Anatolian cuisine’s open secret - There’s no one left who hasn’t heard of their skills

Turkey has countless such women. And many of these women, whose fame precedes them, actually prefer to keep their true talents somewhat secret. But four women in particular have deigned to share with us not only some of their kitchen tips, but also some of their delicious recipes.

Of course, you never see them in the newspapers or on TV. But they are quite famous within their own circles, with their own devoted followers of the food they produce. Most of the followers are from their own neighborhoods, or from their extended families. But no one ever turns down an invitation to eat dishes produced by these women, some people even traveling from far away cities to eat their food. So who are we talking about here? Talented women. Those secret chefs and gourmets out there. And after all, it is they, and not those lokantas and restaurants, who turn out the most delicious su böreği and içli köfte, or the very best of the best hamsili pilav. And in the end, as it turns out, there are really four basic secrets to what they do: experience built up over the years, knowledge passed from generation to generation, fresh and local ingredients, and of course, true love.

One shared trait of these talented female cooks is that they tend to have lots of visitors to their homes. Here is İzmir’s Havva Eştürkler, whose su böreği is so famous that word of it has spread all the way to İstanbul, and who recalls these words from the Prophet Muhammad: “True blessings are in the hands of those who sit and rise from that set table.” And in the case of Havva Hanım, her version of su böreği goes back to her Bosnian mother and older sisters, who also made this recipe with great skill. They made it for years, and for years, Havva Teyze ate this börek. Then one day, she and her husband both said, “Why don’t we make it as well?” Of course, on their first try, all did not go well: in fact, they rolled their yufka, or dough, so thickly that even now remembering it, Havva Teyze laughs. Over time, though, the yufka got thinner and more delicate, and the taste more refined. Nowadays, Havva Teyze attributes the following her su böreği has to the blessings of the grace of experience, and following the traditional recipe it is based upon.

No doubt there are countless more cooks across Anatolia that no one really knows about. And, in fact, most of these women are really, at the same time, true gourmets, with a real innate sense of which ingredients are the best to use, what a dish should taste like, and what should be added and when to a meal to make it its best.

One of these women is Fatma Özdemir from Manisa. Fatma Teyze works so quickly producing incredible dishes that we really have a hard time following her. She always wanted to make large-scale meals, for weddings and such, but actually, people started hearing about how good her meals were, and they would come pick her up from her home and bring her places to cook. Actually, Fatma Teyze’s mother was also a famous Manisa cook. One of her most popular dishes is topalak, a kind of soupy köfte made from bulgur and ground beef. Last February, Fatma Teyze was in İstanbul, visiting her grandson. While here, she made some of her famous topalak. This was when we had the chance to taste it. Interestingly, Fatma Teyze connected the delicious taste of the food she makes to its sheer abundance, the amounts in which she makes it. She serves up her famous topalak with turşu (pickled vegetables) from her home village of Alahıdır. Interestingly, this is a kind of turşu the younger generations call “quick turşu,” which can literally be made overnight, as opposed to the more traditional kind of turşu which takes much longer.

Songül Kaya from Malatya is a woman famous for her local Adana dishes. She learned these traditional Adana dishes, though not from Adana herself, from a local resident when she and her husband moved there for his work. She was, at the time, only a 17-year-old housewife. She wound up cooking with this older Adana woman for a full 12 years. And when she and her husband moved to Malatya from Adana, she was a true expert at Adana dishes.

Kaya says she loves both cooking food and feeding people. She has a very large family, and a home filled with guests constantly. One of the dishes never absent from her table is the Adana favorite, içli köfte. And Kaya can make 80 of these içli köfte at just one sitting. She asserts that the most important element of turning out great food is the ingredients used.

Another female Anatolian cook is Şükran Baki, from Konya. Originally from Gümüşhane, she and her husband lived in Ankara for years, where she learned how to make a delicious Erzurum dish, Erzurum ketesi (kete being a doughy sort of treat like a çörek) from a neighbor there who was from Erzurum. Her husband and children loved this Erzurum ketesi so much that she began making it more and more frequently. She did wind up revising the original recipe she had learned a bit, changing it to fit the taste buds of her family. Rather than the stirred flour that Erzurum people use for this dish, she put in special Gümüşhane çökeleği, which turned out to be very popular. Nowadays, she even sends this special dish of hers from Ankara to İstanbul and even Gümüşhane.

We had a difficult time convincing Şükran Hanım to speak to us, as she was wary of annoying true Erzurum cooks with her version of this food. Actually, as it turns out, she believes much of her skill is rooted in her region. As many know, Gümüşhane is well known for its doughy food. There are foods like katmeri, su böreği, lemisi (which is like the better-known gözleme) and sironu (which is like a kind of mantı). Şükran Hanım also has lots of visitors to her home. Which is why she has always relied on blessings in cooking. And this is really what she is used to! When we ask her about her real secret to it all though, she attributes her skills to years and years of experience, as well the use of natural ingredients. All of her potatoes, butter, cheese, bulgur and spices come from her native Gümüşhane. And of course, the devotees of her kitchen skills are from all over Turkey, from İstanbul, Samsun, Kocaeli and Ankara.

Fatma Teyze from Manisa shares her recipes for topalak and quick turşu

Topalak

Ingredients: Half a kilo of fine bulgur, one tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of cooking oil, black pepper to taste, one tablespoon of tomato paste, 250g finely ground beef with small amounts of fat, water (could be chicken broth), flour and one onion.

Preparation: Put bulgur into a deep bowl, and cover with warm water. Add black pepper and salt. Before the bulgur swells too much, grate the onion and add the ground beef and melted butter. While kneading this, add the flour, until the ingredients all stick together. When the mixture achieves the correct feel after kneading, start forming into small balls and place on a tray. In the meantime, water should be boiling in a nearby pot. Add a bit of butter and oil to the water. Then add the balls of mixed ingredients. After they have boiled for 10 minutes apiece, serve up hot with fresh turşu.

Quick turşu

Ingredients: One or two fresh cucumbers, 250g fresh green beans, 2 bowls of finely chopped cabbage, 3-4 green peppers, 3-4 carrots, vinegar and salt. Preparation: Chop up all the above ingredients finely. Place them into a jar, then pour as much vinegar as possible over them. If you don’t like vinegar too much, add some water.

Songül Kaya from Malatya offers her recipe for içli köfte

Ingredients: For the filling, you need 1 kilo of ground beef, 1 dried onion, one half tablespoon of tomato paste, black pepper, 1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes, half a teaspoon of cumin, lots of parsley, 2-3 spoonfuls of butter.

For the outside: 1 kilo yarma (special kind of wheat), 200g of fine bulgur,  200g of irmik, one tablespoon of tomato paste, salt, water.

Preparation: Saute the ground beef in butter. Add finely chopped onion and add spices as you cook. Add the tomato paste and parsley last of all. Let this cool down. Mix together the bulgur and the yarma and then add water to moisten. When this has soaked up enough water, mix together your other ingredients. Add tomato paste and salt. Then take a handful to mix and then roll out. Place the filling on the inside. Then close it up. Roll into a ball shape. Add lemon juice to the boiling water, as the lemon juice helps keep the dish from falling apart when cooking. Boil the prepared köfte for about 10 minutes, until they rise to the top of the boiling water.

Erzurum ketesi

Ingredients: 3 spoonfuls of yoghurt, 2 eggs with one yolk separated out for later, one glass of milk, one cube of yeast (42g), salt, 1 tea cup of cooking oil, enough flour to bind the mixture. Mix these ingredients, and when they become soft, cover them with a moist cloth, and let sit for 10 minutes.

For the filling: 200g çökelek and 250g butter

Preparation: Melt the 250g butter in a bowl. Take pieces of dough as large as eggs and start rolling them. Brush the melted butter completely over these pieces of rolled dough. Then turn over the edges of the rolled dough inwards, as with an envelope. Again, brush the melted butter over all this. Place a spoonful of çökelek in the center, and bring the four corners of the folded dough together. Brush this with the egg yolk you set aside. Place the prepared pieces of filled dough on oiled baking sheet. Cook in an oven at 180 degrees centigrade. You can always place cooked kete in the freezer for later.