Tag Archives: Yashim’s recipes

Win an Ottoman audiobook!

‘Astonishingly colourful and provocative history.’

Years ago I was on a train, reading The Independent, when I suddenly blushed. My heart raced. Without warning, I had come across a review by Jan Morris of my Ottoman history, Lords of the Horizons. She described it, among other things, as ‘a high-octane work of art,’ and I remember the jolt it gave me in the carriage, and the effort I made not to stand up and share my excitement with my fellow-passengers.

I suppose I am less excitable and more philosophical now, but I’m grateful to the crime novelist Abir Mukherjee for drawing my attention to a new review in The Times for the same book, in audio format. Abir’s first historical crime novel, A Rising Man, is set in Calcutta in 1921, in the days of the Raj, and if you are looking for a new historical detective series to devour, look no further. A Necessary Evil came out last year. I’ve just got my copy of Smoke and Ashes and I urge crime fans to do the same! Mukherjee is really good.

So Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, read by Grahame Edwards, is The Times on Saturday’s Audiobook of the Week, hurrah! The review is by Christina Hardyment:

Jason Goodwin specialised in Byzantine history at Cambridge in the 1980s, walked there (On Foot to the Golden Horn) in 1993 and wrote this award-winning history of the Ottoman empire in 1998. His five excellent historical mysteries set in Istanbul in the 1830s star the gourmet eunuch detective Yashim; The Janissary Tree and The Snake Stone were superbly read by Andrew Sachs. Now at last we can listen to his acclaimed history.
It is a rewarding, but challenging experience. Like Theodore Zeldin’s histories of France and Jan Morris’s accounts of Venice, Goodwin prefers themes to eras, proceeding crab-wise rather than chronologically. We glimpse such fascinating characters as Suleiman the Magnificent’s charismatic wife Roxelana (whom Titian painted), but then whirl away into art and architecture, imports and exports, religious toleration and brutal executions.
The narrator Grahame Edwards lapses after a while into a regular sing-song that makes concentration difficult. But spread out a map of the Ottomans’ vast territories, google images of their glories and persevere; this astonishingly colourful and provocative history is well worth the effort.

The reading lasts 12 hours and 42 minutes, and the audiobook is available here:

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd?asin=B07B3T42WV&source_code=AUKORWS03211890HU

BUT I have three copies of the audiobook to give away – and I’ll send the secret code to the first three people who email me at [email protected] with the words LORDS OF THE HORIZONS in the title – and tell me which year Constantinople fell to the Turks.

In other news, the 2nd UK edition of Yashim Cooks Istanbul: Culinary Adventures in the Ottoman Kitchen has arrived, and is available for a mere £12.99, identical to the 1st edition, hardback and beautifully illustrated, with nearly 100 recipes inspired by Yashim’s own friends, travels and adventures in Ottoman lands – and in Venice, Istanbul’s Mediterranean alter ego.

The judges at the Guild of Food Writers’ Awards described it as “A highly unusual book, which blends fiction with recipes and whisks you away to this exotic world as though on a magic carpet ride. Evocative, captivating and a treat to read a book that breaks new ground in the field of cookery writing.”

It has dozens of five star reviews on Amazon. If you reviewed it yourself, many thanks!

I’m writing a weekly column for Country Life Magazine, called Spectator. It’s on the back page, above the cartoon Tottering-by-Gently by Annie Tempest, and so far it has dealt with such matters as Russians in Dorset, old ladies, evensong, Marseilles tarts, historic architecture, and power cuts. You can read back numbers here: http://www.countrylife.co.uk/author/jasongoodwin

 

And finally, I’m judging the HWA’s Non-Fiction Crown 2018, and dozens of jiffy bags arrived this week containing incredibly interesting-looking history books to be consumed over the next two months or so. I hardly know where to begin. If you have read and would recommend any particularly outstanding history, published in the UK in the last twelve months, do let me know and I’ll try to call it in.

‘When you read a historical mystery by Jason Goodwin, you take a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth.’ New York Times.

 

 

BEATING THE JANUARY BLUES – IN A MORTAR

How many mortars do you have? While I was working on Yashim Cooks Istanbul, I added another two to my kitchen collection, one stone, one made of olive wood. 

Various recipes in the book call for spices, nuts or even pulses to be beaten, chopped, crushed or pounded. Most cookbooks suggest giving your ingredients a quick spin in a food processor, but I fight shy. I can’t stand the noise, for one thing, or those rubber feet, or the clutter that a food processor brings into the kitchen. These machines have a horrid arsenal of blades and graters, rendering every drawer a danger to unwary fingers. They make me jump – and who wants to be jumpy in the kitchen?

Pestle and mortar, on the other hand, work just as they did when these dishes were first prepared, centuries ago in the kitchens at Topkapi Palace. They were there, in the shape of two stones, when cookery was invented: after fire, and a pot, perhaps even before decent knives, cooking must have involved crushing. Old stone querns, for grinding grain, belonged to the ancients and have entered myth. Baba Yaga, the Russian witch, flies about in a pestle and mortar. They are an elemental pairing – yin and yang: pestle is, of course, cognate with pizzle, which it basically resembles. That, I think, is cheerfully salacious.

Not that I am driven by myth and Luddism. Or not entirely. Yashim Cooks Istanbul isn’t an exercise in historical re-enactment, like making mediaeval rice of flesh in an iron bowl, or chucking up lark’s tongues in the vomitorium. The recipes in the book are simple, inspired by their Ottoman originals but not slavish. They are dishes I’d cook at home, any day of the week, as Yashim does in his Balat flat.

No – the advantages of the pestle and mortar are as practical as elemental, even if they aren’t all visible. What you do see, for starters, is the beauty of the tools, in the grain of the wood or the clean, clear lines of the stoneware. It’s that simple, a tool for the hand and another for the bench. In my kitchen, the mother of them all is the 12 gallon mortar in which, incredibly, you can crush the tiniest pinch of cumin with the merest roll of your weighty pestle.

You probably know that a proper pesto is always made in a mortar – just as basil is always torn, not chopped, for adding to a dish. Whirr a pesto in a food processor and you have a glaucous minced mess, whose oily perfume has been already dissipated by the whizzing blades. Beating the leaves, garlic and pine nuts in a mortar takes a little longer (though washing out processor jugs and bowls is another chore), but the whole thing breaks down the oils, and keeps the pesto cool as it should be.

The same thing applies to spices – or to chickpeas. The reviewer at Country Life Magazine called Yashim’s hummus ‘the best ever’, perhaps because I suggest using a pestle and mortar to reduce the chickpeas and garlic to a thick, uneven, consistency rather than the whirred-up paste you get from a plastic pot. There’s no way to grind spices better than a mortar, either; or to crush herbs. It’s about avoiding stress, not inducing it – nor inflicting it on your ingredients.

Pound away. It’s good exercise, and a therapy. Wonderful aromas rise like soothing balm, the action is physical but not exhausting, the sound is regular and human. It is the sound of somebody chopping wood down in the valley. It is as satisfactory as ringing a gong; and it makes you happy.

The pestle and mortar’s closest relations are the wooden chopping board and the sharp steel knife. A family resemblance also exists between a pestle and a rolling pin, as between the mortar and a pot. These are what cooking is about. These are the implements it requires. And not much else.

When, in An Evil Eye, Yashim observes that cooking is really about a sharp knife, he’s pleased to be given one forged of Damascus steel. With the blade he can flatten, crush, chop and slice anything. But when he wants to make muhammara or hummus, or grind spices or nuts for baklava – or roasted coffee beans – he turns to the pestle and mortar. His is a marble mortar, and the pestle has a handle of cherrywood or ash, attached to a marble bulb, whose significant weight does half his work.

It is primitive. But then living in Istanbul in the first half of the nineteenth century, Yashim knows nothing of the magimix.

Autumn falls – and Ottomans cook!

Walking today in the woods, the first fallen leaves rustling underfoot, made me long for a fire – and a taste of this slightly smoky dip taken, of course, from Yashim’s new cook bookimg_4631Aubergine (or eggplant) puree

patlican salatası

A classic Ottoman meze, absolutely worth doing whenever you fire up a charcoal grill. Unlike the real thing, ‘poor man’s meat’ is very forgiving on the grill, so you can start the aubergines off as soon as the coals get hot. The flame gives the finished puree an irresistible smoky taste. Don’t forget the humble home fire, either. If you are burning wood in your fireplace, or maybe a woodburner, use it: an aubergine takes only a few minutes to cook.

img_4256

Ingredients:

aubergines (eggplant) 2

garlic 2 cloves, crushed and chopped

olive oil 2 tbsps

juice of 1 lemon

plain yoghurt 225g/8oz

salt 

pepper

lemon wedges

Method:

If you can rotate the aubergines over charcoal, so much the better: char the skins and pop the aubergines into a plastic bag when the flesh is pulpy. Otherwise, burn the skins on the gas or prick the aubergines with a fork, wrap them in foil and cook for at least half an hour in the hottest oven. 

Hold the aubergine by the stalk and peel away the skin. Scrape the flesh away with a spoon. Drop the flesh into a colander, and squeeze it gently to get rid of some of the water.

Put the aubergines on a board and chop them to a pulp, while they continue to drain. Sweep them into a bowl, and mix in the garlic, the oil and the lemon juice. When they are well mixed, add the yoghurt, a pinch of salt and a twist of pepper and beat again. Check for seasoning.

Serve the puree with a drizzle of olive oil and wedges of lemon, to eat on crusty bread.

Some simple pide

Some simple pide

Everything connects, of course, and given centuries of war and exchange between Russia and the Ottoman Empire it should come as no surprise that the Russians, substituting sauteed onion and tomato for the yoghurt, wisely adopted this as their ‘poor man’s caviar’. Versions of both are very popular across the Caucasus.

This is just one of dozens of the recipes from Yashim Cooks Istanbul, out in the UK on Thursday October 27th and in the USA on November 15th. Signed copies are available, postage free anywhere in the world. Just click on this link: http://bit.ly/2c7fkIU