Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [146]
“The skyline at night in 1957 was magic. The lights shimmered at night when you looked at the Princes’ Islands. The skyline is still quite wonderful with minarets and bridges and modern buildings. I’m looking forward to going back with my grandson.”
—Joyce Goldstein, a food writer, chef, and owner of the former Square One restaurant in San Francisco, and author of over a dozen cookbooks, including The Mediterranean Kitchen (Morrow, 1998), Italian Slow and Savory (Chronicle, 2004), and, most recently, Mediterranean Fresh (Norton, 2008)
Simply Sensational
BERRIN TOROLSAN
BERRIN TOROLSAN, publishing director of the outstanding and gorgeous magazine Cornucopia: The Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey, also writes wonderfully interesting articles about Turkish cuisine for the magazine, and following are two of them.
This first focuses on a ubiquitous Turkish classic, the börek (börekçi is the word for a börek shop or seller), a heavenly marriage of featherlight pastry and cheese, meat, vegetables, or just about any filling you can conceive.
BERRIN TOROLSAN lives in Istanbul and is publishing director of Cornucopia, where this piece originally appeared.
MY GRANDMOTHER was a fine lady with a taste for the good things in life and boundless energy for creating those little pleasures that make life more enjoyable. Besides big lunches on festive days, one of those pleasures was her impromptu midweek börek lunch parties. They would often be announced at short notice, but I don’t remember a single invitation being turned down. Appointments were shifted around, and my father and uncles would be sure to come home from work specially.
There was usually one savory pastry dish on the menu, along with plenty of salad and fresh fruit. Sometimes it would be Tabak Börek, sometimes Tatar Börek. But it was Puf Börek that reigned supreme (see recipes). We would gather round a mountain of these puffed-up böreks displayed in the center of her large dining table. Sometimes the pile was so high that I couldn’t see the person sitting opposite me. Amid the jolly chatter, there were occasional sighs of “I’ve lost count” as someone reached for yet another golden puff. And as soon as one mountain vanished, another pile appeared from the kitchen, freshly fried, to take its place. “Mother, who is going to eat all this?” my mother and aunt would exclaim. But my grandmother would take not the slightest notice and, more often than not, at the end of the meal not a single börek remained. On the rare occasions when any were left over, they would be wrapped and given to a guest to take away as a welcome snack for later.
What exactly is a börek? Put simply, it is a savory pie: a filling, usually of cheese or meat, is sandwiched between sheets of thinly rolled-out dough. It is baked, or pan-fried, or deep-fried, which allows the ingredients to combine in a delectable marriage as the filling melts, blending to a creamy consistency inside a crisp casing of pastry.
Although böreks come in an almost infinite variety of shapes and sizes, the common denominator and chief inspiration is the fine sheet of pastry known as yufka. A yufka (or yupka, as it is spelled in Mahmut al Kashgari’s eleventh-century lexicon of Turkic languages, Divanü Lûgat-it-Türk) is a thin sheet of dry-cooked unleavened dough. Yufka was an ingeniously practical invention. These dry, featherlight leaves of bread could not have been more appropriate for people with a nomadic way of life.
The French nobleman Bertrandon