Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [165]
RECOMMENDED READING
Cookbooks
Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, by Claudia Roden (Knopf, 2005). Roden notes in her excellent book that a sophisticated, aristocratic cuisine developed in Constantinople when it was, for more than four hundred years, the glittering capital city of the Ottoman Empire. “That cuisine came to be considered on a par with those of France and China. While many of the more elaborate dishes have disappeared, what you find in homes in Istanbul today and on the standard menus of Turkish restaurants are simplified adapted versions of that high style.” Regional cuisines of Turkey were barely known outside of their localities, Roden says, until the arrival of millions of migrants from rural and eastern Turkey over the last decades.
Roden also notes that the specialization in the food industry is a legacy of the organization in the Ottoman palace kitchens where cooks were entrusted with one type of food only, such as soups, kebabs, or jams. So pideci specialize in lahmacun, a Turkish type of meat pizza; börekçi specialize in all kinds of pies; işkembeci are tripe soup eateries; muhallebicis offer milk puddings; and baklavaci sell baklavas and other pastries. Note: in addition to these there are also pastahaneler (European-style bakeries or patisseries) and lokantalar (singular is lokanta, referring to a place serving the Turkish version of comfort food; in recent years newfangled versions of these have opened, notably Lokanta, one of the restaurants under the helm of celebrity chef Mehmet Gürs, now sadly closed).
The Art of Turkish Cooking: Or, Delectable Delights of Topkapı, by Neşet Eren (Doubleday, 1969). This may be among the first Turkish cookbooks to be published in the States. The author grew up in a home that was the headquarters of the Bektaşi Order of Dervishes, of which her family were the heads. The house was kept open day and night to all the members of the sect who came by, and therefore it was a real challenge to the cook since no one ever knew how many people might be sitting around the table. This is more interesting to read for the anecdotes—“In Turkey you never order peaches. You must specify whether you want Bursa peaches or Izmir peaches”—and explanations than for being a must-have recipe book.
A Book of Middle Eastern Food (Vintage, 1974) and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (Knopf, 2000), by Claudia Roden. It may seem unnecessary to recommend both of these books as the second is a reedition of the first, and perhaps I wouldn’t if I weren’t so attached to Roden’s original edition; but if you can look at both of them, I think you’ll agree that they’re a little different from each other. There is something so, well, exotic about the first book that I can’t imagine not having it in my kitchen. That said, Roden’s updated edition is very welcome. As she says, “Cooking does not stand still: it evolves. Life is different, and different choices are made to adapt to new circumstances.” The recipes in the first edition employed no home ovens, blenders, food processors, or freezers, for example, so Roden updated and revised some of them, but with no loss of flavor.
The good recipes aside, what is most valuable about these books is the introduction, which is divided into essays such as “Origins and Influences,” “Social Aspects,” “The Traditional Table,” “Muslim Dietary Laws,” “The Ottoman Empire,” and “General Features of Middle Eastern Cuisines.” Roden grew up in a Jewish