EatingAsia

In Mardin: Servet Bilbay's Mırra

 

We left tawny, arid southeastern Turkey a week ago. And I'm missing the coffee.

Clearing the cobwebs at dawn in Gaziantep, Mardin, and Midyat was never a challenge because every tea house also serves coffee. Not the case, we found, in Van and Kars. And the local coffee in Istanbul just doesn't taste the same. (Another example of the flavor that context lends, perhaps.)

 

We were charmed by Mardin, an ancient town of grand amber limestone homes, mosques, churches, and medreses clinging to a hill overlooking the Syrian plain. It's in 'Mesopotamia', widely believed to be the 'Cradle of Civilization'. Awe-inspiring stuff, but the city feels as regular and comfortable as a worn-in flip-flop. Right before we quit town I tossed out a Mardin pitch. When my editor responded positively we backtracked from Midyat, happily.

Seven mornings we spent winding our way up and down Mardin's steep cut-stone lanes. We hugged courtyard walls for shade, Dave kept eyes open for the money shot, and we both lost ourselves many times over in the çarşılar (markets) that climb a slope beneath Mardin's main street, stacked one on top of the other like layers in a club sandwich,

Propelling ourselves up and down and up again with tiny cups of coffee and chasers of tea, we managed to hit most of Mardin's tea houses.

And identified our very favorite on our very last morning: Çamlı Köşk Kıraathane.

"I am Kurd!" Servet Bilbay says proudly, as all of the Kurds we have met on this trip do. Long ago Mardin was settled by a mix of ethnicities and religions: Christians and Muslims, Kurds and Turks, Assyrians/Syriac and Armenians.

Servet comes from a long line of Mardinli; his extended family counts more than 300 members still living in the town.

Çamlı Köşk has a history too: it was opened by Servet's grandfather, which makes him the third generation to prepare coffee behind its wooden kiosk. On one of the shop's walls hang black-and-white photographs of the shop's construction in the early 20th century, of customers and friends hanging out with its owners. Portraits of Servet's grandfather and father -- sprouting thick moustaches much like his -- are there too.

It was at Çamlı Köşk that we first sampled mırra (pronounced MUR-rah, with a good roll of the tongue at the double 'r'), a thick, syrupy brew with a pronounced bitter bite (it's also called acı kahve or 'bitter coffee').

Mırra is made by boiling coarsely ground, double-roasted beans several times over; Servet boils his for over an hour. Like many mırra makers he adds cardamom seeds to soften the beverage's bitterness -- but there's no getting around its almost metallic acidity. At first sip one's tongue instinctively curls up around the liquid as if to shield taste buds from the assault.

Mırra is to Turkish and Syrian coffee what espresso is to a cup of Starbuck's. Its delivers a whallop of a wake-up call.

Traditionally made for special occasions such as weddings, mırra is poured into a clean pot before serving and is drunk from a tiny cup (see top photo). Two doses, one after the other, are the norm. "Ooooh!" Servet utters with a nod and a big grin, when I throw back my second cup.

After we've finished our mırra, Servet circulates amongst the other customers (which is not many on a Sunday at 7am -- folks in Turkey are generally not early risers) with the coffee pot. As custom dictates they all drink mırra from the same cup.

Servet also brews an excellent Suriyani kahvesi (Syrian coffee), heady with cardamom and boasting a manageable coffee-to-grounds ratio (like Turkish coffee, Syrian coffee is served with its grounds, which settle at the bottom of the cup).

And upon request he will prepare menengiç, a hot beverage made with dried, roasted, and pounded wild pistachios. (Read more about menengiç in Gaziantep, in this write-up by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine expert, chef, and author Anissa Helou.)

Servet made my menengiç as it is most often made these days in southeastern Turkey, with a jarred prepared paste. Some menengiç drinkers take theirs with water but he prepared mine with fresh milk. It was lovely, something like hot liquid sesame-and-almond butter with the barest hint of cacao.

'Menengiç ice cream' is what I couldn't stop thinking.

Çamlı Köşk Kıraathane, No. 207, 1 Caddesi (the main street), Mardin.

Bread and Cheese

It's been difficult to find time to post these last two weeks that we've been in eastern Turkey. The precious little idle time I've had on the road has been mostly devoted to work (a downside of being connected is that my editors can always find me.)

But it's been a fantastic trip, and we have much to share from Gaziantep, Mardin, Midyat, Van, Kars, and Erzurum. Tomorrow we head back to Istanbul for an additional 11 days. Once there I'm hoping to slip into a routine that will allow me time to think -- and write, and post -- about the last few weeks.

In the meantime, we leave you with the basics: bread and cheese. (You might also want to drop in on Dave's photo blog; he just posted his second in a series of posts featuring portraits from Turkey.)

 

A bread maker at work in Van. He's making a flat-ish, oval wheat bread with a hole in the middle called liva lavaş. Instead of a conventional wood-fired oven the bread is cooked in a tandoor-like clay vessel called a tandır (tahn-DER).

Interestingly, we found a similarly shaped (but leavened) wheat loaf -- also baked in a tandır -- in Midyat: it's called nan.

Villages in the vicinity of Kars produce a number of wonderful cheeses made from cow's milk. (You can sample them in the morning, at any one of the city's numerous kahvaltı salonu, or breakfast 'salons'.)

This is kaşar (which I also heard variously as kaşaş or kaşas depending on the cheese dealer I spoke with) a cheese that varies in color from vanilla to pale yellow and in flavor from mild and milky to nutty and lightly sharp, depending on how long it's aged.

On our first morning in Kars we had a slab cut from a soft young wheel and took it with us, along with a fresh pillow of pide, to the breathtakingly situated ruins at Ani. The next morning we sampled 'middle-aged' and very aged versions -- delicious, every one.

In Mardin, A Meal to Remember

Etli ekmek, fresh from the community oven

Last night in Mardin, a hilltop town not far from the Syrian border in Turkey's southeast, we dined at Cercis Murat Konağı, a restaurant occupying a lovely old stone house. The mezze platter was, in Dave's (accurate) words, 'mind-blowing' -- a selection of perhaps a dozen dips, spreads, and nibbles based on ingredients like bulgur, garbanzo beans, tahini, walnuts, and pomegranate molasses with flavors that bounced from full, round, and nutty to bitingly spicy (from crushed dried red peppers) or sharply sour.

Yet it's not the meal we'll remember most from our time here. Service varied from patronizing ('No reservation?' we were asked, disbelievingly, upon our arrival; the dining room remained 2/3 empty throughout our meal) to AWOL. The dishes that followed our mezze were unremarkable. And the bill was outrageous -- almost twice the price of a raki-fueled mezze-based dinner at one of the restaurants on Nevizade Sokak in Istanbul.

While we're very much about food, for us it's the context that makes the meal. Bad vibes -- whether from annoying fellow diners or snooty wait staff -- cancel out deliciousness. And the right company and setting can raise a humble meal to heavenly.

 

A table with a view: Mardin's market

Late this afternoon we had that sort of meal.

We met Yusuf on our first morning in town, at a cay evi (tea house) in Mardin's lively market. Tables were few and he took a seat at ours. We began talking about this and that, and the conversation meandered for a couple of hours.

What can we say about Yusuf? This 60-year-old gentleman is so easy to be around. He's smart and thoughtful, knowledgeable about his hometown, and has a wonderful sense of humor. He speaks slowly and clearly (a dream for someone like me, struggling to unearth Turkish buried for more than a decade) -- not as if he's speaking to a slow learner, but as if most everything he says carries some import. And it does. 

This morning we met again at the tea house. He offered to show us an often overlooked local site and we took him up ib it. Afterwards he invited us to meet him at his shop in the market later for etli ekmek.

Yusuf, like most everyone in town, has his etli ekmek baked at a community fırın or oven -- usually the wood-fired contraption anchoring the local pide shop. Few homes have their own ovens and even if they do summer temperatures (above 90F these days) discourage their use.

It works like this:

Yusuf purchases 1/2 a kilo of lamb. He takes it home, minces it with pul biber (dried red pepper), salt, and a mystery spice (kamun -- translations welcome), then drops it off at the pide shop. There, they knead the meat into an equal weight of pide dough, form the result into 4 thin dough ovals, and pop them into the oven for 10 minutes.

Yusuf pays the pide shop 1 US dollar for the dough and the oven time. (If he were having something like  güveç -- a sort of meat stew -- baked in the fırın it would cost perhaps U$ 1.30, to cover the 3 to 4-hour baking time.)

We arrived at Yusuf's shop at 4:30. The etli ekmek came out of the oven at 5 and were delivered to us within 5 minutes. The ekmek was fantastically delicious, meaty but not overwhelmingly so, a bit spicy, and with a texture reminiscent of a freshly baked cookie: crispy on the outside, soft and chewy within.

With the bread we ate cacik (chopped cucumbers mixed with yogurt), and then finished the meal with glasses of tea (delivered from the tea house) and juicy fres cherries.

While we ate, perched on stools at the entrance to Yusuf's shop, we talked about Islam and Christianity, the quality of lamb in Turkey and the preponderance of rice in Asia, pork ('Do you eat it? What does it taste like?' Yusuf asked), languages and America, marriage and children, kismet (fate), the evil eye, shoes (Yusuf sells them), and Ataturk.

'This is just everyday food,' Yusuf told us. Yet from our time in Mardin, this is the meal we'll most remember.

In Gaziantep, Very Locally Yours

In America restaurants waving the local-and-sustainable flag like you to know that they know where their ingredients come from. An entree along the lines of 'Billy Bob's pork chops with Heaven On Earth Farm peach compote and a mixed mash of Patty Paulson's red carrots and Muddy Boy kabocha squash' wouldn't raise any eyebrows in foodie circles.

The vendor slapping together dürüm (a local 'wrap' filled with garbanzos or pilav, or both) at a wheeled cart at the backside of Gaziantep's kale (castle) isn't waving around a menu, but a stroll around the area will tell you all you need to know about the freshness and provenance of his ingredients.

 

The bread is baked a ten-minute walk away, in a slip of a shop anchored by a big wood-fired oven on the back wall. A teenager forms each piece -- stretching pillows of dough on a slab of marble with his palms, imprinting the the bread with the tips of his fingers, and then stretching them again into a football shape -- while an older gent slides his bread paddle in and out of the oven, then lays the flat loaves on wooden slats to cool (no soggy crusts here).

The bread disappears as quick as it's made; men stride into the bakery empty-handed and leave carting dozens of crusts wrapped in paper.

Our dürüm maker sources his flat-leaf parsley, onions, and tomatoes a bit closer to home .. steps from his stall, in other words.

Shops displaying bags of fresh mild cheese, olives, tomato paste, pails of fresh milk and yogurt, mesh sacks of potatoes and purslane, wooden crates filled with tomatoes and eggplant and onions and bell peppers, bundles of young fragrant garlic, and mounds of mint, tarragon, and flat-leaf parsley line the street on which he parks his cart.

There too are the sources of his nohut (garbanzo beans) and rice -- dealers of 'dried foods', the entrances to their shops draped with strings of dried eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and okra, their front pavements crowded with bins of rice and bulgur, wheat berries and pulses, and several varieties of ground dried chilies.

The source of these fresh and dried items? In most cases, for ingredients that can be produced in southeastern Turkey's hot, dry climate, a nearby village. At dawn farmers and cheese and yogurt makers arrive at this street by truck, bicycle and motorbike,and on foot, bearing their products. Most of the cheese makers, one shop owner told me, live not more than 10 kilometers away.

Yesterday's breakfast, then -- in American foodie speak:

Nohut Dürümu (Garbanzo Bean 'Wrap')

Ali Bey's summer tomatoes, nohut grown by Sulaymin steps from the Euphrates, and flat-leaf parsley hand-picked from the terraced garden of Bunyamin and his wife Mazya, all rolled in Mehmet Usta's bread freshly made with flour ground from summer wheat harvested just outside Gaziantep. Served with a pinch of hand-ground Urfa biber (dried red chili) and a sprinkle of köy (village) vinegar        

Price: Ridiculously inexpensive.