Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [150]
Muhallebi is a sweet, milk-based cream, thickened only with starch (unlike custards and crème pâtissière, it contains no eggs), and it is a familiar dish from the Crimea to North Africa, from the Balkans to India. Even the name varies little from place to place. Only in Europe is it unknown, or perhaps forgotten.
In Turkey muhallebi forms part of everyone’s diet, from babies to grandmothers, for it is wonderfully nourishing. It has two essential ingredients: pure starch—whether from the flour of rice, wheat, corn, or potatoes—which is entirely digestible; and milk, which is rich in protein, calcium, and vitamins.
In the distant past, before ready-made rice flour existed, and corn and potatoes were waiting to be discovered in America, rice flour was made at home. Whitened, short-grain rice grains, which contain more starch than long-grain rice, were ground or pounded and sifted to the desired fineness. To obtain the pure starch—nişasta in Turkish—the powdered rice was washed in hot water and filtered through layers of muslin.
The consistency of the muhallebi varies according to taste. Personally, I prefer a fairly creamy, rather than a dense, texture. You can obtain a thicker cream by increasing the ratio of rice or other flour to liquid. One kind of muhallebi, known as taş (or stone) muhallebisi, not surprisingly, is pretty solid.
Inexpensive, healthy, delectable, muhallebi itself is the cream, as it were, of a whole variety of milk puddings, all of which share much the same method of preparation. Because they all take their flavor from the milk, which is the main ingredient, a creamy full-fat cow’s milk is preferable. Modern dieticians may frown at this, and at the addition of sugar and starch. Yet not one of the puddings featured here has anything like as much in the way of calories or fat as, say, a crème brûlée.
An entire food culture grew up around muhallebi. The special heart-shaped silver spoons with the maker’s stamp that you find in antique shops are just one reminder. When the puddings had cooled, it used to be the custom to cover them with a paper stencil and shake powdered cinnamon over them. When the stencil was removed, the puddings might bear—in stylized calligraphy—the words Afiyet olsun (“Bon appétit”) or “Long live the Sultan” or some such greeting. Later, under the Republic, they were replaced by a cinnamon crescent and star. Today, only the sprinkling of cinnamon remains.
I vaguely remember in my childhood seeing these stenciled crescent and stars in muhallebi shop windows. Less blurred is my memory of dozens of china dessert bowls, some delicate, others plain, all filled with muhallebi left to cool on the table in my grandmother’s kitchen. Later I would be served with my own bowl with my initial, B, in cinnamon. My grandmother had cut a stencil for every one of my cousins, too.
The first mention of the dish as a dessert dates from 1473, when the imperial kitchen accounts of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror record that he and his retinue were served muhallebi. This is the very same dish that we know today. But muhallebi was not always such a simple affair. Medieval Arab cookery books give recipes for a dish of the same name that was a complicated confection of milk, rice, almonds, saffron, and chicken breast or other meat. This bears a striking resemblance to the medieval English blancmanger.
In the Oxford Companion to Food, Charles Perry writes, in the entry on blancmange: “The fourteenth-and fifteenth-century English blancmangers were made of shredded chicken breast, sugar, rice, and either ground almonds or almond milk.” Where did the dish originate—with the Romans, with the Arabs, or elsewhere? The question remains open. Colman Andrews tells us in Catalan Cuisine that Catalan monks claim to have invented menjar blanc