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. 

The Relation of Fact to Thought in Elif Batuman's "The Memory Kitchen" (Contra Daniel Soar)

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

Daniel Soar, in his “The paper is white” (London Review of Books, December 14, 2017), a review of Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, is critical of Batuman’s New Yorker writings. He says,

As a staff writer for the New Yorker, living for a time in Turkey, she has in recent years reported on football fandom in Istanbul, archeology in south-eastern Anatolia, transcranial direct-current stimulation in Albuquerque and an unusual kidney disease found only in the Balkans. These pieces are witty, personal, comprehensively reported (“But when I tried to get in touch with him I was told that he was unavailable, having recently been shot”), but they are also dutiful and information-heavy, with the occasional Wikipedia-like bit of background that anyone could have filled in (“In 1908, the sultan’s absolute rule was curbed by the Young Turks, who went on to encourage soccer as a means of Westernising and nationalising Turkish youth”). She has traded thoughts for facts. She doesn’t always have the room to reflect on how selective and partial those facts can be – or on whether, for example, working-class Beşiktaş fans may have a politics beyond the facts of their violence.

She has traded thoughts for facts – is this true? I don’t think so. It fails to credit the complex mental process underpinning Batuman’s factual writing. Take her wonderful “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010), for example, profiling the extraordinary Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren, whose Istanbul restaurant Çiya Sofrasi has “tapped into a powerful vein of collective food memory,” “producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned.”

“The Memory Kitchen” is an artfully shaped narrative comprehending, among other things, the taste of Çiya Sofrasi’s kisir (“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”); the story of Dağdeviren’s rise “from errand boy to dishwasher, from apprentice to chef, and on to head chef and master chef”; an excursion to Kandira, on the Black Sea coast, to shop for foraged herbs (“We made one round of the wild-greens sellers. Most were women, wearing bright flowered head scarves, oversized wool cardigans, and long skirts or baggy pantaloons”); lunch at a fish shop (“The shop owner brought the fish, which had been fried in cornmeal. Musa ate in moderation, but with quick, restless, almost peremptory movements”); and, most memorably, a visit to a turkey farm (“Turkeys were wandering everywhere, producing their strange ambient gurgle, under the lugubrious eye of a large German shepherd”).

Writing is selection, John McPhee says in his Draft No. 4. In Batuman’s great “The Memory Kitchen,” the selection of facts and words is brilliant. The presence of a thinking, creating mind is palpable.

Photos and Illustrations 2014

Riccardo Vecchio, "The Fugitive" (Detail)

The New Yorker is, of course, a great read. But it’s also an immense pleasure to look at. From 2014’s rich yield of New Yorker photos and illustrations, I’ve chosen twelve favorites:

1. David Black’s “Seu Jorge” (“Goings On About Town,” November 17, 2014)

2. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “The New Music Bake Sale” (“Goings On About Town,” March 17, 2014)

3. Pari Dukovic’s “Scarlett Johansson” (for Anthony Lane’s “Her Again,” March 24, 2014)

4. Michael Gillette’s “Jo Nesbø” (for Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil,” May 12, 2014)

5. Grant Cornett’s “Jason Mleczko” (for Tad Friend’s “Thicker Than Water,” February 10, 2014)

6. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Elizabeth Harrower” (for James Wood’s “No Time For Lies,” October 20, 2014)

7. Ethan Levitas’s “Hospitality and Pannonia Quartet” (“Goings On About Town,” February 3, 2014)

8. Leo Espinosa’s “The Office Through the Ages” (for Jill Lepore’s “Away From My Desk,” May 12, 2014)

9. Dan Winters’s “Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire” (for Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

10. Edwin Fotheringham’s “The Trip to Italy” (for David Denby’s “Lasting Impressions,” September 1, 2014)

11. Carolyn Drake’s “Anya Fernald” (for Dana Goodyear’s “Élite Meat,” November 3, 2014)

12. Conor Langton’s “Magic in the Moonlight” (for David Denby’s “Under the Spell,” July 28, 2014)

December 24 & 31, 2012 Issue

I was already agonizing over the selection of my “Top Ten of 2012” pieces when this week’s “World Changers” issue, with its sleek, gleaming blue-black-cream Frank Viva cover, arrived containing three more candidates for consideration - Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Recall of the Wild,” Elif Batuman’s “Stage Mothers,” and Keith Gessen’s “Polar Express” – providing me with hours of readerly bliss and further complicating my “Top Ten” decision-making. All three are “participant observation” pieces – my favorite form of journalism. In “Recall of the Wild,” Kolbert visits the Oostvaardersplassen, a fifteen thousand acre park in the Netherlands that “mimics a Paleolithic ecosystem.” It brims with delicious lines such as “Vera picked me up one day at my hotel in Lelystad, and we drove over to the reserve’s administrative offices, where we had a cup of coffee in a room decorated with the mounted head of a very large Heck bull.” Kolbert is always up for an excursion, and so am I – vicariously through her, of course. When she hears about an auroch-breeding project in Nijmegan, she says, “So while I was in the Netherlands I decided to go for a visit.” I find her personal approach thrilling. Batuman writes in a similar mode, but with this difference: she has a marvelous gift for what I call surreal realism, which she generates organically from her material e.g., her description, in “Stage Mothers,” of the shooting of the movie “Wool Doll” (“Every night, the crew members slept in dead people’s blankets, and every morning they got up to confront a frozen auto transmission”). I notice that “Stage Mothers” is illustrated with a beautiful Carolyn Drake color photo. Batuman and Drake have teamed up at least a couple of times before to excellent effect: see “Natural Histories” (The New Yorker, October 28, 2011) and “The Memory Kitchen” (The New Yorker, April 19, 2010) – both “Top Ten” finishers in their respective years. Of the three writers under consideration this week, Keith Gessen is the minimalist. He’s not afraid to write short, plain lines, stripped to their essentials, e.g., “The next morning, we finally saw it: ice,” “Off we went into the ice,” “I put on a winter coat and hat and walked to the bow.” But his style isn’t starved – far from it. He’s an acute, subtle noticer:

A few times, the ice was so thick, and the icebreaker broke it so cleanly, that it came up again on its side, looking like a giant slice of cake, with green and blue layers separated by thin lines of white. Sometimes a smashed ice floe would be submerged beneath the surface and then come up, the water rolling off its back as off a slowly rising whale.

That “as off a slowly rising whale” is terrific. Gessen is an amazing imagist. Observing the unloading of coal trains in Murmansk, he writes, “It was as if Russia were coughing up her insides.” And this is followed by the evocative, “The cranes’ grabs could barely squeeze into the rail cars. The deep, rumbling sounds of steel on steel echoed in the quiet of the fjord.” I loved everything about “Polar Express” – Gessen’s writing, foremost, but also Davide Monteleone’s photos, and the map by “AJ Frackattack.” There’s such a richesse of great writing in this “World Changers.” I enjoyed it immensely.

October 24, 2011 Issue

What to make of Nathan Heller’s Pauline Kael piece (“What She Said”) in this week’s issue? I confess I didn’t much like it. Here are eight reasons why:

1. Heller reduces Kael’s thinking to the level of “whimsical taste.” He says, “from the time she wrote her first review until the moment she retired, in 1991, her authority as a critic relied solely on her own, occasionally whimsical taste.” He says that she flaunted intuition “in the face of formalism,“ and that “She was dowsing for film classics with her nervous system.” Intuition,” “taste,” and “ dowsing with her nervous system” do not do justice to Kael’s approach. Each of her reviews is an unfolding of thought. Did she have an interpretive or ideological a priori? Yes and no. She wasn’t locked into a system the way, say, a Freudian or Marxist critic is. But there are theories implicit in her criticism. Her love of “open form,” for example, governs her aesthetic response. And her great essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” (included in her 1970 collection Going Steady), develops “the simple good distinction” that she repeatedly applied in her criticism: “all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art.” Heller, in his piece, fails to mention “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

2. Heller asserts that “the fifteen-year stretch between 1964 and 1979” is “when Kael wrote almost all the reviews on which her reputation rests.” Even though he’s saying “almost,” he’s still leaving the impression that the writing Kael did between 1980 and February 11, 1991, when she wrote her last review, is of secondary importance. I disagree. In that eleven-year period, Kael produced four brilliant collections: Taking It All In (1984), State of the Art (1985), Hooked (1989), and Movie Love (1991). Also, in 1982, the first edition of her magnificent 5001 Nights at the Movies was published. It’s a collection of several thousand capsule reviews she did for The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” department. In the foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies, William Shawn says:

A master of synopsis, Pauline Kael has contrived to tell us between the covers of one book what eight decades of film are about and who is in them and behind them, and to reflect, swiftly but astutely, on what they signify. No one else has done that; no one else could have done that.

Heller, in his piece, fails to mention 5001 Nights at the Movies.

3. Speaking of William Shawn, I was surprised to read in Heller’s article that, when Kael tried to return to The New Yorker, after spending less than a year working in Hollywood, “William Shawn balked.” Heller says, “One of her former editors prevailed on him, but the homecoming was awkward.” This is the same Shawn, who, three years later, writes in his Foreword to 5001 Nights at the Movies that “The originality of Pauline Kael’s mind and temperament, her formidable intelligence, her eloquent use of the vernacular, her extraordinary analytical powers, her insight into character, her ability to shed light wherever the real world intersects with the world on film, her enormous gift for social observation, the wit and energy and clarity of her prose all go into making her the singular critic she is.” In light of the foregoing, it’s hard to imagine Shawn passing up the opportunity to rehire Kael. Heller doesn’t disclose his source for the information that “William Shawn balked.” Perhaps it comes from Brian Kellow’s new biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. If so, he should’ve said so, rather than report it as established fact.

4. Heller says that Kael “had few qualms about blackballing young writers on her turf, and otherwise using her influence for ill.” This verges on slander, unless substantiated. Heller fails to do so. But he does indicate his source for this nasty tidbit: “In 1970, Kellow tells us, Kael conned a U.C.L.A. assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on 'Citizen Kane': she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, 'Raising Kane' (1971).” This is absolutely the worst story I have ever heard told about Pauline Kael. I question whether it’s true. And so should Heller and The New Yorker question it. What was the nature of the promise? What proof is there of it? How “proprietary” was the research? What part, if any, did Kael use?

5. Heller uses the old, elitist High-Low structure to describe culture. At one point, he says, “The art and the criticism of the sixties were blurring the boundaries of high and low culture.” At another point, he says, “In truth, most of her early pursuits reached for higher cultural ground.” And at another, he says, “And when she started to write seriously about movies, much later, it was her passion for the high-art canon that helped set her bearings.” Kael was against High-Low distinctions. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies, she said, “Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies, it is not found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.” Heller is wrong. Kael didn’t have a “passion for the high-art canon.” She wanted that high-art canon overturned. Her passion was for “the subversive gesture.” That’s one of the reasons I admire her.

6. Heller claims that Kael “actively opposed” “many of the seventies’ classics.” He names three of them: The French Connection, Chinatown, and Manhattan. It’s true that she disliked The French Connection. She said, “It’s certainly exciting, but that excitement isn’t necessarily a pleasure.” But with regard to Chinatown, her opinion was mixed. She says, “It’s all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look and a fascination.” That doesn’t sound like “active opposition” to me. Regarding Woody Allen’s Manhattan, she didn’t review it, not even in capsule form. In her review of Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, she refers to Manhattan as part of his “ongoing poem to love and New York City” (“Couples,” Hooked, 1989). Therefore, Heller is wrong with respect to two out of the three movies he says Kael “actively opposed.” And, contrary to what he says, there were many seventies’ classics that she praised, e.g., Last Tango in Paris, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, The Godfather, Part II, Nashville, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter.

7. Heller rarely quotes from Kael’s writing. And when he does, it’s not to celebrate her style, but to embarrass her reputation. For example, his quote from her Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid review is a bridge to a wretched anecdote in which George Roy Hill calls her a “miserable bitch” because she conveyed the impression (apparently wrong) that some of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s dialogue was taped in a studio. In his piece, Heller constantly tells us what Kael was doing, instead of showing us by adducing examples from her work: “She was constantly goading the industry to try harder, but dismissed pictures that seemed to try harder”; “She worried – and this is essentially an avant-garde worry – that audiences suckling a teat of cynicism and easy entertainment would lose their appetite for creative urgency”; “She reviewed many of these movies [late sixties’ films] with gusto”; “Kael didn’t just say, This is a bad movie because it fails to turn me on. Instead, she strung movies loosely together, as if mapping out the lines of tradition, and weather-tested them against a couple of things: authenticity of experience and the proved canon of noncimematic art.” Reading this stuff, I found myself thinking, For gods sake, Heller, shut up for a moment and let Kael speak. The same goes for his endless theorizing. “What She Said” is awash with airy theories, e.g., “Kael fell in love with writing about movies, because, unlike every other creative form at the time, they had no “tradition” from the audience’s point of view.” Really? James Agee was in the audience from 1941 to 1948, writing reviews for Time and The Nation. He and countless other moviegoers (including Kael, of course) had a very clear sense of movie tradition stretching back to Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and beyond. Kael fell in love with writing about movies because she loved writing and she loved movies. In the introduction to her wonderful For Keeps, she says, “As the seventies gave way to the eighties, the excitement I had earlier found in the movies gave way to the pleasure I found in writing.”

8. This brings me to my main complaint about Heller’s piece. He fails to see that it's Kael’s writing that accounts for her work’s endurance. He talks about how a lot of people today dream of lost opportunities, and he says, “Kael’s great achievement was to fight this way of thinking, to persuade her readers that work is always done with the machinery at hand.” Maybe that’s one of Kael’s achievements, but it’s not her greatest. Her greatest achievement was the creation of a style of writing that let you in on her thought processes as she wrote. Before she came along, no one did that. She was the first. Now, almost every critic writes that way, her way. She changed the way writers write (and think) about art. I yearn for a close, literary study of her work, one that considers her writing from the level of language, syntax, structure. Heller’s piece is just about as wide of the mark as you can get.

Postscript: Elif Batuman enriches this week’s issue with a cabinet-of-wonders piece titled “Natural Histories” that, in its combinative strangeness, its mixture of history, ecology, eco-poetry, wildlife, biology, literature, politics, travelogue, and memoir, is some sort of masterpiece. Its final two paragraphs are exquisite. Carolyn Drake's photograph is superb.