Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes:
We are back from Turkey. Well traveled and all-too-well fed, and pleased that the farm came through with only a few small disasters, and in very good order. We thank Beth and Darlene and Beth's son, Karl, for their valiant caretaking efforts. They might not welcome taking sole charge of the farm again very soon, but we now know that taking a vacation is, after all, possible. Taking vacation is also valuable. Not just for the rest and restoration it provides, but also for the way in which exposure to a different culture helps illuminate our own world. We can't see people doing things differently from us without considering whether we, ourselves, shouldn't be emulating them in some way. For Peter and me, what we gain from traveling now includes agriculture-related insights. Turkey, the rump state of the great Ottoman and Byzantine Empires, is today a vital young country simultaneously plunging into the industrial and post-industrial world economies. But its economy is also still heavily oriented to agriculture. Next week Peter will post his impressions of the state of Turkish agriculture as he observed it. But while Peter was busy taking note of the organization and processes of production, I have to confess to being much more preoccupied with the end product: the food. It would be fair to say we ate our way across the country, and came away both inspired and wanting to learn more.
Our eating in Turkey took place almost entirely in restaurants. I recognize the danger of characterizing a cuisine by the food one eats in restaurants. American home cooking and restaurant cuisine have similarities but certainly are not identical. One of the reasons we go out to eat is that the food is different, that restaurant chefs with their equipment and training can do some things that we cannot. Turkey is no different in its restaurant fare being distinct from home cooking. Throughout the country we saw small flocks of turkeys being kept, but only once in two weeks did we see turkey being offered on a restaurant menu. We saw ducks, geese and guinea fowl being sold in live markets, too, yet they never appeared on menus either. We sampled the cactus fruits offered by a Turk we met on the street, yet never saw cactus offered in an eating establishment. Most strikingly, substantial herds of goats were ubiquitous in the countryside, yet in the restaurants goat, too, was decidedly absent.
Despite the obvious difficulty of extrapolating from restaurant fare, our "taste bud tour" made clear at least one truth about theTurks' use of their agricultural products. From a limited repertoire of raw ingredients, they produce a mind-boggling array of end products with significantly different flavors and textures. Eggplant is a prime example. Eggplant dishes include numerous dips, such as a grilled, deliberately scorched creamy eggplant puree, and eggplant mixed with tahini; various eggplant side dishes, some paired just with olive oil, others with tomatoes, peppers, yoghurt, or meat; main dishes in which eggplant is a primary ingredient, or a significant contributing element (as in stews), or in which it serves as a vehicle to be stuffed. It is said that there are as many as 39 different ways of preparing eggplant. Even the eggplant leaves are used as wraps, similar to grape leaves. Spinach is also used in a versatile manner: not just the leaves, but also, independently, the stems, which may be marinated as a salad on their own, or made into fried vegetable patties, or used in lamb stews.
Because of our British and Irish culinary heritages, Americans have a pretty versatile approach to potatoes, but I can't think of other raw ingredients where we even approach the Turks. It may well be that some of their endlessly creative use of raw ingredients derives from a time not so long ago when their lives were much more difficult economically, and a thorough use of what was most readily available was critical. How else can one explain a rosemary salad, a taste revelation? It is comprised almost entirely of rosemary leaves, which grow in profusion in Turkey, the bushes almost to hedge size. They are soaked overnight in brine, then rinsed and marinated in olive oil and lemon juice, and garnished with a few tomatoes (yes, the Turks had the tomatoes we missed this summer). And how else to account for a fantastic dish we had at one restaurant in Sirince, a former Greek village near the Aegean coast, which was translated into English as "lamb with local roots?" The root was subtle, reminiscent of, but less dominant, than Chinese lotus root. It imparted a creamy consistency and mellow flavor to the lamb. When we asked its name, the restaurant owner called it "guzel" root (meaning beautiful in Turkish) but the plant he described did not seem to be lotus, having a small leaf and flower. If anyone reading this can enlighten me as to the identity of this local root, I'd be very grateful.
The "use everything" ethic is not the rule in every context. Before our departure, I told my office manager (who had spent a semester studying in Istanbul) that we were planning to visit the beautiful Thracian city of Edirne, the capital of the Ottoman Empire before the conquest of Constantinople, and famous today because it is the site of the Selimye mosque, the 16th century masterpiece of Sinan, Turkey's greatest architect. Her immediate response was that we must try the fried liver there. I laughed, because Peter had told me of his quest in Edirne on his last visit to find a restaurant that didn't focus on liver. Indeed, it turns out that Edirne is mad for lamb liver. Throughout the city, there are dozens of little restaurants denominated as "cigercis" (sellers of liver) or advertising themselves as masters or champions of liver. Even the finest fish restaurants, charmingly located near preserved Ottoman bridges on the city's two rivers, offer fried liver dishes. What, we wondered, did Edirneans do with the rest of the lamb? But in most ways, I feel, we could take a lesson from the Turks. They have made a virtue of frugally using every part of the food they raise, much of which we would ordinarily discard, and of developing wonderfully creative preparations of what abounds in their environment—things we would ordinarily ignore. Their cuisine is all the more wonderful for that. —Mark Scherzer
