Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [204]
Aşure
Aşure, as Fergus Garrett notes in his piece on Turkish roses (see page 65), is a sweet pudding, or stew, traditionally served on the tenth day of the month of Muharram. Irfan Orga, in Portrait of a Turkish Family, writes, “In Turkey in the old days there used to be a month called Aşure Ayi. Aşure is a sweet cooked with wheat, sultanas, figs, dates, dried beans, what you will, the whole being boiled for several hours until the result looks a little like aspic jelly. The legend of aşure is that when Noah in the Ark found himself running short of supplies, he ordered all the remaining foods to be cooked together for one last gigantic meal. This was aşure—or so we were told. During the days of the Ottoman Empire a month used to be set aside each year for the making of aşure in all the houses of the rich, who afterwards distributed it to the poor.”
Neşet Eren, in The Art of Turkish Cooking, relates her memoir of the aşure festival, which she said topped all:
Three days before the festival the tripods in the fireplace were removed to make space for the huge cauldron that was moved from the pantry to the kitchen. How we loved to watch the cook weigh the twenty different ingredients that went into the cauldron for the Noah’s Pudding. We jostled each other eagerly waiting for the opportunity to light the fire. There would be a big scramble among us for pushing the torch under the cauldron and we would all rush out of the kitchen crying, “I did it,” “I did it.” The fire would burn for a whole day and a whole night, somebody keeping watch constantly stirring the pudding with a wooden spoon with a long handle.… And then the morning of the festival, Grandfather would descend from upstairs to make his yearly entry into the kitchen. Everybody would stand apart with his hands folded before him and his head bowed, which we children would imitate. Grandfather would speak a prayer, take the spoon, and serve the pudding into a bowl extended by the cook. Thereafter the poor of the village would come and each would get his bowl filled.
My friend Maha refers to aşure as Noah’s Sludge, which makes it sound like something horrible. Paula Wolfert, in The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, initially thought it was: “Before I even tasted this dish, I was sure I would hate it. I couldn’t imagine a dessert made of white beans, chickpeas, husked wheat berries, and every conceivable type of dried fruit all mixed together and scented with rose water. And when I saw it, I was sure that I was right, because it was so unattractive. I was wrong.”
For the record, I made the recipe in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, though it was May and pomegranates were not in season so I omitted the seeds. It was deliciously comforting, and unlike anything else I’d ever eaten.
B
Baklava
There are a number of confections in Turkish cuisine, but none are as celebrated as baklava. According to the Turkish Culture portal (turkishculture.org), the ancestor of baklava may have been a dish the Assyrians made with dried fruit sandwiched between two layers of pastry and baked in an oven. The earliest record of baklava as we know it today is in Damascus, from where it moved to Gaziantep, Turkey, before spreading throughout the country and the world. (Baklava is prevalent in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, India, Afghanistan, Armenia, North Africa, the Turkic republics of Central Asia, and the Arabian peninsula.) We know that by the seventeenth century, baklava was being baked in the Topkapı kitchens and that the Janissaries carried trays