Gaziantep: What's Lost

I had planned to write a smart little tale this week about how I survived Maine’s Big Freeze of 2023 with a bowl of Ukrainian-style beetroot borsch. That’s the correct way to spell the famously restorative soup, according to chef and food writer Olia Hercules—for more information, check out her great cookbook, Summer Kitchens: Recipes and Reminiscences from Every Corner of Ukraine (https://tinyurl.com/4x63cw4n).

But I woke up Monday morning to news of a horrific disaster in one of those places in the world I most long to go back to—southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, the area between Gaziantep and Aleppo, where I have happily spent time in the past enjoying both local hospitality and local food. At this writing the great citadel that had dominated Gaziantep since long before Byzantine times has crumbled under the earthquake’s devastating force; throughout the region some 7,000 people have died--a figure that increases every time I open a news bulletin.

Update: a week later, the death toll is an incredible 33,000 and still climbing. If you want to help, I urge you to contribute to World Central Kitchen (https://wck.org), the organization founded by Chef Jose Andres that has done so much around the world to help people suffering often unimaginable crises, bringing food, setting up kitchens, and delivering what people need.

Gaziantep: Bastion of cherished culinary traditions

Back in the late 1990’s, around the turn of the millennium, I stopped off in Gaziantep for a week. I was on my way to Aleppo in northern Syria, planning to look into Aleppo peppers and what made them so special. But I also wanted to take stock of a town that, although unknown to the great food world, was legendary in Turkey as another kind of citadel, a bastion of some of Turkey’s most cherished culinary traditions.

Making Aleppo pepper the old-fashioned way

My guide back then was Filiz Hösükoglu, a local woman who, despite a degree in mechanical engineering, was passionate about the culture and food of her Gaziantep. Filiz took visible pride in showing admiring visitors around. Her dark eyes actually gleamed with a kind of jubilation at my awe and appreciation for the markets teeming with produce, including piles of just-harvested pink pistachios, and sacks and sacks of brightly colored peppers, red, pink, deep mahogany, dried, crushed, and mixed with other spices to various formulas. We stopped to sample at restaurant stalls where the aroma of lamb köfta mingled with the fragrance of charcoal from flat-topped grills called mangals, and we bought ingredients to take home to make içli köfte, skewers of ground lamb with the ubiquitous Antep pistachios, and a pilaf of firik (fareekh, smoky green wheat) and bulgur with meaty lamb shanks and a rich sauce of yogurt and butter. Later we drove out to the banks of the Euphrates, across dry, dusty plains carpeted with pistachio and carob orchards, and visited archeological sites going back to the Late Neolithic, soon to be inundated by another dam on the great river.

Many years later, Filiz’s enthusiasm would lead her to spearhead a campaign for UNESCO recognition of Gaziantep’s importance as a center of culinary culture; I last saw her several years ago at a festival in Istanbul to celebrate that recognition, attended by many of the world’s leading food people from Europe and North America, as well as the President of the Turkish Republic. (President Erdogan was not exactly a welcome guest for those of us who wanted to indulge in fine Turkish wines to accompany the sumptuous feast; as a strict Moslem, he would not attend a function at which anything alcoholic was served.)

But that was later. This is something I wrote after that first visit:

On Turkey’s southeastern border with Syria, Gaziantep is at the heart of what my fourth-grade geography text called the Fertile Crescent, almost on the banks of the great Euphrates River, the fountainhead of so many Mediterranean food traditions, indeed so many foods (wheat, olives, apricots, pistachios), the birthplace of that wheat-vine-olive agriculture that would eventually dominate the entire Mediterranean world.

Bedouin hospitality, somewhere north of Aleppo & south of Gaziantep

The term cultural crossroads is so over-used that it’s meaningless, and yet it seems appropriate here at this critical junction of routes that, already in ancient times, led from Anatolia down into the Jordan valley and Egypt; from the Mediterranean east across the deserts to Central Asia and China; and from the highlands of the Taurus Mountains south by way of the Tigris and Euphrates, down to the Arab-Persian Gulf and beyond to India and Ceylon. Along these highways traveled caravans and merchant traders carrying, at one time or another, cowrie shells from the Mediterranean, turquoise from Sinai, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, silks and fine ceramics from China, smooth white marble from the Cycladic islands, olive oil from Crete and Palestine, wheat from Anatolia and the Hauran plains of southern Syria, wine, slaves, gold, frankincense, myrrh, and a host of fragrant woods—cedar, camphor and juniper—and spices.

Incense, fragrance, spices

Not all the spices, herbs and fragrances were for use in the kitchen by any means. From earliest times, the aroma of burning spices and incense was an indication of holiness, just as it is today in many orthodox religions. The fragrant smoke was both an offering to the gods, who were pleased by it, even nourished by it, and a way of enveloping humble supplicants in an aura of the sacred and pure.

Gradually, many aromatics entered into cuisines, first probably as medicines and only later for the delight and even opulence they lend to the humblest meal. But medicinal uses still apply: in parts of North Africa, you’ll be given an infusion of wild mountain thyme for an upset stomach; in Spain a tea of bitter orange blossoms is a cure for insomnia; and all over the Mediterranean, chamomile at the end of the meal settles the stomach and guarantees a good night’s sleep.

Aleppo, once great, now just rubble and refugees

Aleppo was once the entrepot for this trade and until quite recently the city’s legendary souqs retained a sense of mystery in their shadowy maze of vaulted alleys and great khans or caravanserais. But Aleppo, poor Aleppo, a once great city already reduced to rubble and refugees by endless civil war, is no longer a crossroads and the cuisine of the city, once renowned throughout the Middle East, has suffered from scarce resources in recent decades. It’s in Gaziantep, instead, where local cooks maintain the aromatic traditions of other times. In the Gaziantep bazaar, spice merchants will mix up a bharat while you wait—a pepper mixture with varying proportions of seven spices (or five or nine, for that matter), cardamom and cumin, cinnamon and cassia, coriander seeds, nutmeg, allspice, dried ginger, a little clove, white and black pepper for sure, and maybe some of the red pepper for which the region is known. Red capsicum or chili pepper, an immigrant from the New World, never arrived by camel caravan since it quickly became a staple in local gardens.

Çig köfte in the park

I had an example of this spice tradition one afternoon in Gaziantep when another Turkish friend, Ayfer Unsal, introduced me to a cousin, Mübetcel Atay. On the spur of the moment Mübetcel invited us to meet her in a lush green park along the banks of a little river that runs through the heart of the city. And so we set out for the sort of spontaneous meal that could only happen in Gaziantep.

Small children played among the splashing fountains and shallow pools around the park, while a track team, boys and girls together from a nearby school, ran tirelessly back and forth, training for a race. The sun was hot but the autumn air was clear, the sky a piercing blue, and in the shade of the acacias it was already cool—one sensed a chill just around the corner. With her kitchen tools laid out on a picnic table, Mübetcel was making çig köfte, raw meatballs made of fresh lean lamb and bulgur wheat mixed liberally with lots of hot and pungent spices. A specialty of the region, çig köfte has become popular all over Turkey in recent years; I’ve seen it on restaurant menus, even, quite unaccountably, in a vegan version.

A woman in her forties with amused brown eyes and an Islamic hijab over her hair but otherwise quite conventionally dressed, Mübetcel mixed the çig köfte as comfortably as if she were in her own kitchen. She started with two cups of brown bulgur wheat (fine-ground, she emphasized) which she kneaded diligently while we chatted about Turkish food, life in Gaziantep, and the array of spices available.  For a full 40 minutes, Mübetcel worked the grains of bulgur with very finely minced onion and garlic, a scoop of red pepper paste (biber salçasi, which I wrote about last week), a couple of grated tomatoes (no skins) and salt. No water—there’s enough liquid in the tomatoes and onions, she said in Turkish, to soften the bulgur and you don’t want it to swell too much. When she judged the wheat to be ready—when it would hold together in a ball—she added 350 grams (about 3/4 pound) of very lean, very finely minced lamb, and again kneaded that in along with ground cumin, allspice and black pepper, crushed and flaked sweet red pepper, more red pepper paste, chopped green parsley, and two kinds of bharat, that spice mixture that varies from cook to cook and from market to market. Her hands and arms were red halfway to her elbows, bloodstained I thought at first, but it was the kneading of all those red peppers. “You see, we care about color,” she explained.

After a while, a small child escaped from a group playing on the jungle gym, came over to our table and stood patiently by while Mübetcel, without looking at him, quietly slipped him bits of çig köfte which he ate like a little bird, holding his mouth open and swallowing almost without chewing as soon as she popped a morsel in.

Çoban salatası (shepherd’s salad)

We ate the çig köfte, sitting at a picnic table, Mübetcel, her mother, Ayfer, and me. It was a late-afternoon picnic, more like a tea party than lunch; we had strong, sweet tea in thermos containers to go with the köfte and sesame-sprinkled flatbreads (pide) hot from the neighborhood baker’s wood-fired oven. Çig köfte means raw köfte; it’s similar to Lebanese raw-lamb kibbe, but with such an array of spices that you hardly know you’re eating raw meat. With it we had shepherd’s salad, çoban salatasi (tomatoes, green pepper, red onion, garlic and pomegranate syrup), plain boiled potatoes and home-made pickles (garlic, cucumbers, peppers), and finished with a soft, sweet, milky pudding made from pekmez, a boiled-down syrup of grape must, and served with a pile of fresh pistachios which we had bought, still in their tender pink skins, from a gypsy woman in the Gaziantep market that morning.

“This is a Sunday dish,” said Mübetcel, “or something to serve a distinguished guest—like yourself.”

“Sometimes,” her cousin added, “it’s made with lentils instead of with meat.” (Ah! the vegan version?) “But it’s still a celebration.” It was very spicy, almost too much so, with the peppers dominating, topmost in all the subtle layers of flavor. But the heat of them was rich, lingering and satisfying.

I’m sorry to say that my photos from this incredible visit are locked up in 35-millimeter slides and I’m having a tough time figuring out how to transfer them to digital. But when I’m able to do it, I’ll post pictures of some of these scenes. If nothing else, they will give you a taste of Gaziantep as it once was.

And for a taste of this ancient city’s celebrated cuisine, there is a tantalizing cookbook—tantalizing because it may be very hard to find—called Gaziantep Cookery: A Taste of Sun & Fire (ISBN: 978-605-137-120-7). Edited by Turkish food journalist Aylin Öney Tan, it’s a comprehensive collection of recipes, with beautiful illustrations, for “Gaziantep’s best-loved dishes, including some that are on the verge of disappearing.” They include yuvalama, an iconic and famously tricky yogurt-chickpea-lamb stew, plus an array of yogurt soups, kebabs and köftas, stuffed and wrapped vegetables, pilafs, my personal favorite visne kebab (meatballs braised with sour cherries, a dish that originated in Aleppo), and, yes, the çig köfte very much like what Mübetcel made on that long ago autumn afternoon. The recipes were selected by five local cookery writers, sponsored by the Gaziantep Chamber of Commerce in a wise and far-sighted move. Just how far-sighted has become evident after the horrific events of yesterday; from this perspective, the book is an even more vital tribute to a glorious food culture.