Yogurt

Bell peppers change in color as they ripen from olive, pale, and bright green to vivid yellow and red. The red ones are the ripest and sweetest. In Turkey they are roasted or deep-fried whole and served hot as a first course accompanied with yogurt or with a tomato sauce. There is no need to peel them. A long, pointed, piquant (but not hot) variety is also prepared in the same way.

Fava beans are the most important vegetable of Egypt. Buy young, tender ones in their season. If they are very young, you can cook them in their pods, which you cut into pieces. Some supermarkets sell young fava beans already shelled in packets, which do not need to be skinned. Older beans have tough skins as well as tough pods. The skinned frozen ones you can buy in Middle Eastern stores are particularly good.

A delicious Turkish dish—the rich meat is offset by the cool yogurt.

Because of its whiteness, this is a festive dish served on the New Year to augur a year full of happiness. It is served hot with rice in winter, and cold in summer.

This intriguing layered dish with a delicious mix of textures and flavors is a specialty of the city of Hama in Syria.

Recipes for meat cooked in yogurt abound in medieval Arabic cookery manuals, where the dish was called madira. As early as the tenth century, the Arab writer Badia’z Zaman wrote a tale entitled “Al Madirya” about the dish. Such dishes are still popular in the Arab world. The name of this Lebanese version, which means “his mother’s milk,” implies that the meat of a young animal is cooked in its own mother’s milk. It can be made with chunks of meat or lamb shanks. Serve with plain rice (page 337) or rice with vermicelli (page 340).

Hardly any dishes were invented by restaurant chefs in Turkey, but this one was, by a man called Iskander; that is why it is also known as Iskander kebab. It made its appearance in the 1920s, after the Ottoman Empire had crumbled and Turkey became a republic. The cooks who had worked in the palace kitchens and in the homes of the aristocracy (much of the aristocracy moved to Egypt) became unemployed and looked for ways to survive. Many of them opened restaurants—lokandesi and kebab houses. This dish has remained a mainstay of Turkish kebab houses, where it is sometimes served dramatically in a dome-shaped copper dish—the type that was used at the palace. On one level it reflects the preponderance of yogurt in the Turkish kitchen. I serve it in deep individual clay bowls which can be kept hot in the oven. It is a multi-layered extravaganza. There is toasted pita bread at the bottom. It is covered by a light sauce made with fresh tomatoes, topped by a layer of yogurt. This is sprinkled with olive oil which has been colored with paprika and with pine nuts. Skewers of grilled ground meat kofta or small burgers (as in this recipe) are laid on top. The tomato sauce and the meat must be very hot when you assemble the dish. The yogurt should be at room temperature.

This multi-layered dish is complex and time-consuming, and I don’t expect many people to attempt it. But it is very important in the Arab world, especially in Syria and Lebanon. And it is one of those recipes which bring me a flood of memories. I had received a letter from a woman I did not know in Beirut saying that she would like to meet me and that she had recipes for me. It was the late Josephine Salam. On our first meeting—at Claridge’s tearoom, where a band played Noël Coward tunes—she brought me a bottle of orange-blossom water and a copper pan. She volunteered to come to my house and show me how to make fattet jaj. I got the ingredients, and we made so much that we had to call in the neighbors to eat. I saw her for many years after that, and we had many meals together. It was the time of the civil war in Lebanon, and I received through her an ongoing account of everyday life in the ravaged city. Her daughter Rana has become a conceptual artist. For her thesis at the Royal College of Art in London, she asked me to give a lecture on the history of Middle Eastern food. She filled the college with hangings announcing the event, with my portrait painted on by a cinema-poster painter in Egypt. She laid out foods and spices as in a souk, put on a tape of Egyptian street sounds and music, and offered Arab delicacies.

A Turkish dish in which yogurt, an important feature in Turkish cooking, is flavored with cardamom and ginger.

This Turkish way of embellishing poached eggs is also good with fried eggs.

This is one of my favorite soups from Egypt.

A simple and delightful Armenian peasant soup.

In this lovely Turkish soup, the egg yolk and the flour prevent the yogurt from curdling. The rice is best cooked separately and added in before serving, as it gets bloated and mushy if left in the soup too long.

Many Middle Eastern dishes call for yogurt as a cooking liquid or sauce which needs to be cooked—boiled or simmered—rather than just heated. Salted goat’s milk yogurt, which was used in similar recipes in olden times, can be cooked without curdling, which explains why medieval recipes do not give any indication of ways of preventing yogurt from curdling. Cooking, however, causes yogurt made with cow’s milk to curdle, and stabilizers such as cornstarch or egg white are required to prevent this.

In Turkey all kinds of vegetables, including cauliflower and green beans, are dressed with a nut sauce called tarator. Here celeriac and carrots make a good combination of flavor and color, and yogurt is a refreshing addition to the sauce.

This common Turkish way of serving eggplants is simple and quite delicious.

This refreshing Iranian salad has a pure and delicate flavor.

This popular Turkish salad can be served as a cold summer soup. We sometimes used to drain the yogurt through a fine cloth to thicken it (see page 111), but now you can buy a thick strained Greek variety.

This version has a delicate flavor and is rather creamier than most. My mother discovered it in the Sudan, and has made it ever since. It can be a dip or a sauce.