“Ok, shall we go this way,” says Nil. She always gives directions like this.
I’ve come to meet my friend Nil, who has a supper club tomorrow — her first! — and she’s going to show me how to cook Aegean Turkish food: how to make dolmas, lentil koftas, borek. She’ll make the salads and so on tomorrow and will, hopefully, give me the recipes.
She lives in North London, near Seven Sisters, a grimy and delicious part of London. Here’s the city’s second-biggest South/Central American community — up the road in Tottenham is the Latin Village, an indoor food market (and, as these things are, a community asset) that was recently saved from the jaws of developers.
Our first stop is Merca Express Latino, El Dorado Restaurant on Google Maps. Inside the smell of sweet dough, maize, pork and people speaking Spanish — “they always think I’m Spanish” says Nilm. I tell her the same thing happens to me in Polish shops, that I always feel a bit embarrassed replying in English. We stand before the display of empanadas and chicharrones; balls of fried maize stuffed with meat or cheese called pastels; neat, pretty tamales; whole plantains cut open in the middle with cheese inside. We ask the woman serving us her favourites, and she indulges our questions. We take pork empanada and pastel and sit outside drinking Manzana Postobon, which is bright pink and tastes like childhood.
Nil had lived in Winchester before London. “I liked it, it’s like a very pastoral idea of England, like a storybook. But I had very olive skin and where ever I went people’s first question would be where are you from. Which is tiring.”
We stop at her favoured Turkish supermarket. I watch her expertly picking big beef tomatoes, sniffing them, turning them over in her hand. I look at the neat displays of fruit, the half-moons of watermelon astride their crate and think how much I love London.
We talk about different Turkish ingredients and I ask her about the dried and fermented wheat crisps one turns into soup. “Oh, you mean tarhana. It’s very good, villagey, sour. Sort of nice sort of horrible. It's better to make the soup with a course powder rather than the crisps, which people eat like crisps actually.” I had done the same, finding the odd yogurtiness of them bizarre and compelling. More questions and more detailed, generous answers. I consider getting my notebook out, but it's in my bag under a jumble of jars she’s had me carry.
What are we making? “Ok, so dolma, lentil kofta, borek, an Armenian white bean dish with cinnamon, muhammara. That’s today. First, though, we’ll have matcha latté. I prefer the cheap matcha. You want cow's milk or oat?” Looking for something she says “Oh, try this. It’s a mastic liquor, like the coffee” — she’d been telling me about a mastic laced Turkish coffee she’d make me — “smell it, try it.” A proper cook so she really sniffs the bottle, putting her nose right into everything, and throughout the day has flecks of herbs and spice on its tip. The liquor tastes like arak but if you removed the anise and replaced it with the sickly sweet warmth of mastic. She shakes the lattés in jars because she can’t be bothered to use the whisk, we drink out of small bowls. The sofa is covered in bread sculptures Nil made yesterday and I tap them when she’s not looking — hard. I’d wanted to buy a bread face in Barcelona, so hope she’ll give me one after the dinner. (She did.)
Work is slow and gentle, very relaxed. “I want two types of onion, one cubed, one julienned.” As we slice onion we talk about our mothers, about the food they cooked, or didn’t. It must’ve looked like a serious conversation as our eyes are streaming. By julienne she doesn’t mean little battons but slicing the onion down while holding it in your hand, making little crescent moons. We agree it's a very Turkish way of slicing onions. Maybe that’s what's on the flag? “The two most important things in Turkish cooking are olive oil and onions. Much more oil than you think you need and good olive oil, and onion, because of its sweetness and how moist it makes things. Especially for stuffing. Lots of oil, lots of onion.”
She heats the pan, tips in the diced onion, and then pours the oil on top. Odd. “I never thought about it. I think it makes the onion sweet rather than them frying straight away, which is more savoury." These will be for the dolma filling and the lentil koftas. Feeling clever, I ask “so lentil kofta, it’s called kofta because kofta is the shape, not the ingredients, right?” “Exactly!” “Ok and is this maybe a peasant dish, using lentils?” “No, I think it's more housewife cuisine.” “Oh?”
“There is a tradition called Golden Day where wives meet in the day, from 12 or 1, at one of their houses to eat together. Maybe once a month. And each guest brings a piece of gold to the host and the host cooks. The gold isn’t used, it circulates between them all. So they sit and listen to music and eat food and chat together, a purely women’s space, somewhere to relax. You have tea with the food and coffee afterward, and you finish at four or so, so you can get home in time for the husband. And they bring the leftovers to the husband so that they’re not cooking that day. So the host will make a lot. As well as lentil kofta you will have salads, vegetables, dolmas, light things. It’s similar to the food we’re making.”
She puts most of the onions in another pan, puts that aside, and adds tomato paste, mixing it in. “It’s different to Italian tomato paste” — I’m given it to smell and taste, it's a little sharper. After cooking the paste in the softened onions — which have been cooking for half an hour or so — she adds red lentils and a lot of cumin, mixing them into the oil. “Mmm! Smell!” I smell — the sweet onions and cumin are heady. Over the lentils she pours boiling water, from the kettle she mostly keeps topped up beside the oven, and covers, keeping a low heat. These low heats mean everything is sweeter, and that everything can be left while other work is done.
“My granny had a farm in central Anatolia. Not one with animals just with fields of crops, what is the word for it?” A common thing with someone speaking English, is they’ll have two specific words while English will have one. Dull language. “Oh, it's still just a farm. Arable I guess.” “We would be in the fields and our snack would be a piece of country bread and some spring onions and herbs you’d pick from the field, lots of sorrel.” I think of Caroline Conran’s recipe for a spring onion omelette — more like a scramble — made by French harvesters on the side of fields in a pan over a little fire, I’d made it once a week when I was 17.
While the lentils cook we chop herbs for the dolma filling and soak vine leaves in water. “This is important because the brine can be too salty. It’s important to taste the leave too, to see how salty they are, and think about this when you make the filling.” They sit, big clumps, looking seaweedish, rockpools on the sideboard. The lentils have turned into a soup, daal — “though we would blend them up for a soup. So, now we add the bulgur.” She gets a packet of the rough ground sort that’s only a little bigger than polenta and pours a generous amount into the soup, mixing it in with a spoon, then covers with a lid and sets it aside. This will cook the wheat and form a dough for the koftas, the colour is a deep orange.
There’s a pile of chard on the side, and she’s started quickly chopping it. “Want me to help?” So I chop, small pieces, which will be for the borek filling. She’s not using cheese in this one, so that the whole menu will be vegan. The chard is added to the onions we’d made into crescents, which are soft and swimming in oil, along with fresh dill and parsley, and then she covers. When everything has wilted she’ll uncover to get rid of the excess water. She’ll made the pastry tomorrow. And there are the beans to put on! They’ve been soaking, little shells, happy in the corner and she tips them into big saucepans. Her stock ingredients are similar to my own but differ when she adds juniper berries and cinammon sticks. No lemon either, because it’s overpowering.
She soaks blackcurrants in water — the whole day, when I’m not chopping or doing light washing up, for which I'm thanked profusely, I’m following her around with a notebook — and has me grate tomatoes for the dolma filling. “Halve the tomato and grate it by pressing the middle hard against the grater, you don’t want to grate any of the skin. When you're done you’ll get an inverted tomato.” Now she warms the onions she set aside while making the kofta and adds the grated tomato. Never bringing to the boil, everything is allowed its time. A pattern emerges, sanity to what seemed a little like chaos or disorder. Things are finished with regularity. When the tomato has cooked, for ten or so minutes, she adds the soaked currants — “if they’re not sweet enough we’ll add a little sugar” — along with black pepper and double that amount of cinnamon, pimento and cumin. She stirs and inhales and beckons me over to inhale too. “If it smells too tomatoey, you have to add more spice, the same amount of everything.” She adds more spice. "Cumin is also very important, lots of cumin — do I have enough? I think so. But not so much you drown the cinnamon."
Now she adds rice, currants, pinenuts and stirs them into the tomato and onion — as one would at the beginning of a risotto. She tries this and I laugh as she grimaces and crunches the hard rice. “When I was little, and everything was so organic, from the country, not processed, sometimes there would be little stones in the rice. So my job was to pick the stones from the rice before my mother cooked it. I’d forgotten that.” She adds a generous amount of parsley, twice as much dill, and a tbsp of dried mint. “I prefer dried mint because fresh mint loses its flavour when you cook it and becomes so dark.” I agree. The texture, too, is always quite tough. She tries, adds a little sugar, a little salt — “but remember the salty vines” — and adds as much water as rice and atop this a great deal of olive oil. She brings the mixture almost to a boil and turns it right down, giving one stir then covering, letting the rice — a special Turkish rice called Super Baldo — cook until it’s al-dente. "Do not stir it." She says she puts her mixture into roasted peppers, too, but this isn’t traditional. Once the rice is cooked we put it outside to cool.
Now we sit and drink some prosecco. I ask her about Turkey, and she talks about it with such love and such sadness. “My friends have to switch themselves off, to be able to get along, to live. It’s really sad. It’s really difficult to be political.” I ask if she’d been in Istanbul, where she'd lived before coming to England, for the Gezy Park protests, and she had, working as a medic. “Did it feel hopeful?” “No, it felt like a test. And the test went the right way for the government. It felt hopeless.” We talk about horror movies — I mention the Turkish horror film Baskin and ask if she’s seen it, and she says she was at the premiere and knows the director.
The dough for the lentil koftas is cool now and we tipit into a pile to pull pieces from, rolling them into little balls — so not actually koftas — placing these into a tray. It’s very therapeutic. Nil tells me about the house she lived in in the summer as a child — she could see across the Aegean to Greece, and if she used binoculars could see people walking around. She shows me pictures, the whole town is white and looks like a Greek Island, obviously. In the winter she would stay near her cousins, who have a large farm. Her parents are educated secular Turks who exist in a world that sounds entirely separate from Erdogan’s hellscape. Never forget how important it is to speak to your peers from countries painted the way Turkey is, to remember the breadth of secular left-wing cosmopolitanism in the world, of people caring most for eating good food or the theatre or music and not ugly ideas.
We finish the koftas and the dolma filling is now cool. She spreads a leaf onto the table and shows me how to fold dolma — the veins of the leaf must be facing up, one puts less filling in than you’d think. I’ll upload a video of the folding to my Instagram since it's as fiddly to write as it is to do. We sit for a long time, our backs begin to ache and make what feel like hundreds of dolmas. Later an Iraqi-Irish friend says she thinks Arab girls always smoke straights, not because they’re rich, but because the trauma of dolma rolling makes rolling cigarettes unbearable. When we’re done, Nil layers vine leaves on the bottom of a large pan, over which she pours olive oil. She then neatly stacks the dolmas in the pan, filling the whole thing up. “Now you’d put on a low heat and cook for an hour. The steam softens the vine leaves and helps bind them.” But it is dark now, and I’ve heard the foxes outside and we say goodbye. All the way home my head is a jumble of ideas. — 5 April
Where are the recipes? I want to test them once myself so they’ll arrive next week. In the meantime go an follow @healgoblin for more of Nil’s food. & listen to the playlist!
i absolutely love these. it's very inspiring to read about friendships forged in culinary pursuits. i so look forward to these every week ❤️
So lovely!