Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [154]
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. It is not unusual for albondigas to contain potato, spinach, celery, or eggplant, but the most famous and popular kind is certainly albondigas de prasa: leek meatballs. A single mashed potato may also find its way into the mix along with a handful of ground walnuts, which not only add flavor but provide a contrasting texture to the softness of the rest. Usually the albondigas are first dredged in flour and then dipped in beaten egg—the reverse of most Western cookery—which turns them a somewhat mottled golden brown. Less often, they are dredged in flour alone, which gives the chestnut brown color we usually associate with meatballs. After frying, the albondigas are further enlivened by a dash of fresh lemon juice.
As someone who writes about Jewish food, I had long heard about albondigas, but I had never tasted one until a year ago, when a Turkish friend sent me a photocopy of Sefarad Yemekleri, “Sephardic Food.” That cookbook, sadly now out of print, was published in 1990 by members of Istanbul’s Jewish community, which today numbers about fifteen thousand, to raise money for a senior citizens’ home. The book is a fascinating compilation of traditional Turkish Jewish recipes, among them such favorites as eggplant gratin, sweet-and-sour celery, and the sweetened rice-flour pudding called sütlaç.
Of the book’s 141 recipes, seven are for albondigas, which suggests their importance to the community. Albondigas are perhaps the most beloved of all Turkish Jewish foods, served on the Sabbath, on holidays, at weddings, or, for that matter, on almost any other festive occasion. So it has been for a very long time. Some months ago I called up an acquaintance, Klara Perahya, a writer for the Istanbul Jewish weekly newspaper Shalom and a venerable albondiga maker. “When I make albondigas,” she told me, “they are the same as my grandmother’s albondigas from seventy years ago. A lot of things have changed, but albondigas never did.” Perahya admits to having grown children, but she never reveals her age. When asked, she says only, “Old, old, old.”
Adding chopped vegetables to meatballs appears to be one of the distinctive features of Jewish cuisine, commonplace in Jewish communities throughout Turkey and the Balkans but unknown outside them. Claudia Roden notes this in her exemplary Book of Jewish Food, and the cookbook author Nicholas Stavroulakis, the leading authority on Greek Jewish food, told me recently, “I can’t say that we are the only people to do this—but we certainly do, and mixing vegetables and meat together to form meatballs is certainly neither Turkish nor Greek nor Bulgarian.”
Why Jewish meatballs contain vegetables has never been answered definitively, but it likely has to do with the very popularity of the meatball among Jewish cooks. For them, the generally tenderer cuts of meat in the back of the animal are outlawed by the dictates of kashruth. (Jewish law forbids the consumption of the sciatic nerve, located in the hindquarters. The nerve can be removed, but the time and expense is, practically speaking, prohibitive.) As a result, Jews adopted various methods of tenderizing the mostly tougher meat from the forequarters. This resulted in the celebrated Jewish affinity for long-stewed pot roasts. But many times whole cuts were unavailable, and cooks could obtain only scraps, flavorful but very tough. They required chopping or grinding. Even this humble meat was relatively expensive for those in the lower reaches of society, and so a thrifty cook naturally sought to stretch the meat by combining it with cheaper, more plentiful ingredients. Meatballs