MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

“Do you know what this is?” Dağdeviren held up a bunch of greens.

“I don’t.”

“It has lots of names. We call it snake’s pillow, or snakeweed, or heathen’s beet. Do you want me to wreck your palate, early in the morning?”

“Well—OK,” I said.

“It’s really going to be awful,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t mind? Here, just take a bite.” He tore off a leaf and handed it to me. It tasted fresh and not unpleasant. “No, don’t chew it. Spit it out. Spit it out!” I furtively deposited the half-chewed heathen’s beet leaf in a nearby pile of detritus. My mouth was filled with a numb burning sensation, as sometimes caused by fresh pineapple. [NB---Neither my editor, the fact-checker, nor the copy-editor, who considered "numb burning" to be oxymoronic, had ever had this experience, which is, however, well-documented on the Internet.]

“Is it burning?” Dağdeviren asked.

“It is.”

“It’s actually a poisonous plant—you can poison someone with the roots. But it makes a delicious soup. There are special ways of preparing it, that the people know. The leaves will burn you if you eat them raw. That’s a joke I like to play on people. I gave some to my big brother once—that was worth seeing. He’s chewing and chewing. First he says, ‘It’s delicious!’ Then he says, ‘It’s a bit sweet! It tastes,’ he says, ‘just like almonds!’ Then he says, ‘You son of a bitch, what did you just give me?’ You should have seen his face.”

Another day, I had occasion to witness Dağdeviren playing this same trick on two of his acquaintances, at the Kasımpaşa market in Istanbul. Though it was late in the season, Dağdeviren was looking for milk-cap mushrooms. We ran into the famous collector, Mert Sandalcı, who had written an article for Food and Culture about collecting gazoz bottles. Sandalcı was accompanied by a young man with thick plastic-framed glasses and a knit cap, who had written a book on the vicissitudes of the potato in the Ottoman Empire. They were also looking for milk-cap mushrooms. Dağdeviren greeted them effusively and plied them with heathen beets.

“What is it?” Sandalcı asked, munching on a leaf.

“I don’t know,” said Dağdeviren innocently.

“You really don’t know, or you’re messing with us?” asked the potato scholar.

The two chewed for a minute, intent expressions on their faces.

“It’s sweet,” mused Sandalcı.

“Is it borage?” asked the potato scholar.

“No…”

The victims swallowed. “It burns like nettles!” Sandalcı shouted, and the potato scholar uttered a mild oath. Dağdeviren roared with laughter. He and Sandalcı began to discuss the preparation of onions in topik, a traditional Armenian Christmas dumpling made of boiled potatoes and chickpeas, stuffed with onions, pine nuts, currants, allspice, and tahini. According to Armenian custom, Dağdeviren serves topik only between December 24 and January 6.

“We caramelize the onions first for three and a half hours,” he said. “Others, out of laziness, stuff the topik with raw onions and just let them boil.”

Sandalcı, perhaps still under the influence of the heathen beet, expressed some skepticism. “The one thing I hate is for stringy onions to come out of topik when you bite it.” He went on to praise the preparation technique of another restaurant.

“Come try my topik, and you’ll see,” Dağdeviren said, a bit tersely. Sandalcı and the potato scholar wandered off. Dağdeviren proceeded to find the only farmer in the entire market who was selling the kind of mushrooms they were all looking for—known as kanlıca, they had giant flat crowns of a gorgeous green-tinged auburn color—and bought up the entire stock.

Dağdeviren was more solicitous of my condition than with Sandalcı. “Do you want a kiwi?” he asked. “Kiwi cuts the burning.” I was puzzled, until I noticed that in fact a farmer nearby was selling an enormous pile of kiwis. “Kiwi, kiwi, kiwi!” called the farmer hopefully.  I assured them that I was doing OK.