Istanbul Eats

1 August 2014

Today was one of the most unique and interesting travel days I have every had. That's saying a lot. I booked a tour with Istanbul Eats-- the particular tour is called Culinary Backstreets of the Bazaar Quarter.

For about eight hours, a small group (I was one of seven) followed an expert guide, Benoit, through narrow streets and most interestingly up into the first, second and even the rooftop levels of the Bazaar. These were not the places where tourists shop, but rather the places where the tradesman work. Every fifteen minutes or so, we'd arrive at a new location, hear about the customs and the food, and then sample. While the tasting was important, what was most fascinating was how much more I understand about Turkey's history and culture now.

Our morning meeting spot was the old arrival station of the famous Orient Express. It now serves only as the departure point of the shuttle across the Bosphorus, so was very quiet. The rooms we were in are well maintained, though.

 We entered a small side room and saw this spread:

 Before we started walking we had a leisurely breakfast together. It was an excellent way for the group to feel acquainted while right away getting an orientation to Istanbul food.Turkish breakfast takes advantage of wider array of foods than American ones. And, the choices are little more likely to be salty than sweet-- although sweet has a role. So, we had cheese and olives, a pickled herb, and the sesame topped ring of a plain cookie textured bread that is as common in Turkey as a bagel or pretzel would be in New York.

Our breakfast nook had an interesting story. It had been a busy tea room of the station, but when the train stopped running, it was much more difficult for the tea shop to find customers. In the streets outside the station, however, truckers meet to negotiate contracts. They began to visit the tea room, however, the station masters were not terribly pleased to have teamsters hanging around all day. In what Benoit explained as a great example of the Turkish sense of bargaining and compromise, an agreement was reached. Our tea preparers serve their tea through the window and a runner brings it to the truckers. The tea shop now makes its rent, and the atmosphere is preserved for the station master. Our morning visit must have been made by a similar arrangement since Benoit brought the food and we only were customers for the tea itself.

Before we left the tea room, we tasted four types of honey from different areas of Istanbul. Most USA honey is label clover and jars have a similar. uniform taste. If you look in special areas, you can find honey from bees that have visited primarily one type of plant when it is in flower. (Orange blossom and lavender are two USA examples.) The two that I tasted today that were notable were rhododendron honey and chestnut honey. The rhododendron was not as sweet (this is all relative!) and had a creamy palate. The chestnut honey was surprising-- it was dark and had a sweet attack, and a more bitter, tannin flavored finish. The owner of Istabul Eats has a passion for honey, and I can understand it as a hobby as interesting as wine tasting after getting to taste four in a row.

A chronological description of the walk is not the right way to go about relating the day. Here is the tale of another highlight of the day.

These men are making us pide, the original pizza. The dough is hand-stretched, filled with finely minced meat or with cheese, and baked in a brick fire-heated oven. One gentleman specializes in working the dough while the other in turning the pie in the oven to cook evenly.

This was a tradesman's shop--I'd never find it again-- but the priceless part of this snack was where we ate it. Up a steep stone stair, to a roof with a view.

 We sat upon solicitously provided cushions, our backs against the wall, under the small overhang of a rooftop hat workshop and munched.

Pide

Two of the stops provided tastes that were excellent but would not be found on a non-Turkish menu. The first was a grilled minced meat sandwich that almost lost its place in Turkish cuisine. It is a combination of sweetmeats and intestines from a milk fed lamb. After the mad cow disease scare, it almost became an illegal food--even though you can't get mad cow disease from a lamb (or even a cow that is so young it's still milk fed.) 

This also provides an example of how valuable meat is. Meat is expensive in Turkey, and so there are numerous ways to stretch it and use its flavor in combination with vegetables and grains. It's smart and healthy and sooner or later we are all going to have to eat meat with as much respect since its production for the level of consumption we have in the USA is not ultimately sustainable.

With that in mind, understand the concept of why my second very non-Western taste would be invented in the first place. After climbing to see this view

 Benoit offered us spoons of a sweet, white pudding. It is called chicken breast pudding and really made from chicken breast, cooked for a long time. It doesn't taste like chicken--unless you are deliberately hunting for that flavor. It is cool and sweet like any milk pudding with bit of very fine stringy consistency-- that is the chicken's more obvious contribution. Benoit reminded us that chicken is meat, meat is expensive, as was sugar, so combining two very dear food products together made sense. Anyone who ever dipped a chicken nugget in ketchup probably had a less healthy and more sugary morsel than this pudding, which has a calcium from the milk also to its credit!

I haven't described much of the day, really. Our guide, Benoit was excellent. He did not flag in energy or enthusiasm for a moment, and never went on "autopilot" either. He has the knowledge of a native after more than twenty years in Turkey, the passionate enthusiasm of an immigrant, and the patience and understanding of a teacher when interpreting Istanbul for the group.