Best of the Decade: #11 Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

Photo by Carolyn Drake, from Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #11 pick – Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (April 19, 2010). It’s about a chef, Musa Dağdeviren, “who has masterminded an ambitious project to document, restore, and reinvent Turkish food culture.” 

The piece begins with a visit to Dağdeviren’s restaurant, Çiya Sofrasi. Batuman writes,

To get to the restaurant Çiya Sofrasi from the old city of Istanbul, you take a twenty-minute ferry ride to the Asian side of the Bosporus. On a cold Monday night last November, a friend persuaded me to make the trip with him. 

Those are the first lines of the piece, and they totally grab me. I love their exoticism (“Çiya Sofrasi,” “old city of Istanbul,” “Asian side of the Bosporus”). And I love that “me”; it tells me that Batuman is writing from personal experience – my favourite form of journalism.

The piece unfolds in five exquisite scenes: a meal at Çiya Sofrasi; an excursion to Kandira; lunch at a Kandira fish shop; a visit to a Bozburun turkey farm; and a tour of Dağdeviren’s country mansion. The theme running throughout is Dağdeviren’s constant search for Turkish authenticity.

Çiya Sofrasi

At Çiya Sofrasi, Batuman and her friend sample a number of dishes:

The first sign of anything unusual was the kisir, a Turkish version of tabouli, which had an indescribable freshness and suddenly reminded you that wheat is a plant. The bitter edge of sumac and pomegranate extract, the tang of tomato paste, and the warmth of cumin, which people from the south of Turkey put in everything, recalled to me, with preternatural vividness, the kisir that my aunt used to make. Likewise, the stewed eggplant dolmas resembled my grandmother’s version even more intensely, somehow, than those dolmas resembled themselves.

As the meal progresses, Batuman notices that the tastes grow stronger and more varied:

One inscrutable salad contained no recognizable ingredient except jewel-like pomegranate kernels, nestled among seaweed-colored, twig-shaped objects and mysterious chopped herbs, nutty and slightly bitter. A stew uniting beef, roasted chestnuts, quince, and dried apricots in an enigmatic greenish broth tugged at some multilayered memory involving my mother’s quince compote. 

Batuman is a superb describer. Here, for example, is her depiction of “an array of marvellous, doll-like desserts” in Çiya Sofrasi’s window:

Candied tomatoes, dull-red translucent disks, resembled ancient talismans. Miniature candied eggplants had a troublingly sentient appearance, inky and squidlike. Kerebiç—round cakes with pistachio filling—were served with a gooey sauce. My friend thought it might be whipped cream; I thought it was some kind of high-end marshmallow. Finally, I asked a waiter. He said it was made from “the pulverized root of a local tree from Antakya.”

Kandira Market

Batuman joins Dağdeviren for an excursion to Kandira, “two hours east of Istanbul, on the Black Sea coast.” They visit the town’s market. Batuman writes, 

After a second circuit, during which he bought a total of thirty kilos each of borage and mallow, seven kilos of corn poppy, six kilos of curly dock, and twenty bunches of watercress, Musa seemed to relax. He made some sundry purchases: buffalo-milk yogurt and two kinds of honey, one made with chestnut and linden flower, the other with chestnut and rhododendron. Near the beekeeper’s table, a farmer was selling live turkeys. There were seven or eight of them sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury. In Turkey, the turkey is called hindi (“Indian”) and is often roasted on New Year’s Eve, which was two days away.

That turkey description (“sitting on a row of crates, occasionally nodding their heads and gurgling, like members of a jury”) is excellent.

Fish Shop Lunch

When Batuman and Dağdeviren finish shopping in the market, they look for a place to have lunch. Batuman writes,

For lunch, we walked to the town center, which Musa described as “authentic,” his highest term of praise. There were three busy commercial streets, whose businesses were all local. “There aren’t any streets like this left in Istanbul. Look, they have a simit oven, and no Simit Sarayi.” A simit is a pretzel-like ring of bread covered in sesame seeds. Simit Sarayi (saray means “palace”) is a ubiquitous Turkish chain whose owners have plans to expand into Europe. “They sell what I call pastane simit”—a pastane is a French-style pastry shop—“and now that’s what people are used to,” Musa said. “In the old days, every region had its own way of making simit. There’s an incredible variety of simit, and it’s all being lost.”

That last sentence is a variation on the piece’s main theme: Dağdeviren’s determination to recover the foods that Turkey is forgetting. 

Dağdeviren suggests lunch at a fish shop. While they eat, Dağdeviren talks about, among other things, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Turkey known as the “Safranbolu Houses”:

“Nobody lives there anymore—it’s all pensions and hotels,” he said. “You might go to a place like that once, just to see it, but you won’t go back a second time.” The moral of his story was that “the moment you say, ‘Hey, let’s revive this’—no matter what it is—it’s finished.” This is exactly the paradox that Çiya has avoided. “The people’s” lost food is rescued not only from disappearance or mechanization but also from foodie fetishism. The restaurant is an ark in which every tiny species is salvaged, represented, preserved—but still alive, changing, and growing.

Turkey Farm

After lunch, they drive to a turkey farm in a village called Bozburun. Dağdeviren buys four female turkeys. Batuman vividly describes the killing of the first turkey:

The farmer’s wife handed the first one to her husband, who bent down and swiftly cut off its head with a sharp knife. A loud wheezing came from the stump of the neck, which emitted irregular spurts of blood. The dog stood up slowly and ambled over.

“Hoşt!” the farmer shouted. This is a Turkish word used exclusively for the purpose of chasing away dogs—there are different words for chasing away cats and poultry—but this dog did not respond. Finally, the farmer tossed the turkey’s tiny head some distance away, and the dog went off to look for it. The farmer’s wife handed him the next turkey.

The other turkeys seemed to view these developments with mild concern. Those which had been walking in the direction of the creek casually changed course and walked elsewhere, with one exception: a stately male, with a red wattle and an enormous fan of back feathers, marched pompously, deliberately, almost sinisterly before the scene of carnage. “What could he be thinking?” Musa asked.

What an amazing scene! The wheezing from the neck stump, the farmer shouting “Host!” at the dog, the pompously marching male turkey – Chekhov couldn’t have rendered it better. 

Country Mansion

On the drive back to Istanbul, Batuman and Dağdeviren visit a property that Dağdeviren recently bought “in order to realize his long-cherished dream of a Turkish culinary institute. The idea was to provide a center for Turkish food culture: a school, a library, a research institute, and a publishing house.” The scene unfolds like a Chekhov short story:

By the time we reached the property, night had fallen. We came to a pair of imposing metal gates and Musa rang a bell, several times, to no effect. Banging on the gates with his fist, he began shouting to someone called Ismail. Then he picked up a rock and started beating it against the metal. After five minutes of this, the groundskeeper, who is hard of hearing, appeared, bowing and apologizing. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said, unlocking the gate.

They drive in. Batuman says,

A mansion loomed before us, and Musa stopped the car, leaving the headlights on. As we walked toward the mansion, I became aware of the presence all around us of enormous, shadowy formations, which proved to be topiary animals. A monstrous dolphin reared on its tail in the middle of the circular drive, and, in the murk, I thought I could make out a stag and a bear on the lawn.

The piece brilliantly ends in a blaze of light, a glimpse of yet another one of those surreal topiary animals, and then a final dissolve to darkness:

Entering the mansion, he switched on the electric lights and, one by one, rooms materialized around us. Musa told me his plans for a library, a reading room, a kitchen with stations for students, conference rooms, lecture halls, editorial offices. There would be guest rooms for visiting scholars and writers. He and his family would live on the top floor. He showed me a spot he was considering for his desk, in a window overlooking a giant topiary alligator. Back downstairs, he lingered a moment in the front hall before turning off the lights. Everything dissolved again into darkness, and we got back in the car to return to Istanbul.

Nothing dramatic happens in “The Memory Kitchen,” unless you count the killing of that female turkey. Yet it delights from beginning to end. Part of that delight is sourced in its arresting material – Musa Dağdeviren, Çiya Sofrasi, the Kandira market, the Bozburun turkey farm, etc. And part of it is in its marvellous writing – attentive, specific, vital, perceptive. The piece is double bliss.