EatingAsia

Hot Milk with *t***u**'s (Or, Sometimes You Just Gotta Be a Tourist)

In a recent post on how to get the most out of stanbul I recommended getting into tea drinking. I certainly do when I'm in Turkey, so much so that after a few days on the ground I experience cravings for a glass or two mid-morning, mid-afternoon, early evening, and so on. Lunch or dinner without a glass of tea to follow? Unimagineable!

But there is one time of the day when tea, even strong Turkish tea uncut with water, won't do the job: immediately after I wake. I am a card-carrying caffeine addict and for me that initial, life-giving A.M. jolt comes in one and only one form -- coffee. (Actually, that is not quite accurate -- if given the opportunity I always preface my first sip of morning coffee with a few slugs of Diet Coke. It's not pretty, I know. But it's the truth.)

These days a decent cup is readily (if expensively) available in Istanbul and, I'm guessing, maybe elsewhere on the country's well-touristed western and Mediterranean coasts. Not so much from middle Anatolia east, which is where we've been spending the majority of our Turkey time these last two years. Nescafe is sold just about everywhere (even some tea shops advertise it). I've been known to drink it like medicine, holding nose between thumb and forefinger, when necessary. But now, thanks to a certain Evil Empire-like American coffee chain, Nescafe is a beverage of my past.

I should be ashamed to admit it but these days when we pack our bags for Turkey there's always a ziploc bag or two of single-serving instant coffee from said coffee chain tucked between the jeans and t-shirts. The best part? It actually tastes like coffee (instead of medicine). Pretty good coffee, in fact.

The next best part is that Turkey is an instant coffee-friendly country, for two reasons: (1) even the most down-and-out lodgingscome with in-house breakfast, and (2) Turkey's tea preparation modus operandi guarantees a ready supply of plain hot water for breakfasters. It is the rare Turkish breakfast table that does not include either a traditional caydanlik -- a double boiler consisting of two stacked kettles, the lower containing hot water only, while the upper holds tea -- or an electric samovar-like contraption with one spout dispensing hot water on demand.

At first I felt a measure of embarassment whipping out *t***u**'s instant coffee packets at the hotel/guest house buffet. Some of my fellow diners looked askance (most Turks are much too polite to openly snicker), especially when. like a beer drinker with her whiskey chaser, I accompanied each cup of coffee (2 is my Magic Number) with a full glass of dark, undiluted tea.

But soon I got over the shame and was brandishing my coffee packets with ease. "Yes, I'm a boorish American who cannot adapt -- nay, who refuses to adapt -- to local caffeine customs," those foil cylinders announced.

But the rewards for my crudeness were a fog-free head and a spring in my step, even at 7 A.M..

What else would you expect to see at a fresh milk-serving tea house in what is possiblyTurkey's dustiest town? A patron dressed in white, head to toe,of course.

Then in Van Dave and I spied a cay evi advertising fresh hot milk. Warmed milk just hours from the cow is something that must be tasted to be believed; we'd been drinking it before bed in village homes further north in Kars.

How uttery mind-blowing, I wondered, would our *t***u**'s instant coffee taste stirred into that liquid white gold?

Back in our hotel room we debated. Would it be rude to defile the cay evi's otherworldly hot fresh milk with our instant coffee? Would other patrons be shocked when we pulled out our packets and shook the contents into our glasses?

Then it occurred to me: while hot fresh milk may be something extraordinary to us, to Vanlilar -- or at least to the male Vanlilar who frequent this particular tea shop -- Hot Fresh Milk ain't no big thang. Add to that the fact that, as yabancilar (foreigners), in the eyes of the tea shop proprietor and his customers we're pretty much alien beings who engage in all sorts of bizarre behavior anyway. Suddenly our so-called dilemma was a no-brainer.

We went. We ordered glasses of taze süt. We added our *t***u**'s instant and stirred. And then we drank -- I kid you not -- the BEST frigging coffee of our lives.

The instant coffee -- you know where to get it. The tea house is opposite the blue mosque by the peynir carsisi, or cheese market, Van.

Where Breakfast is THE Meal of the Day

Say 'cheese' - otlu peyniri (herbed cheese) is the centerpiece of the Van kahvalti

When we headed to Turkey we had vague notions of making it to Van, in the far east. Those thoughts took on a certain urgency after we sampled the breakfast spread at Van Kahvalti in Cihangir (in Istanbul's Beyoglu district).

Turkish breakfasts are enormous, and wonderful, to start with. Van kahvalti (Van-style breakfast) is just that much huge-er and more over-the-top (cheese and clotted cream in the same meal). At the center of any Van kahvalti are local cheeses, and first and foremost among these are otlu peyniri, a lovely white cheese flavored with herbs foraged in the spring and preserved in brine.

We did make it to Van, and we're dying to go back. We delve into the Van kahvalti phenomenon, visit Van's cheesiest market, talk otlu peyniri, and ponder the Istanbul's relatively recent Van kahvalti craze in our latest piece for Zester Daily.

There's a slideshow of course. And info -- with a recipe for kavuk (a delicious wheat flour concoction) -- on how to breakfast the Van way. Read it here.

An abridged Van kahvalti, delivered: kaymak and honey, bread, warm milk, cheese (wrapped)

It's A Man's World

James Brown certainly wasn't describing the Turkish çay evi (tea house) when he crooned those four words, but he could have been. Even in Istanbul -- but especially in Turkey's more conservative east -- the çay evi is a cultural artifact claimed by males. It's run by men, staffed by men (and often boys, who work as tea runners, delivering orders beyond the tea house), and frequented by men. 

In the east çay evi are everywhere, two or three to a city block. Tea houses are community halls, gossip nodes, places where men come together with their friends. They're where backgammon and cards (and other games that we're not familiar with) are played and TV is watched.

   

They're where buyers and sellers gather to compare purchases and sales after a morning at the market.

They're where a prayer bead maker might set up shop and a watch seller peddle his wares.

Turkish tea houses are also spots for solitary pursuits: a bite of breakfast, an hour or three of silent contemplation. They're where, if you are a retired Turkish gentleman, you might go to get away from the house, because the house is where the women are. You might call the çay evi an extension of the living room, if Turkish families were made up of nothing but men and boys.

 

 

I can't claim to be in tune with a culture that dictates that a goodly portion of its population spend the majority of its time inside the house. But it is what it is. We fell hard for eastern Turkey, and we especially love its çay evi. 

As a woman I rarely felt unwelcome in a tea house -- but then again I'm a yabanci, or foreigner, and I was accompanied by a male. (I'm also "of a certain age", which in Asia and Turkey commands a respect, deference, and certain amount of courtesy that it doesn't in the United States.)

And the weather was fine so we often sat outside, especially if a çay evi was crowded. If ordering required walking inside, Dave would take care of it. He payed for our tea most of the time (when we weren't being treated -- that happened often.). And invariably if one of the men wanted to chat he'd turn to  Dave first.

I spent a fair amount of time pondering this as we made our way around eastern Turkey, this "tea house as man's world" thing and my place in it. I am a strong woman, I think, who's never thought of herself as anything but equal to men. Yet here I was retreating to the background, allowing Dave to test the waters in a tea house before we decided whether or not to drink there, sitting outside so as not to offend, so sensitive to appearances that I'd avoid paying for my own tea if I could.

And yet -- some of our best, most memorable encounters in eastern Turkey took place in tea houses. Once a customer figured out that it was I, not Dave, with whom he could communicate the conversation flowed. And flowed. That I was a woman seemed to be a non-issue (or maybe, as a yabanci I am a sort of undefinable 'non-woman'.)

(As an aside, all of this tea house conversation made me wish that women in eastern Turkey had gathering places similarly accessible to travelers -- because the one thing I lacked, and wished for, on this trip were more opportunities to talk to women.)

We spent hours in (and on stools in front of) tea houses. Beautiful old tea houses with sweeping views of the Syrian plains in Mardin.

Newer, characterless tea houses with pleasant outdoor courtyards in Van. A cubbyhole of a tea house in Gaziantep, where we watched the owner assemble an order of 25 glasses in about 3 minutes.

 

In çay evi we learned that -- unlike American cafes and Malaysian coffee shops -- it's quite OK to bring in outside food and drink.

That laying your glass on its side when you've finished means you've had enough, and that turning it upside down means the tea wasn't good.

That Erzurumlu like a slice of lemon in their tea.

That in the east the sugar cube goes not in the glass, but under your tongue or just inside your bottom lip (like chewing tobacco) or between your lips, to be melted with each sip. (Sugar cubes in the east are also harder and denser.)

That the only man allowed in the tea maker's cubicle -- besides the tea maker -- is Ataturk.

That for us, "Cay içer misiniz?" ("Will you drink some tea?") are among the three most evocative words in the Turkish language.

For more glimpses of Turkey hop over to Sky Blue Sky, where Dave has posted some lovely portraits he shot in the strange little southeastern town of Midyat. View it here.

The Accidental Anniversary

We don't plan birthdays or anniversaries. There is something about the expectations built into "big days" that means they almost never live up to what one thinks they should be.

Some years we remember them, and wish each other a "Happy". Other years the day slides by without notice, buried beneath our To-Do lists and the day-to-day grind. And some years, not by design, a great day just happens to coincide with "the" day.

On our second morning in Van we went out for breakfast (because that's what you do in Van, which is known for its breakfasts) checked out the cheese market (a wonderfully smelly hive of activity), then wandered back to our hotel, wondering what to do with the rest of our day. Van is not a small city but has only a few sites of interest within the city limits. Lake Van seemed the obvious destination.

Plus, there was trout.

One disappointment (if you can call it that) associated with this year's driving tour of Turkey's southeast and east was the lack of stands, restaurants, and holes-in-the-wall advertising alabalık (trout). Dave and I love trout. The first time we drove across Turkey neither of us spoke a word of Turkish, but we taught ourselves to recognize the word alabalık on a sign. On that trip we made numerous spur-of-the-moment stops to feast on grilled trout by streams, overlooking herds of sheep, on the shores of lakes. In short, we ate a mess of trout over a blissful few weeks. We were looking to duplicate that experience this year in the east.

Alas - eastern Turkey doesn't lack for streams and rivers and lakes and trout farms, but we found the sort of knock-up roadside trout grills we remembered to be in short supply. By the time we reached Van we hadn't eaten a single fish. Then, tracing Lake Van's southern shore on our way into the city after a 5-hour drive from the Mesopotamian hilltop city of Mardin, we saw restaurants and stalls sporting signs emblazoned with: alabalık, alabalık, alabalık, alabalık. 

So, with trout on the brain, we got in the car and retraced our route to the shore -- which on that morning, a Monday, was empty. Similarly empty restaurants complicated our effort to identify the one serving the best fish. We stopped at probably the fifth place we saw, an ugly hulking double-story affair that had seen better days. But there lakeside tables, and several were occupied. We ordered ... well, you know what we ordered. Two butterflied fish cooked on a griddle with leaves of rocket (classic Turkish accompaniment to grilled fish) and lemon for squeezing.

The weather was perfect -- turquoise skies with cottony clouds, dry, warm-but-not-sweaty in the sun and a touch cool in the shade. The fish was good. It wasn't fantastic, but it was fresh and well-prepared. A good  alabalık lunch.

As often happens when we take to the road for an extended period, neither of us were thinking dates. It suddenly occurred to me as we were finishing our fish that it was the 14th. I told Dave, and we agreed that it was pretty cool to be eating trout with a view, in a country that we'd been wanting to re-visit for a long time, on our twenty-fourth -- entirely unplanned. Not a bad anniversary, even if we'd both forgotten it.

We got back into the car and continued east, to catch the ferry to Akdamar, a small island about 15 minutes from the shore of Lake Van known for its abandoned Armenian church. On the way to the ferry we passed another trout restaurant. It was small, kind of cute ... and P-A-C-K-E-D.

"That's the one!" we cried, almost in unison.

"Oh maaaan, that's the one!" repeated Dave, with more than a hint of regret in his voice.

But hey, it was our anniversary. If there's a day in the year that we can justify repeating the same favorite meal within 4 hours, we figured, our wedding anniversary is certainly it.

But first we had to work up a facsimile of an appetite.

So we caught the ferry to Akdamar, walked around the island, and toured the beautiful, and sad, church. We spent a long time inside, admiring the faded wall murals and wondering what would move someone to build a church on an unoccupied island.

We chatted with some friendly folks from Van and elsewhere in Turkey (Van and its gorgeous lake draw plenty of domestic tourists),

and ended up hanging out with 3 of them. (Bonus: the next morning these guys took us out for a killer Van breakfast).

We sat by the water for a while

and watched the sun begin to fall towards the velvet hills beyond the shore,

before catching the return ferry.

Driving back to Van, Dave pulled over to capture the spectacle of a sheep herder leading his hundreds of charges across a busy four-lane highway. (He didn't hurry. Trucks and cars just stopped.)

 
Then, again, we ate trout.

And it really, truly was The One, so fresh and beautifully prepared -- dusted with red pepper, moist inside its crispy seared skin, served with charred spicy green peppers, roasted tomatoes, cucumber, and sliced onion rubbed with sumac and salt.

There was also excellent cig kofte (tender hand-formed bites of bulgur, raw lamb, red pepper paste, and chopped parsley to eat wrapped in lettuce with a squeeze of lemon) and ezme, a spicy-tart dip of finely chopped tomatoes and fresh hot peppers soured with pomegranate molasses, and flat bread, and a good chopped salad.

We ate and watched the sun set and toasted 24 years with bottled water (no alcohol at this place, but then again we had a drive ahead of us), then headed back to Van in a crisp summer twilight -- sated, sunburned, tired, and feeling lucky to be in such a lovely place, with each other.

Gorgeous weather, a beautiful lake, a ferry ride (we love ferries!) new friends, being in Turkey again, the luxury of traveling for pleasure rather than work, and two grilled fresh trout each. On the day, all by accident.

We couldn't have planned a better wedding anniversary if we'd tried.