Yashim’s Kitchen III

I don’t know if you’re having turkey this year? Or a goose? We are going for guinea fowl because they are so tasty, with a duck for the crisp skin. I quite like turkey but it makes a greasy stock, and a good stock is what you want for this pilaf.

Mehmet the Conqueror’s Grand Vizier used to serve this as a working lunch in divan, the council meeting held on a Friday. Into it he tossed a gold chickpea for some lucky pasha to discover (or break a tooth on): the Ottoman version of putting a sixpence in the Christmas pudding, perhaps.

 

Ingredients:

Basmati rice

Chickpeas, soaked overnight and boiled for an hour (but tinned chickpeas are pretty handy, too)

An onion

butter, salt, festive stock

 

Rinse the rice in cold water until the water is clear – this is to remove the starch, which would make the rice too sticky. Leave it to soak while you melt the onions in butter. When they are soft, add the chickpeas.

Drain the rice, stir it into the pan and add enough stock to cover the rice and a little more.

When the stock has all been absorbed, check the rice; it should be a little nutty, but almost edible. If necessary add a little more stock until the rice is almost done.

Now comes the strange pilaf magic: cover the pan with a cloth and a lid. Over a whisper of heat, or none, let the rice steam for fifteen minutes.

Turn the rice out into a dish, helping to fluff it out with a fork.

This rice method sounds like complicated alchemy, but it’s simple really – and it works.

 

Yashim’s Kitchen II – lamb kebab

Effortless and classic, these kebabs are best gently grilled over a throbbing mass of hot charcoal.

Ingredients

2 lbs boned shoulder of lamb, cut into inch cubes

2 onions

some garlic cloves, crushed

A small handful of cumin seeds

Salt

Pitta bread

Red onion, sliced

Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Lemon wedges

 

Grate the onions into a colander set on a plate, sprinkle with salt, and leave to sweat for twenty minutes. Press the onions down with a spoon to extract all the juice, chuck the pulp and mix the juice with the garlic and the cumin seeds, roasted and crushed.

Stir in the lamb and marinade at room temperature for a few hours, then thread the meat onto skewers.

Sprinkle the pitta breads with water, and grill them on both sides for a minute.

Grill the meat for 2-3 minutes on each side.

Pop meat, onion and parsley into the bread, with a squeeze of lemon, and eat with both hands.

 

 

Stuffed mackerel

 

With some trepidation I prepared this rather spectacular dish in front of sixty people at a literary festival one Summer. It was a complete triumph, as you can see from my expression in the photo.

 

 Yashim cooks this, too, in An Evil Eye.

Ingredients:

A large fresh mackerel, not gutted

Olive oil

For the stuffing: A few shallots, scoop of pine nuts, scoop of chopped blanched almonds, scoop of chopped walnuts, a handful of currants soaked in warm water, a few dried apricots finely chopped, and some herbs and spices – generous pinches of cinnamon, allspice, ground cloves, kirmiz biber or chilli powder, sugar and dill and parsley, finely chopped.

 

Cooking is easy – it’s getting there that’s the challenge. You have to make a small incision beneath the gills, and then draw out the guts, and chuck them away. Lay the mackerel on a board and beat it with a rolling pin, or an empty bottle, making sure you’ve snapped the backbone. Massage the skin gently, to loosen it from the flesh and finally – this is the bit that makes your audience, if you have one, groan out loud – squeeze the whole thing out through the incision below the gills!

It is not easy. Go gently, trying not to tear the skin, as if you were squeezing a tube of toothpaste. You are left with an empty skin, still attached to the head. Rinse it out, making sure to remove any little bones, and set it aside.

Now make the stuffing: sweat the chopped shallots in oil, add all the nuts, and let them colour. Add all the other ingredients except the herbs, and stir them around.

Pick out as much of the flesh as you can from the bones, and mix it into the stuffing, with herbs, a squeeze of lemon, and salt and pepper to taste.

Cook it through for another couple of minutes. Let it cool a bit, and stuff that mackerel! Use a teaspoon, and gradually fill the skin, squeezing the stuffing right down to the end. It looks like a mackerel again.

You can roll the fish in flour and fry it, or better still brush with oil and set it under the grill, hot, until the skin begins to blister.

Finally, with a very sharp knife, slice the mackerel thickly, lay it on a plate like a fish, and serve with lemon wedges.

 

Yashim’s kitchen I

Yashim, the protagonist of four novels in the award winning detective series set in 1830s Istanbul, is more than a sleuth – he’s also a great cook. In his apartment in Balat he prepares some of the dishes for which the Turks, with their long Ottoman heritage, are justly famous: not for nothing is Turkish cookery described as one of the three great cuisines of the world, along with French and Chinese.

Yashim loves cooking, which gives him time and space to think, and readers seem to love his recipes just as much. Like a turban glimpsed on the street, a draft of sweet coffee or the slender shadow of a minaret, Yashim’s dishes help to recreate the flavours of Istanbul – its abundance of seasonal vegetables, fresh fish drawn from the waters of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, the ubiquitous soups and grilled lamb, the yoghurt and the spices that scent the air of the Egyptian Bazaar.

Each of the novels, beginning with The Janissary Tree, has figured several recipes perfected in the sultan’s kitchens – although the fish stew which appears in An Evil Eye, the latest in the series, is really a Greek fisherman’s feast, and the recipe for that – kakavia – can be found here on my blog.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting some new recipes for readers to try – maybe for some people they’ll suggest a break from turkey leftovers (I mean the bird, not the country)!

The quantities are not precise. As I wrote in Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire: ‘The French emperor Napoleon III and his empress, Eugenie, spent a week in Istanbul as the Sultan’s guests in 1862. The Empress was so taken with a concoction of aubergine puree and lamb that she asked for permission to send her own chef to the kitchens to study the recipe. The request was graciously granted by their host, and the chef duly set off with his scales and notebook. The Sultan’s cook slung him out, roaring, ‘An imperial chef cooks with his feelings, his eyes, and his nose!’

Be warned.

getting out a bit more

Back from a glorious morning at the Guildford Book Festival – glorious, not least, for dragging me out into the dawn in Dorset, and the mist curving over the hils as the sun rose red. After a frustrating week of plotting – a film treatment, of all things – it was good fun to arrive at the Electric Theatre and find myself amongst friends old and new, readers, writers – and Tim O’Kelly, who runs the One Tree Bookshop in Petersfield. Tim’s shop is what all book shops should be, and the Guardian have just said so here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/01/day-in-life-independent-bookshop

The event was a ‘Reader’s Day’, which meant a medley of small and large events with various authors including Elizabeth Speller, Mark Mills, Suzannah Dunn, S.J. Parris (aka Stephania Merritt) and Imogen Robertson, for whom I feel an avuncular affection, having given her a well-deserved good review in the New York Times for her first book, Instruments of Darkness. A great deal of laughter, some very interesting book chat, and – as ever – three cheers for the librarians of Surrey, who turned out as volunteers to make sure we got to the sandwiches.

Coming home I listened to Katie Fforde enthusing about Georgette Heyer; she was, apparently, extremely rude about all her millions of fans. Perhaps she should have gone to the Electric?

 

Writing – or idling?

This morning, after the usual flurry of sending the children off to school, I found myself still in pyjamas and so I got back into bed, to read a bit, and maybe think.

Kate, just about to do a school run herself, didn’t think it looked much like work. Her whole attitude bristled with suspicion. Which raises the question of what, exactly, writing does look like.

I suppose St Jerome is the proper model.

But later, perched Jerome-like in front of my screen, I happened to come across this lovely literary blog, with a review of Lords of the Horizons, at http://tinylibrary.blogspot.com/2011/02/lords-of-horizons-by-jason-goodwin.html

To the casual observer, I was by then at work, like our saint here. But actually I was just messing about.

 

Come along! Events in the next month…

Guildford Book festival – Join Jason at the Reader’s Day on Saturday October 15th. http://www.guildfordbookfestival.co.uk/ 

that’s bound to be jolly, and then at Daunt’s Book Shop 

Roger Crowley in conversation with Jason Goodwin

Wednesday, 19th October at 7.00pm in Marylebone

A magisterial work of gripping history, Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune tells the story of the Venetian ascent from lagoon dwellers to the greatest power in the Mediterranean – an epic five-hundred-year voyage that encompassed crusade and trade, plague, sea battles and colonial adventure.

In Venice, the path to empire unfolded in a series of extraordinary contests – the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, the fight to the finish with Genoa and a desperate defence against the Turks. Under the lion banner of St Mark, Venice created an empire of ports and naval bases, which funnelled the goods of the world through its wharfs. In the process the city became the richest place on earth – a brilliant mosaic fashioned from trade on one hand, and plunder on the other. The story is told in a gripping narrative that will fascinate anyone who loves Venice and the Mediterranean world.

Jason Goodwin made his name with wonderful travel writing, and he has gone on to enjoy huge success with his superb Ottoman thrillers that center on the seductive character of Yashim the Eunuch. The latest in the series, An Evil Eye, was published in the summer.

Tickets are £8 (including a glass of wine and 20% off the speaker’s books). They may be purchased from our Marylebone shop in person, with credit/debit card by telephone (020 7224 2295) or here online.

BUT IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, TOO -

Eype Centre for the Arts Autumn 2011 ‘Book ‘n Author’ Week Literary Festival in Dorset, on Friday 21st October

Friday October 21st at 6.30pm: An evening of Turkish Delight – a Turkish buffet followed by a talk by JASON GOODWIN – scholar of the Ottoman empire and author ofAN EVIL EYE, the latest of the Yashim detective series.

Increasingly drawn to 19th century Istanbul life and Turkish cooking we are hosting a buffet of delicious Turkish food to be followed by a talk by Jason on what draws him to the city where East meets West. An accomplished travel writer he has in the past few years turned his considerable skills to writing detective novels set in Istanbul in the early 1800s. His first in the series The Janissary Tree introduced Yashim, the Turkish slipper wearing debonair detective which became a best seller and won the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 2007. This was followed by The Snake Stone and The Bellini Card. These have been translated into more than 40 languages. An Evil Eye is the latest in the series. A review of the book in the Independent says, ‘Historical novels may be sometimes lightly regarded, but this one is full of the virtues of that genre, bringing to life an immeasurably different world’ and ‘The bare outlines are enlivened by Goodwin’s skilful use of colour and detail, especially Yashim’s recipes, which set the reader drooling.’

Tickets

Turkish Delight evening on Friday 21st with Jason Goodwin at £12.00 to include buffet

Available from the Bridport Tourist Information Centre on 01308 424901.

http://www.eypechurcharts.co.uk/2011_literary_festival.html

AND FINALLY, RUDE DEBATE AT

The Bridport Literary Festival

http://www.bridlit.com/index.php?page=2011

The Festival Debate

Friend or Foe?

Dr. Philip Mansel - author of LEVANT: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, Roger Crowley - author ofCITY OF FORTUNE: A History of Venice, Professor Norman Stone - author of TURKEY: A Short History and Jason Goodwin creator of the ‘Yashim’ mysteries. Turkey has always been at loggerheads with Europe. Our 4 historians debate how European is Turkey and how Turkish is Europe? The relationship has always been marked by links as well as by conflicts – in diplomacy, culture and economics.

Thursday 10 November 6:30pm

Tickets: £8.00

a great blog

Here’s a link to a great blog by  Miranda Innes. Do you want to learn how to draw, or stay in Perugia, or do yoga?

Or simply relax in Marrakesh?

Miranda is my aunt, and all this is good:

http://mirandainnes.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ten good books

Here’s a list from yesterday’s Guardian: 10 of my favourite books about Turkey (though to judge from some of the comments, you might think I’d written a list called ‘The Only Ten Books about Turkey You Should Ever Read’!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/31/jason-goodwin-top-10-books-turkey

See what you think…!

The list was republished in the liberal Turkish paper Taraf, too:

Housekeeping and apologies

Shortly before the British launch of An Evil Eye, a greedy web-hosting company in Melbourne made off with my website. Largely on principle (and partly because they asked for money, and I’d lost all my original set-up passwords, user names and such), I have walked away from it, with my nose in the air.

I’m about to start another at www.jasongoodwin.info. My children assure me that the dot-info tag is very low, but there’s someone else who has .com and frankly, .info describes exactly what I want. Plus it’s delightfully cheap.

Meantime, apologies to anyone searching elsewhere on the web. Come back later!

I’ve had some great feedback for An Evil Eye already, both in the States and in the UK, and I was chuffed that the Christian Science Monitor chose The Janissary Tree and its sequels as one of its favourite foreign detective series…

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2011/0701/Top-7-detective-series-set-in-foreign-locales/Yashim-the-Eunuch-series-by-Jason-Goodwin

And here is Marco Ventura’s delicious cover, for Faber in the UK.