to end up eating one.  And there's a lot more variation - and flavour - in the kebab world than you might think.  Some of them, in fact, are downright delicious.  So to help you find the best and avoid the less desirable, here's our all-time top most tasty kebab list.

It's ridiculous to try to sum up Turkish cuisine in 10 flavours.  Turkish cuisine is hugely rich and infinitely varied, not least because a) Turkey's absolutely enormous - have you looked at a map recently? - comprising three different coastlines, high snowy mountains, very hot, dry plains and lush wooded hillsides, among other things, and b) its cooking has been influenced over the centuries by Mongolian, Chinese, Persian and Greek cultures and then, through the enormous Ottoman empire and its trade routes, many more, including Moroccan and French.

But I'll give it a go...

It wasn’t until afterwards, when we persuaded Gülcan to translate some of the preceding fast and furious conversation, that we realised just how colourful it had been.  An elderly neighbour had come round to lead us in our gözleme-cooking session over the tandır, and, it turned out, she’d spent the entire time hurling insults of the most explicit kind at anyone and everyone, for no apparent reason.  Really, it was so rude I can’t write one word of it here.  (And there was me thinking she’d been animatedly discussing the fine art of gözleme-making.)  Gülcan’s husband Andus reassured us she’d loved it all really, and was even quite emotional at the end, since it was probably the last time she would ever cook over the traditional tandır oven.

We’d already heard about the tandır earlier in our Turkish travels - it’s a deep clay-lined hole in the ground in which you build the fire.  (We suspect the similarity with the Indian tandoor is not a coincidence.)  But it was not until we reached Cappadocia that we first saw one.  In fact we saw lots - their remains are still clearly visible carved into the floors of the hundreds of cave dwellings dug into the cliffs.  Many date back over a thousand years to Byzantine times. 
We were intrigued - how long had people been living in caves here, how and what did they cook in them, and why would Hatice, our garrulous elderly neighbour, not be using a tandır any more? 

How fortunate that we were staying with a cook and an anthropologist...