My Life and Thoughts

One Wednesday, I joined Musa for an excursion to the market in Kandıra, two hours from Istanbul. We met at eight in the morning at the restaurant. The bakers had already come and left at four to start the bread. Now, in the kitchen, which was below ground level, a tall and extraordinarily grim-looking master chef was overseeing various simmering pots containing giant milk-cap mushrooms, mumbar, dolma, sheeps’ feet, and dried beans. The beans came from Çiya’s fields, located on the outskirts of Istanbul, and had been dried during the summer.

“We don’t use anything frozen—everything is either fresh, or pickled or dried by our people. The only ingredients we buy out of season are tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers—those we buy all year round. Have you seen one of these?” Musa handed me a gigantic wrinkled lemon-like object, the size of a human head. “It’s called kebbet. The peel is two fingers thick. Inside there’s a tiny fruit, more sour than a lemon. We use it for jam.” He cut a slice and handed it to me. It was in fact very sour. The kebbet, a kind of bergamot, are grown exclusively for Çiya by a farm in Antakya.

We proceeded to a nearby parking lot, in the courtyard of an apartment complex. Musa owns several of the buildings: some are warehouses,  others, residences for the master chefs and their families. Inside Dağdeviren’s Volkswagen SUV, I noticed a Johnny Cash CD.

“He’s good, I like him,” he said. “I got that CD in Memphis. There’s a great music culture in Memphis.”

“Did you visit Elvis’s house?”

“Yes, that was interesting. It was like a state museum of some kind. But what I really liked there were the blues bars. I’m crazy about blues music, the kind that the black people sing. There are tiny bars there with an unbelievable atmosphere, it’s genuinely exciting.” As we began the drive to Kandıra, Musa explained that he had been in town for the Memphis in May festival in 2008, when there had been a Turkish theme, and had cooked a meal for 150 people, including a Turkish consul general. He had prepared a meal centered around ritual foods. The consul general hadn’t known any of them.

“In the Black Sea, there are special foods to bring the sun. In one ceremony they throw oil in the air and say, ‘Now give me the red thing.’ What do you think the red thing is?”

“The sun?”

“That’s right! Then there are rain rituals. In one ritual, children have to gather 10,000 rocks. Can you imagine? Why 10,000, why not 1,000?” Musa shook his head in amazement, changing lanes. He told me about another rain ceremony in which everyone in the village goes to the graveyard and eats a special rain börek. “And they don’t just do it once—they repeat it until it rains.”

We drove past a Greek-owned butcher’s shop which Musa identified as one of the only shops in Istanbul that sells pork. “They’ve been there for decades. They have good mortadella.”

Dağdeviren, who believes religion, along with ethnicity, to be one of the two greatest obstacles to human progress, does not go out of his way to avoid pork. In Memphis, he stumbled upon the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, where he tried barbecue smoked ribs for the first time. “It was insanely good,” he recalled. He had been so taken with barbecue ribs that he actually joined the team Oinking on the River. “They were very friendly,” he recalled. “I just went to them, said their food had impressed me, and asked if I could help them and study what they were doing. They said, ‘Sure—welcome to America.’”

On the same trip, Musa had made a point to spend a week visiting a Native American reservation in Texas. “I was curious how they eat,” he explained. “So I went there and saw how they ate. Mostly, they ate fast food. They ate a lot of ketchup. There was an old woman who was making baskets out of pine needles—that was interesting. And then there was a festival, where they made corn soup. Other than at the festival, though, they only ate fast food, or prepared foods. I had brought some chickpeas and lentils—I had to cook them myself. A young girl there saw me cooking, and said, ‘I can’t eat organic food.’ That’s what she called everything but fast food.”

We also passed a twenty-four-hour tripe salon. “That’s a great place—the oldest tripe salon in Istanbul. It’s run by Armenians. Have you had breakfast? We could stop here, we have time.” Musa slowed down and seemed to be looking for a parking space. “I have to warn you though, it’s a bit heavy… no? Don’t worry. Not everyone likes tripe in the morning.”

He told me about the time his friend, the San Francisco chef and restauranteur Patricia Unterman, had arrived in Istanbul at four in the morning. Since she had been hungry, they had headed straight from the airport to the tripe salon. “We had a translator with us, and I was telling her about all the different kinds of people who come there. Drunks, of course”—tripe soup is a famous Turkish hangover remedy—“and thugs, and prostitutes. Just when I was saying that, the door opened and a big group of just those kinds of people came in! Of course,” he continued, “lots of normal people go there, too. People who like tripe.”

Kandıra is located on the Black Sea, in Kocaeli province, near Izmit. On the highway, Musa told me how a group from the restaurant had traveled this road in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake, bringing provisions to stricken areas such as Gölcük and Düzce. Military officers had stopped them outside Gölcük, saying they weren’t allowed into the disaster area. “It turned out they wanted a bribe,” Musa explained. “We gave them what they wanted—they took some stuff from the truck—but it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel sad in your heart.” In Gölcük they had seen terrible things: someone stole a ring from the finger of a man with a mangled hand. “The officers did nothing to stop them. They’re the people in charge of protecting us, and they were no help. The Israeli government sent some people with electric generators—we helped carry them. The people from Israel worked well, but our people were stealing things. It was horrible to see. Another time we went to Düzce, with tents and blankets and soup—mostly soup, because what does a person want at a time like that? Soup, right? I’ll never forget the terror I saw there. There were cars crushed like cans, flattened houses, and the smell of terror—it was something else.” We drove for some minutes in silence.

“I don’t like giving bribes,” Musa resumed. “It makes me feel sick. Here in Turkey, the police pull you over for speeding, and they say something like, ‘Hmm, what are we going to do about this?’ They’re waiting for you to offer them a bribe. But I always say, ‘You’d better write me a ticket, so I’ll learn the traffic laws better.’”