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Ladle the hot mixture into individual bowls. While still hot, garnish the tops with the bitter chocolate shavings: rub a piece of chocolate against the chip blade of a hand-grater. The chocolate will half melt.

Serve chilled.

“When I first went to Istanbul thirty years ago, Istanbullus saw the cooking of the Anatolian provinces as crude and basic and full of garlic, spices, and hot red pepper. They saw their own cuisine as more European and refined. No one was interested in regional foods. But now their best restaurants serve foods from areas such as Gaziantep, Konya, and the Black Sea. My friend Nevin Halici (who was the first to travel around the country collecting regional recipes) and her brother Feyzi Halici (a poet and longtime senator who promoted regional cuisines by organizing cooking competitions and gastronomic congresses) took me to their favorite restaurant—Borsa.

“There are four Borsas. The famous old Borsa is in Beyoğlu, İstiklâl Caddesi. We went to the one in the İstinye Park luxury mall. It is like a grand old-style French restaurant with wood paneling and Murano chandeliers. The owner, Rasim Özkanca Bey, serves traditional dishes from different regions, especially from the Black Sea, where he is from, and presents them in an elegant way that can compete with any international nouvelle cuisine. Here is a list of what we had: aubergine salad; su boregi beyaz peynirli—baked pastry with creamy cheese; manti—tiny pasta stuffed with minced lamb with yogurt sauce and a sprinkling of melted butter and red pepper; maize flour fried in butter with a special Black Sea cheese; black cabbage stuffed with minced meat and rice with sumac; Jerusalem artichokes and leeks in olive oil, grilled turbot, anchovies, and baby red mullet; roasted baby lamb shanks served with hünkar begendi, an aubergine purée, and iç pilav, rice with raisins and tiny bits of liver; and veal meatballs with yoghurt. We finished with a heavenly assortment of fruits and pastries. It was paradise.”

—Claudia Roden, author of Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon (Knopf, 2006) and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Knopf, 2000), among others

Albóndigas

MATTHEW GOODMAN

HERE IS a piece that originally appeared in one of my favorite food magazines, The Art of Eating, referred to as “the must-have foodie quarterly” by National Public Radio and by me as one of the best publications of any kind, ever (1 800 495 3944 / artofeating.com). The piece eventually became a chapter in the writer’s very good cookbook Jewish Food: The World at Table, one of the most refreshing and enlightened Jewish cookbooks in print. In the cookbook, the author reminds readers to really, really squeeze out all the excess water from the potato and leeks or the meatballs won’t have the proper consistency. Additionally, he notes that “correctly prepared, albondigas come out of the frying pan crisp outside and remarkably light inside, almost fluffy. The surprising softness of the interior results from the ground meat having been mixed not just with starch, as in most other meatballs, but also with some form of cooked vegetable. These meatballs are, in fact, mostly vegetable.” I made these with ground turkey, instead of beef or lamb, and the results were delicious.

MATTHEW GOODMAN wrote the “Food Maven” column for The Forward for ten years and is the author of Jewish Food: The World at Table (Morrow, 2005), with recipes from thirty different Jewish communities around the world. His food writing has also appeared in Bon Appétit and Brill’s Content, among others. He recently wrote The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxes, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (Basic Books, 2008), a nonfiction narrative about a newspaper hoax in 1835 claiming that life had been discovered on the moon and involving P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe.

IT MAY not be possible to read the future in tea leaves or coffee grounds,