Just inside the door I spotted a line of baskets piled high with packets of rice, wheat, beans, chickpeas and dried fruit. My eyes drifted to the sign above and at once I remembered.
Of course! Ashura Day.
Ashura is a store-cupboard dessert with a romantic story attached to it. Supposedly when the Ark finally came to rest on Mt. Ararat, Noah and his wife created it out of their leftovers to celebrate reaching dry land. Today the best ashuras are supposed to contain 40 different ingredients.
In Arabic ashura means “tenth,” and Ashura Day is simply the tenth day of the month of Muharrem in the Islamic calendar. According to tradition, this was the day when Moses fasted to give thanks for the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. In turn, the Prophet Mohammed also fasted on the 10th of Muharrem. Today pious Muslims follow in his footsteps, fasting for the three days leading up to Ashura Day, then tucking into bowls of tasty dessert afterwards.
One of the best things about moving to another country, especially one with a different culture, is that as time goes by you slowly peel back the onion layers of your own ignorance to discover unexpected aspects of life in your new home. I had already been living in Turkey for seven years before one day I noticed my neighbors bustling from house to house with small pots of ashura. I had tasted the dessert in pudding shops. I knew the Noah’s Ark story. But somehow the fact that there was a whole day associated with the pudding had managed to slip my notice.
Back in Göreme I asked my neighbor Fatma if she would be making ashura. “We don’t have any apricots,” she said sadly. A late cold snap last May had killed them all along with the walnuts and most of the grapes.
Ayşegül was better prepared. “Come round tomorrow,” she said, “and I’ll teach you to make it.”
So Sunday morning found me leaning over a steaming pot as she reeled off her favorite ingredients: wheat and green lentils; beans, chickpeas and cloves; apricots, grapes, figs, walnuts and peanuts and lashings of pekmez. In homage to the local iğde trees, her ashura also contained white olives. This year her family hadn’t made a sacrifice on Kurban Bayramı. Had they done so, tiny pieces of the meat would have gone into the mixture, too.
For all the long list of ingredients, making the dessert turned out to be a doddle. Basically, you just soak and boil the different ingredients for suitably different lengths of time before throwing them in together to simmer and cool. The most important thing comes last of all when you rush around your mahalle with bowls of the end product to share with seven of your neighbors.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
