Safranbolu Turkish Restaurant, and Shared Culture

Safranbolu Turkish Restaurant
#60 Nanjing E. Road Sec 2
(corner of Nanjing and Jilin Roads)
Zhongshan District, Taipei Taiwan
02-2522-2939

Pictures on this will come later, as I only had my phone with me and haven't uploaded the photos yet.

Anyway, I was quite excited to hear about Safranbolu, which as far as I know is the only Turkish restaurant currently operating in Taipei. Middle Eastern food exists, but until now, I couldn't find Turkish. As someone of Armenian descent - Armenian from Turkey - this is like a godsend to me.

The atmosphere is quite good - well lit (perhaps a little too brightly lit for a romantic dinner, but not overly dim as a lot of restaurants are), with the sort of lanterns one might find in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar hanging from the ceiling, Turkish coffee sets and evil eye charms for sale and Turkish music piped in.

We got hummus, ezme (a finely chopped salad of tomato, bell pepper, parsley, lemon juice, walnuts and pomegranate molasses), ayran (a savory Turkish yoghurt drink), lahmacun and Iskender kebab (my favorite kebab), Turkish coffee and two desserts (a custard and a rice pudding).

The food came quickly which we appreciated, and the ezme was perfect - exactly like I used to eat in Turkey after long days on the CELTA course - I would put it on thick slices of Turkish bread spread with soft cheese and eat it with a bowl of olives and local wine (Ancyra Okuzgozu), occasionally with some kofte. The hummus was chunkier and grainier than I prefer - I think this might be a regional difference. My ancestors' homeland is in the deep south of Turkey, near Antakya (Antioch) and the Syrian border. Around there they make their hummus silky smooth, doused in olive oil, garnished with parsley, cumin and cayenne pepper and served with bread, tomato slices and pickled vegetables (usually turnips or beets). When we had hummus in Patara, a little further west, it was chunky with nearly whole chickpeas and didn't have the same seasonings. This hummus was more like what we had in Patara. It was fine - though I still haven't found anyone in Taipei who makes hummus the way I like it - although we were a bit annoyed that the bread took awhile to arrive and was not very substantial. The bread was, however, good. I hope that they can sort out this service snafu and remember that bread comes at the same time as the hummus, and should be adequate to eat all of the hummus on the plate.

The lahmacun was excellent - the bread was not as thin as you can get it in Turkey but they got the flavors just right. My only comment here is that in Turkey lahmacun usually comes with a lightly dressed side salad of onion, tomato, possibly lettuce, cilantro or cucumber and you wrap the salad in with the lahmacun, and no salad was provided. On the other hand, I feel I should not be quite so picky: there is nowhere else in all of Taiwan to get decent lahmacun.

Iskender kebab is from the city of Iskenderiya just north of Antakya - it's the closest "regional kebab" to Musa Dagh, where my ancestors are from. While my family has apparently had a long-running feud with the Iskenderians, an Armenian family most likely from Iskenderiya (I don't really subscribe to the "old family feud" school of thought though), Iskender kebab remains my favorite. It's thin slices of grilled meat over chopped flatbread, doused in tomato sauce and served with yoghurt and rice. This Iskender kebab was pretty good, though it doesn't hold a candle to the huge heap of perfectly cooked lamb I had at a Turkish restaurant in New York not to mention the delicious Iskender kebab I had in Sanliurfa or Antakya. But, it was pretty good...I guess I just wish lamb had been an option (they only had chicken or beef).

The ayran was served in Moscow mule mugs, which I liked, and tasted basically like ayran, so yay!

All in all though I would say they hit the mark on all the flavor combinations - the tastes were all just like we had in Turkey - the other issues are just small kinks to work out.

The desserts were quite good - both fairly Turkish and tasty. We had them with Turkish coffee, which came in lovely cups with Iznik tile designs on them (not real, of course) and a pistachio Turkish delight. They don't do different sugar levels though - you can't say you want your coffee sweet or not. But, the way it's made, it's basically perfect so I'm not complaining.

Prices were not cheap, but then for good foreign food in Taipei you will usually pay a premium. The lahmacun (which is a light meal) was about 260NT, the Iskender kebab topped out in the 400s and the appetizers were about 60-90NT each. For the two of us - coffee, appetizers, ayran, meals, dessert - we paid about NT1800.

Oh, no alcohol on the menu. That's one major downside.

Before I finish this, I'd like to add something on a personal note. As an Armenian whose ancestors lived in Turkey before the genocide (the 100th anniversary of which just passed), it's kind of weird for me to eat Turkish food, because that's OUR food. The food of my family. The food of my ancestors. It's integral to our culture as Armenians...but that food is Turkish. But, it's also Armenian. I want to claim it as my cultural heritage, but I do not want to claim Turkish as my heritage, as I am not Turkish, I am Armenian by ancestry. It comes across as - this is our food! So, you're Turkish? No, we're Armenian. But this is our food too. But it's Turkish food. It's also Armenian. Armenian from Turkey? Well, yes, but food in Armenia proper isn't that different. So if they lived in Turkey, weren't they technically also Turkish? Not under the Ottoman Empire they weren't - there were Turks and then there were millets, or ethnic minorities under Ottoman control.

But a lot of the words of Western Armenian (the Armenian variant spoken by Armenians in Turkey) are Turkish borrowings, the food is the same, the culture is essentially the same, the tea and the games are the same, but we're not exactly the same. So on one hand I'm claiming my own heritage, on the other, I feel like I'm claiming one that is not entirely mine. Or, by claiming it, people make assumptions about my heritage that are not true.

All this to say, I understand how a lot of Taiwanese feel, wanting to claim aspects of Chinese culture that are also Taiwanese, that the two groups share (with the added aspect that they are ethnically the same), but wanting to remain culturally distinct. Wanting to say, yes, this is our heritage, we have this too - but we are not "Chinese", or, in the ways that we are, that is not the same as being from China. We share cultural touchstones, but we are distinct, and having that claiming of cultural heritage confused by the world at large for identifying as "Chinese".
I mean, I can never fully "get it", but I get it well enough, I think.

Home Mountain: Musa Dagh

The outskirts of Vakifli, the last remaning ethnic Armenian village in Turkey.

Yesterday we made a quiet but meaningful trip to Musa Dagh, the site of the village of some of my ancestors (it would be disingenuous not to note that I could surely make similar trips to Poland, Switzerland and the UK, but I wouldn't know quite where to go). We have been staying in Antakya (also known as Hatay and best known as the great city of Antioch), which is the closest small city with good accommodation options, amenities and points of interest.

It also happens to be the "town" that my ancestors would go to just as my folks might drive to Poughkeepsie for the day or Brendan's might drive over to Bangor. My great great grandfather was involved in the silk business there. I'll probably post more about Hatay later.

From Hatay, public transportation to Musa Dagh is a bit dodgy, although it does exist. You have to take a dolmus - a small van-like minibus - to the town of Samandag near the Mediterranean coast and then transfer to a rickety bus, van or dolmus (or back of a truck or whatever you can finagle) up the mountain. There is an official dolmus service but it is so infrequent that most people grab rides informally. The view on the way up grows more stunning as you climb, past farms and orange orchards with rocky bluffs and cultivated fields in the difference, all under a crystal blue sky.

This was the first time that I've felt comfortable in Turkey openly stating my reasons for being here, and for being candid about my origins: Vakifli is a small village but there are enough Armenians around that I felt I could openly, well, be who I am.

Bitias (my home village) is long gone, the residents having relocated to Anjar in Lebanon when Hatay returned to Turkey. The land out beyond that golden lump and farmed rows is where one resident of Vakifli told me Bitias was once located.

I didn't really know what I expected to find - I went up more for personal reasons than to see anything in particular or make any specific discoveries. I've wanted to make this trip for years and, being the big traveler in the family (although I have other relatives who have traveled extensively I'm the one who seems to have turned it into a lifestyle) it seemed inevitable that it would eventually happen. As we climbed Musa Dagh, I can say that a calming feeling did come over me - although I think this is less an ancient attachment to the land than a feeling of peace at having finally made the trip to be there (as in, it came from my ego, not my id).

It is a difficult thing to think, but it's true: that side of my family was quite prosperous in Bitias. If the genocide had never occurred, if there had been no Forty Days of Musa Dagh, they would not have left for America. My grandfather would have never met my grandmother while he was at RPI. My mother would have never been born, let alone met my father. 

So I can say that "if things had happened differently I would have grown up around here" but it's not true: I would not exist at all.

Despite the grittiness of the photo above, Vakifli is a prosperous village - they are making a name for themselves in organic farming and earning big bucks for it, and being the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey, they have close ties to some very deep pockets in the Armenian community in Istanbul as well as the diaspora. It is a popular vacation spot for members of the diaspora coming home as well as a summer destination for Istanbul Armenians. I was surprised by how neat, tidy and prosperous it was: new stone buildings, neatly paved roads (mostly), a well-tended cemetery, fecund orange orchards and farms, people dressed neatly and driving nice, new-looking cars. 

The swingset was just about the only broken-down thing in the place. Not really what you expect from a mountain village in Turkey or any country that is not quite First World (although I'd argue that Turkey is not too far from Taiwan in terms of development, mostly), but hey. That's Armenians for you.

The church in Vakifli

For those who don't know - you should. When the mass murders and deportations were occurring across Turkey around 1915, the residents of the eight Armenian villages of Musa Dagh managed to resist and hold off the Turkish forces for forty days, hiding in the mountains and fighting back. My great grandfather was among them along with other distant relatives. They held out and were nearly out of supplies when they were rescued by French ships (note the Mediterranean below, it's not that far away and quite visible from Musa Dagh) and taken to Port Said, Egypt. The episode is known as the Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which is also a novel based on true events. It's the reason why the residents of those villages were not deported or massacred (although many died), and why they were all still there until the 1930s, when Hatay united with Turkey: that's why they were there at all and decided to leave, not wanting to return to the rule of a country whose government had tried to murder them.

My family ended up in the USA, of course, as did other distant relatives.

Plaques in the church wall commemorate this. According to my mother there is also a monument up there to memorialize the resistance - we hiked the roads above Vakifli for awhile and down a few side roads but did not find it.

Musa Dagh with a view of the Mediterranean

 I am extremely proud of the courage and tough survivalism of my ancestors, which is a part of why this visit was so meaningful for me. I grew up with this story - I heard it many times and from many lips, sometimes from people who had lived through it (such as my Nana, although I couldn't understand her entirely - she did learn English but was never fully fluent in it and forgot much of it in her old age). It's not just the food, not just the kilims, not just the other assorted memories of my childhood and cultural upbringing that make me who I am and make my family who they are: this story is also there, hanging behind it all like a dark cloud, a story that is purposely told so as not to be forgotten even as generation upon generation becomes more American in both culture and looks (most of my cousins would never be guessed for Armenians. Very few of them were born with the features one normally associates with people from the Caucasus. I personally look more Polish than anything).

I also reflected on who I am today and what it meant to come here with Brendan - as much as thoughts, feelings, ideas and other bits and bobs of soul should ideally be shared with a good mate, this piece of my history is something I am ecstatic to have shared with him.  I can say confidently that there is no one else I would have rather shared this journey with than my husband, and that yes, an ideal husband (or wife) is the sort of person you both can and wish to share such things with. We spent quite a bit of time sitting on a warm rock just off the road looking out at this splendid view of the mountains and sea, and though we didn't say much, just sitting there with him was more of a sharing experience than talking could have been (we also ate some Cheezy Stix).

Another mountan view out towards where Bitias once stood

The residents of Vakifli are quite used to members of the diaspora venturing back to discover their roots - I thought I might be met with surprise but no, not at all. I'm just one in a string of foreign-born Armenians who makes the trip up here, not necessarily to see anything but just to be there and to see it with their own eyes. The town has a surprisingly hopping tea garden, and here is where you can see some cultural influence from the Turks: like others across Turkey, sitting outside, drinking tea and playing backgammon seems to be a career path in Vakifli. They may be Armenian but in this way they're just like their Turkish neighbors. A key difference - unlike most small-time tea gardens, women were welcome here and children were running around. I felt no sense of "this is the preserve of men" as I did from many tea gardens in Gaziantep and Sanliurfa, and the owner was a woman to boot. Go Armenians!

It was quite clear that we were not from around these parts, so we had the chance to chat with a few locals (although most were so used to people just like us, albeit usually older and more connected to the Armenian community, that they paid us no mind). One older man was disappointed that I don't speak Armenian but was happy to point out where Bitias once stood. At one point I got locked in the tea garden bathroom (the lock broke) and half the town came to rescue me.

All in all it was a quiet trip, a ruminative one, not one given to fresh new discoveries or heaps of things to see. Just walking on Musa Dagh, watching the Queen Anne's Lace and other dry-climate flowers shake in the Mediterranean beaches, smelling the dry earth and orange trees, waving hello to locals on tractors, visiting the church, getting horrific sunburn while peering out at sun-drenched vistas and drinking tea among fellow Armenians was what I came for, and that's what I got. 

I do think that everyone with the means and interest in their origins should make a similar trip - I can't point specifically to how the visit moved me, but it did, I know it did. Wherever you are from, whatever your history, it is worthwhile to go see the place of your origin - even if it's just to lay eyes on the place.

The New Old Country

I'm not the first person to travel back to my 老家, or ancestral homeland - from any land to any other. "Roots" tourism is a well-established industry (in fact, it's practically its own business model in China). Ever since people have been immigrating, moving or simply forced to leave their homelands, they or their descendants been trying to find ways to return, even if just to poke around the place a bit. That's basically what I'm doing right now.

We arrived in Antioch (Hatay) yesterday after a long and improperly air-conditioned bus ride from Sanliurfa - I am hoping to blog about my experiences earlier in our trip after this one. As I have mentioned numerous times, on my mother's side I am Armenian from Turkey - Musa Dagh in Hatay to be precise. Before 1915, they were living in Bitias, a village on the slopes of Musa Dagh - one of the eight ethnic Armenian villages that once graced its slopes among farms and orange trees.

My great grandparents fled Turkey in the wake of the Armenian genocide, but not until after my great grandfather spent time as a freedom fighter for the resistance, escaping death by hiding in an olive barrel, and my great grandmother's family fled only to end up in Izmir (Smyrna) where Turkish forces and the Great Fire of 1922 - almost certainly set on orders of Kemal Ataturk - claimed many fatalities. They fled to Greece, where their three children, including my grandfather, were born. As World War II rolled in they fled once again for the USA and settled near Troy, New York. My grandfather married and had five children, the oldest of which is my mother.

So here I am, not quite 100 years later, back in Antioch - not only a historic city in its own right but also the nearest decent-sized town with accommodation options to Musa Dagh. One hundred years and I made it back to the Old Country. I may not be the first person to return to an ancestral homeland, and I won't be the last, but I'm the first in my generation to go - I don't believe anyone in my mother's generation has returned either, but I could be wrong. It's a pretty big generation, including many distant cousins I've never met.

I have to say this: when one returns to The Old Country, one expects to see, well...an old country. Don't get me wrong - Turkey's quite old, possibly the oldest settled, civilized place there is and boasts approximately one butt-ton of ancient stuff. I mean that one expects this ideal vision of what an "ancestral homeland" should be: whitewashed buildings, donkey carts, women in headscarves, an exotic bazaar.

One certainly does not expect to start rolling into town over a mountain range, as one does to enter Hatay, and see a shiny modern wind farm spread out across the peaks and ridges.

One does not expect, regardless of what the guidebook noted, a cosmopolitan downtown full of smart cafes with HDTV and Turkish techno-pop, WiFi everywhere, upscale restaurants with pleasant outdoor seating, bars that welcome women (a rarity in much of Turkey besides the party towns of the Mediterranean and larger cities), women in skinny jeans and halter tops yakking on cell phones and people generally more smartly dressed than you - you scuzzy traveler, living in rumpled t-shirts from a backpack for weeks on end.

I know I'm not the only one to feel this way: I've had at least one acquaintance in Taiwan tell me that somewhere in the back of his head was lurking this idea that his ancestral home in China was still this stone-house, chickens-in-the-courtyard, ancient-temple and peak-roofed paradise in rural farming country. When he got there and found a mid-sized town of dingy tile and concrete buildings, snarled traffic and paved-over boxiness, he admitted a touch of disappointment.

I've had Indian friends note the same thing: their parents left when their towns were, well, quaint, with goatherders in white lungis and women in saris and vendors that crisscrossed the neighborhood with carts of goods, and toilets that required hand-flushing. A lot of that is still there - the goats certainly haven't gone anywhere - but children return and are shocked to see women in pants (still a rarity in non-urban India but becoming more common), flat-screen TVs, Western toilets and everyone with an iPhone.

As we walked through pleasant evening breezes down the bustling nightlife of downtown Hatay - a thoroughly pleasant city with the exception of the stinky Orontes river - music flowing from cafes, locals on laptops, lights playing off pedestrian walkways, I thought to myself Nana would not recognize this.

Of course, I should have known that the Hatay of 1915 would look nothing like the Hatay of 2011. It was, on an intellectual level, abundantly clear. It's just that the reality - which is exactly what one should have expected (other than, perhaps, the fact that such a small city is so cosmopolitan - usually mid-size towns in countries like Turkey are a bit tatty at the edges. Not Antioch) - was not what my mind associated with "The Old Country".

We still haven't tackled Musa Dagh - we were far too tired today, Brendan has a very angry digestive tract and public transportation out there is unreliable at best. We're planning to go tomorrow and visit Vakifli, the last remaining ethnic Armenian village on Musa Dagh. We don't imagine that there is anything left of Bitias to see, but I personally am hoping to at least do a little rural walking or hiking on the mountain.

Today, we went to the bazaar and the museum (and a few of those smart cafes). I have to say that - hometown pride notwithstanding - Antioch's bazaar is my favorite. Goreme didn't have one (instead it had streets packed up and down with souvenir shops). Gaziantep had a great one full of coppersmiths and huge plastic tubs of fresh paprika and cayenne powder, but an entire chunk of it was given over to a tourist bazaar in one of the restored caravanserais and I never did feel entirely good about buying anything there (for the record I do think the "tourist bazaar" was just as much for the domestic tourists looking for high-end gifts). I will say that Tahmis Kahvesi, a coffeeshop in the heart of Gaziantep's bazaar, was one of my favorite kick-back spots in Turkey. Sanliurfa's is exotic and huge, but I feel in some ways it banks on its reputation as such and is given over to kitschy tourist shopping - although, again, much of that is for domestic tourists. We did buy four silk scarves - two for me, two for gifts.

Antioch's bazaar is distinctly non-touristy. We wandered it for hours, got a little lost, and found alley upon alley of things that actual locals who live their lives and need stuff would want: household goods, decorative items, clothing, spices, jewelry, food. I saw exactly one shop selling souvenir-type goods which seemed popular with Turkish schoolgirls. It was very much an Everyman's Bazaar and I love it for that.

I bought some amazing smelling olive oil soap and a set for Turkish coffee (which the Turks do drink, just not to the great extent that they drink tea) - the kind a local might buy if they had a desire for coffee.

What I love generally about the bazaars in Turkey, and especially about Antioch, is that the snaking alleys and backways of shops are set around ornate - or sometimes half-hidden - entrances to mosques you would never guess were there, ancient bathhouses and crumbling caravanserais. You get the sense that these shopping streets have had the same function for millenia, or at least as long as it takes to build a caravanserai, have it be used and have it crumble. As you walk through, much of it is shaded, which is the only way you can possibly shop during the heat of the day. You round a turn and - here's what I really love - you see an old caravanserai entrance, so you poke your head in and more often than not you come upon a courtyard of locals relaxing or even a tea garden. We found one today shaded by trees rustling nicely in the breeze, set among a water station where people were washing their feet and hands, and a cage full of exotic birds. Needing a break from the packed bazaar alleys - it's "Ramazan Bayrami shopping season" (people seem to do a lot of shopping as Ramadan ends, not too unlike Christmas shopping in terms of the sheer crowds and sales volume) - we breathed a collective sigh of relief as we found this little paradise tucked away right in the middle of the bazaar, and downed several glasses of tea while I wrote postcards and Brendan worked his way through a book. Sure beats a food court at the mall.

Cognitive Dissonance

More photos from Istanbul tomorrow. This was taken in The Blue Mosque

We've been in Turkey for two days now, and what I have to say is this:

- Great food
- Breathtaking sights and scenery
- Extremely friendly people, talkative and helpful almost on the level of the Taiwanese

That last one is a bit of a sticker for me.

(By the way, I do link this a bit to Taiwan further down, if you feel like reading that far).

As you know if you read this blog with any regularity, I'm Armenian on my mother's side. Specifically, Armenian from Musa Dagh, Turkey: it's half the reason why we're in Turkey now at all - I'm interested ins seeing the one of the lands I come from. And as you know if you've studied history under anything other than a regime hell-bent on brainwashing young citizens through education, the Turks committed a massive genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century. I exist at all - and am American - because my family (or at least many of them) escaped that genocide. My great grandparents fled to Greece, but as WWII approached they had to leave Athens, as well - my great grandfather had been a freedom fighter for the Armenians, was well-known to the Turks and also to the Nazis. They would not have lived long in Greece had they stayed through the Nazi invasion.

My grandfather was born in Greece between those two flights for life, and as you can imagine, he hates Turks with a passion. Nobody else in the family is too fond of them, either. This might be left to history if the Turks would admit that what they did was commit genocide, and apologize for it. This hatchet might be buried if they'd admit that Ataturk was not only the father of their nation but also someone capable of committing great evil (hell, most Taiwanese, even those who vote KMT, pull no punches when saying the same about Chiang Kai-shek, although nobody sees him as the father of Taiwan and "father of the Republic of China" is a honor given to Sun Yat-sen).

And yet they won't admit this, and they educate the young to believe their side of the story - not that I believe there are sides - there is the side that knows what happened and the side that denies it, and that's all - and so young Turks today still believe that "it was a difficult and chaotic time and many people died but we did not commit a genocide". They will defend this quite vehemently and in Turkey, the law against speaking ill of Ataturk or calling the Armenian genocide a "genocide" is on their side.

This is why I have not told anyone I've met in Turkey of my ancestry. Yet. It's not a fight I can win. It's a fight that can get me in legal trouble.

So in my postcards home I've been writing things about how friendly the people are, and sounding fairly lighthearted about it. Honestly, though, I'm not. I am not remotely lighthearted about it. If anything it's had me a bit on edge since we arrived.

These women were quite friendly to me, and took lots of photos with me because they liked my blue eyes. No joke!

Instead, I'm torn. That friendly fellow in the tea garden who chatted with us, and the nice young boy who served us tea, and the helpful people who gave us directions or gently guided us, or who smiled but did not mock the mistakes we made in Istanbul (like trying to put a token on a card reader in the Metro), the man in the electronics shop who asked if we liked Cappadocia and the women in the Blue Mosque who took pictures with me just for fun, or those who were just plain friendly and welcoming - they didn't murder my people. I can't blame them for something that happened almost a century ago.

And yet they also deny that it happened.

And yet they were educated to believe it didn't happen.

And yet despite that education, they should know better.

And yet, they are some of the friendliest people I've had the pleasure of traveling among.

There's no denying it - so far the Turks have been nothing if not truly hospitable. That's hard for me. Their ancestors killed my people and the descendants deny it happened, and yet I cannot find fault with their kindness. How do I even begin to reconcile that?

Because really, underneath my feeling of warmth for the warmth the Turks have shown us is a bit of a raw scar - a thin line of anger, knowing that that kindness would probably be withdrawn the moment they learned I was Armenian. That kindness is wholly dependent on a pretense - on allowing them their cognitive dissonance. On not upending their belief system. This means that I also feel cognitive dissonance - these people who are so friendly, whom deep down I know would deny a massacre I know to have happened - how does one go about stitching those two things together? Is it really friendliness if it's contingent upon my not revealing a deep kernel of myself? Would it even be appropriate to do so? Is it fair to my ancestors who gave their lives or risked their lives to save others to not do so and to accept this hospitality at face value?

What happens is that I talk with these lovely people, and it's fine, except I feel, off to my side maybe, waves of heat from a red-hot poker, just inches from my skin, threatening to brand me an Unwelcome Other if I discuss my heritage or speak the truth, and threatening on the other hand to brand me a Traitor if I let things be.

It's a hard line to walk and I can't help but feel a little emotional over it. It's not so bad in Cappadocia, but when we hit Musa Dagh I will have to work very hard to keep my feelings in check.

I can see how the same issue dogs many Taiwanese. There are those who came or whose parents came over with the KMT, those who served or whose parents served under Chiang Kai-shek, and those who were killed by the KMT in the wake of 228 and the White Terror. There are many for whom being welcomed by neighbors, coworkers, classmates and even family is contingent upon not upsetting the worldview of others that their political beliefs are correct (and that goes for both sides). It is not so serious as a genocide when someone who is deep green can't reveal to his coworkers who are mostly blue, but there is still a raw feeling underneath the pretense of cameraderie. There is an unspoken understanding that "we all need to get along", so talking about things like, well, the White Terror around people whose parents may have ignored it or even supported it is not condoned. I can very much imagine how those Taiwanese feel, unable to upset the fragile truce of "your parents' party killed my loved ones, and that party won't apologize for it, your parents won't acknowledge the atrocity, and that kills me inside so I won't talk about it. I have to deal with you and I want things to run smoothly so I can't bring it up. I have to pretend it doesn't exist."

I can imagine it because I'm living it right now.

Tastes of Childhood II: Making Fish Cookies in Taipei

In my younger years, whenever I'd go to a family gathering my Aunt Rose (who has since passed on) made these cookies. They were sweet, filled with a soft walnut center and, justifying their namesake, were cut into a herringbone pattern. They were coated with a sugar syrup and were so tooth-achingly sweet that you could only eat one or two.

Aunt Rose would show up with a Tupperware in hand, or, too frugal to buy tupperware, a regular baking tin that she'd wash and bring home. Inside would be layers and layers of sticky-syruped parchment paper separating layers of buttery walnut fish cookies. She'd set them out on a side table and through the gathering people would walk by and swipe a few.

Most of my relatives didn't care for them - too sweet - but as a kid I loved them (exactly because they were so sweet)!

Having recently obtained the recipe or something along the same lines from my mom, I tried to make them today, knowing that they should keep until next week's party if refrigerated well.

Mine turned out delicious, although much softer and more crumbly than Aunt Rose's cookies (and slightly less overwhelmingly sweet - I think my aunts and uncles would like my version more, in fact).

I can't link to a website for this, so I'll give you the recipe. 

The ingredients are: 

Filling: 3 cups of walnuts, finely chopped (cups of walnuts before chopping, not after)

5-6 tablespoons of sugar

1 flat tablespoon ground cinnamon

Mix together and set aside (and walnuts are easy to chop if you can't find pre-finely-chopped ones).

 Dough: 

4 1/2 cups of flour (you could make very buttery cookies with 4, but the extra 1/2 lends them needed cohesion)

2 cups of butter (yes, you read that right)

3 tablespoons of sugar

A dusting of cinnamon powder to taste

1 cap-ful of vanilla extract (my own addition, not in the traditional recipe)

1 egg

1 cup milk (I used goat's milk)

2 teaspoons baking soda

Syrup:

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

Some lemon juice to taste (don't overdo it)

pastry brush (silicone ones are best)

Glaze:

One egg and 1/3 cup milk beaten together

                                                                                    Different pastry brush

First mix the walnut mixture and set aside.

Then mix dry dough ingredients. Mix sugar into softened butter and then beat an egg into that. Slowly add the dry ingredients and when added and well-mixed, add milk. Mix and knead longer than you usually would for cookies (usually you don't want the gluten in the flour to do that thing it does when you over-mix cookie, cake and muffin dough but for these it adds cohesion). Don't knead as long as you would for bread, though. Allow to sit in a cool place or in the refrigerator as you would sugar cookie dough.

Preheat oven to 375F, or 190C.

Now, make the cookies by rolling small balls (a little smaller than golf balls but larger than walnuts) into ovals, flattening them with your palm and sprinkling a line of walnut mixture down the middle. Then push the ends together to create a dough "packet" filled with walnuts. Like this:

Take a pastry brush and brush them generously with the egg glaze. Take a small pair of scissors, like manicure scissors, and cut thin, close herringbones across the top - pull up a bit as you go to really get the right look (as you can see I was not entirely successful - I think I'll get better with practice).

Bake for 15-20 minutes and, while baking, mix the water, sugar and lemon and boil for 5 minutes. Allow to cool and set aside.

The old recipe calls for you to use tongs and dip the cookies into the syrup while hot, but if you make them super buttery they'll fall apart easily (as with the one above). You can do just as well brushing them with syrup with a pastry brush while still hot. 

What I love about these is that the sugar in the walnut mix melts in the heat and creates a sort of sweet walnut paste filling that is just delectable and not bitter (as walnuts can be).

Allow to cook and separate with parchment paper (you do not want to be wrapping plastic wrap around these babies).

And voila! Mediterranean sweet walnut cookies! 

And while my Aunt Rose's cookies always looked spectacular, not all falling apart like mine, I'd say that mine taste pretty damn good.

Food!

Just thought I'd post this for fun. The full and confirmed menu of what I'll be cooking next week to share the food of my homeland (Armenian Musa Dagh) with my friends. All I can say is: yum yum yum!


lahmacun - a flavorful "pizza" topped with ground lamb mixed with onion, tomato, mint, parsley and other delicious things, topped with raw onion, tomato slices, parsley and lemon juice

stuffed grape leaves - assuming I can get grape leaves from Yi Wei foods in time. My grape leaves are stuffed with white rice mashed a bit with ground pine nuts, salt, black pepper, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and a touch of black pepper (I also cook the rice with some of the tattered grape leaves to imbue a full flavor).

If I can't get the grape leaves I'll make something else - possibly yoghurt kofta (meatballs in yoghurt sauce), possibly something with phyllo, maybe stuffed tomato dolma

muhammara - a zesty red pepper walnut dip

hummus - chick peas ground to a fine dip with sesame paste, garlic (both raw and roasted), cumin, paprika, lemon juice, olive oil salt and pepper and topped with a dusting of fiery cayenne powder

babaghanoush - the same, except with roasted eggplant instead of chick peas

All of the above served with baguette rounds (cheaper and tastier than imported pita in Taipei, my relatives would appprove of the change considering that pita sold here tends to be stale) and assorted vegetables

cucumber mint yoghurt salad - just what you think it is, with some raw garlic and spices to give it a punch

tabbouleh - bulgur salad with mint, parsley, bell pepper, cucumber, onion and tomato among other seasonings

pilaf - rice cooked with fried pasta in butter and chicken broth with a few spices

fish cookies - named for their herringbone design, these syrup-dipped butter cookies are filled with a walnut-cinnamon sugar mixture

Tastes of Childhood: Making Lahmacun in Taipei

OH YUMMY

I've mentioned before that my mom's side of the family is Armenian from Musa Dagh, Turkey and that this is one of the reasons why we chose Turkey as our next travel destination: to seek out my homeland (or rather, one of my homelands - I'm also Polish, Swiss and generic British/Irish). Of all my many threads of ancestry, my Armenian heritage has always been the most vibrant and the biggest part of my life - I do believe that's because that side of the family came to the USA the most recently, and also because that branch of the family has been the most tenacious in terms of keeping heritage and memories alive. That tends to happen when your family lives through a genocide. When one's great grandfather (in my case, Mehran Renjilian) was a freedom fighter (the Turks would say "terrorist" but they're wrong) in the Armenian resistance...later turned minister. When one's family arrives in the USA after being forced to leave not one, but two countries - the second being Greece as the Nazis closed in.

So, after many years of regaling friends with homecooked Indian food, various appetizers and organizing outings to restaurants, I decided that on the eve of the trip that will mark my generation's first return to Musa Dagh, that I will cook some of the best-loved and most familiar dishes of my childhood.

The party will be in two weeks. I can make some of these dishes in my sleep, quite literally: I've had dreams where I have made hummus from scratch and upon waking up realized that even in my dream I followed exactly the right recipe. I have to admit, though, that there are others that I've eaten plenty of but never attempted to make (such as "fish cookies" which are flavored not with fish but with honey, and derive their name from the herringbone pattern cut across the top), and still others that I've attempted once before, failed at miserably, and never tried again...such as lahmacun.

The last time I made lahmacun, or tried to, I was too scared to attempt the dough, being terrified of trying something that included yeast. Instead I put the tasty topping on soft pita. The pita burned. I took the smoking mess of charred bread and raw meat laid out in a glass casserole out of the oven and plopped it on the counter, where the glass instantly shattered.

You can imagine my trepidation at deciding to not only attempt lahmacun again, but to do so with my tiny electric oven and with real dough made with actual yeast (I'm a great baker of cakes, muffins and such but not so experienced with bread products).

So this weekend was the test run.

My beloved husband helps out in the kitchen as I prepare the lahmacun dough.

I mostly followed this recipe, with a few changes to reflect the flavors I remember from childhood. I would never use ground beef - only lamb will do. Beef is a cop-out. I also added extra garlic, black pepper and allspice to the recipe. The "Armenian spice" I grew up with is made of cumin, paprika, cayenne pepper, black pepper and allspice and that's the combination I created and added.

Ground allspice in my tiny marble mortar&pestle.

 Fortunately, I have a wonderful husband who, while not exactly a kitchen god in his own right, is very good at helping out in the kitchen - chopping, grinding, peeling, mixing, stirring - whatever I may need when my two hands and one brain just aren't enough.

Lahmacun is not just flavored with dry spices and lamb - it also includes the pungent flavors of onion, parsley, mint, tomato, lemon and garlic (and, of course, salt).

Mint and lemon - yum!

 My mom once wrote a short story of her experiences making lahmacun, lamenting that Nana - her grandmother - could always turn out perfect dough circles but hers were eternally lumpy and lopsided.

I have to say that I take after my mother, but it doesn't matter: I care about taste, not looks.

Sorry, Nana. I hope as you look down on me from heaven (despite my not being religious) I hope you will forgive my horrifically uneven dough rounds).

Creating this dish in Taipei was - and will be, when I make it again in two weeks - a collision of memories. My life in Taipei with our assortment of friends here, our decrepit apartment that we'll soon be moving out of for better digs, our insane cat, Chinese class, evenings enjoying Belgian beer at various Da'an cafes or going out for some of the best food I've ever had from around China and the world... and commingled with childhood holidays where we'd serve typical American food - turkey or ham, gratin potatoes, green beans, tossed salad, apple pie - alongside hummus, Armenian string cheese, cheoreg (my mom wrote that recipe!), babaghanoush, pilaf, fish cookies, olives and lahmacun. We'd eat scrambled eggs with string cheese, bacon and cheoreg the next morning sitting around Grandma and Grandpa's kitchen table in their suburban house that is so typically American that I once saw their living room in a TV commercial (except it wasn't theirs - it just happened to be the same pre-fab living room). Running around the backyard with my cousins, all much younger than myself and helping Grandma make deviled eggs - it took years for her to realize that I was, in fact, capable of cooking much more than that.

Those flavors - mahlab (a spice made from the ground pits of a certain cherry), tahini, aromatic lamb, tangy lemon, earthy cumin, pungent mint and parsley, fiery cayenne - are the sensory receptacles of my childhood and going back from there, of my heritage. Despite sweating in a kitchen in Taiwan over a plastic table covered in parchment paper, whereas my great grandmother would have done this first on a rough kitchen counter in rural Turkey and later in Athens, and later still in Troy, New York, I did feel a connection to the feisty woman who passed away when I was 9 and who never did quite become fluent in English. It was also meaningful to me to share this first batch of lahmacun - the food of my childhood - with my ever-amazing husband:

...who, you know, certainly appreciates good food. We ate it as I always have, topped with fresh vegetables (onion, cucumber, tomato, bell pepper, all will do) and a squeeze of lemon.

And it means a lot to me to be able to share this food with my friends in Taipei in just a few short weeks, before we say goodbye until October.

Oh yes, and I made a cucumber yoghurt mint salad, too!