My soon-to-be father-in-law is sitting across from me, extending an oval-shaped plastic plate that’s piled high with iceberg lettuce, arugula, dark greens I can’t yet identify, and spring onions as wide as my thumb.
Five of us crowd around a small table that typically seats four in a galley-style kitchen. This is one of the first meals I’m eating with my wife’s family, probably in the summer of 2018. I’d visited Turkey for the first time in 2007 and moved to Ankara permanently in 2011, but my experiences with Turkish cuisine up to this point had been largely confined to restaurants, workplace potlucks, and my own attempts at home cooking.
“Al! Take some!”
I reach for an onion, something familiar, and more flavorful than the dressingless iceberg lettuce. They laugh as I bite off the onion bulb and hold back tears. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this meal with my in-laws would be formative in my understanding of the seasonal cooking that is alive and well in Turkey, even in the country’s largest and most cosmopolitan cities.
My wife’s mother and father came to Ankara as young people in the 1980s from Nallıhan, a mountainous region in northwestern Anatolia. A one-time stop on The Silk Road, known for grapes and fruit trees, a stunning bird sanctuary, and the ancient Roman city of Juliopolis, it remains curiously isolated from all major industries and highways, despite its relative proximity to the country’s two largest cities. Their move occurred in the context of a wider trend of industrialisation and urbanisation that Turkey has undergone since the late 1940s. In this time frame, Ankara’s population boomed from half a million to well over five million today.
I put down my onion. The centrepiece of our meal is the kapama pilavı. A Nallıhan speciality, not found on Ankara restaurant menus. Shredded chicken, boiled beef or lamb, or minced meat is fried in a large pot with onions and tomatoes. A layer of rice is added on top, not stirred, and then covered with homemade chicken or beef broth. When the rice is cooked, the pot is covered with a serving tray and flipped over quickly. Finally, the pot is slowly lifted to unveil a tower of rice covered in a layer of meat and onions.
On this summer day, the pilaf tray rests in the middle of the table, surrounded by smaller plates and bowls full of greens, mild green peppers, yufka (the flat bread used in making baklava and börek, but also excellent for scooping up meats, vegetables, cheeses, jams, and honey), and sliced green melon. Each of us has a plate of rice and a small bowl full of cacık, a yoghurt dish similar to tzatziki. Crushed garlic, grated cucumber, chopped mint, and sometimes fresh dill are mixed into a thick strained yoghurt, then thinned with water until it becomes a cold soup. Bread and vegetables are torn and casually distributed across the tablecloth.
I’ve come to know kapama well over the years. For my wife’s family, it’s a staple year-round, offered to guests or just cooked on a weekend as a hearty comfort food. It’s typically prepared in the same manner, regardless of time of year, but for one small detail. In summer or early fall, the first step is to roughly chop an onion and a few tomatoes. In winter or spring, there are no fresh tomatoes to be found in my in-laws’ household (or, now, my own). Instead, they open up a can of tomatoes they’ve preserved in August, and pour it into the pot of sizzling onions. But this detail would be easy to miss.
It’s the sides that change with the seasons. In late spring and summer, the rice is certainly accompanied by fresh greens, some combination of lettuce, green onion, green garlic shoots if the timing is just right, flat-leafed parsley, fresh mint, arugula, kuzu kulağı, a thick sour salad green with a flavour almost like lemon, and sharp peppery tere. In the fall, winter, or early spring, the cacık will be gone, replaced by a hot soup, probably lentil, yoghurt, or tarhana (a powdered soup base made by sun drying fermented yoghurt, mixed with herbs, spices, and hot pepper). The sharpness and the texture of salad greens are substituted with all manner of pickles: cucumbers, small yellow hot peppers, and red cabbage.
My in-laws continue this practice even though supermarket chains and warehouse stores sell the same selection of fruits and vegetables year-round. The Migros supermarket near my apartment is nearly indistinguishable from any large grocery store I grew up with in the Boston area. Yet, if I consider my New England childhood, I recall only faint traces of seasonal eating. Sweet corn with butter and watermelon in the summer. Visiting apple orchards in the fall with my parents to buy bushels of apples, apple cider, and pumpkins. Summers in Maine taught me when to expect ripe blueberries and huckleberries, and the time of year that mackerel are running. But I couldn’t have told you when a tomato reddens, or in what months broccoli, cabbage, peppers, potatoes, lettuce, or onions are grown. Information that I, today, take for granted. I knew they came from the supermarket. Shipped from somewhere.
The onion I bit into in that summer of 2018, almost certainly came from a neighbourhood bazaar. Outside of the small historic centre, Ankara is a planned city that has rapidly expanded outwards in every direction since its founding as the nation’s capital in 1923. Today, much of the population lives in suburbs that were built since the 1970s. The zoning for these neighbourhoods nearly always includes a pazar yeri, a semi-permanent structure, usually made of metal pillars supporting a roof, sometimes as large as a city block.
Each pazar hosts a farmers market one day each week, all year. On pazar day, the space is packed with cheap tables, piled high with seasonal produce. Men (it is usually men, but not always) repeat their wares with their city of provenance. Tomatoes from Ayaş! Melons from Kazan! Watermelons from Diyarbakır! Oranges from Antalya! Potatoes from Afyon! Carrots from Beypazarı! Again and again. Their produce is seasonal, and its quality puts supermarkets to shame, at equal if not lower prices. You wander the pazar, sampling whatever you like, trying to find the reddest, meatiest tomatoes, the sweetest, crispest watermelons, hoping you’ll find the first corn of the season, or the last strawberries of the year.
For my in-laws and for many in the city, the pazar dictates how they eat year-round. Fresh greens, tomatoes, peppers, and green beans will all plummet in quality, but skyrocket in price in September or October, if they can be found at all.
In anticipation, my mother-in-law spends the late summer preparing for this event. Each year, she buys dozens of kilos of tomatoes and boils them in olive oil before canning them for the winter. Cucumbers, peppers, and perhaps cabbage or carrots are bought in bulk and pickled with garlic and flat-leaf parsley. Long, thin hot peppers are strung up on the balcony in the height of summer until they shrivel and blush red. Green beans are laid out on trays to dry until they wrinkle and curl. These will be rehydrated in winter and pan-fried with onion and scrambled eggs. And a year’s worth of fresh mint and purple basil are dried and put in jars.
As an American who grew up in the 1990s in a mainstream food culture that did not yet look at processed food with great scepticism, it’s easy for me to interpret these practices as “traditional” village life transplanted into an urban environment. In a way, it is. The inherited knowledge of seasonality and food preservation possessed by many urban Ankara residents is far greater than that of a typical American. This is perhaps not surprising, given the number of generations in the United States that have lived in a culture dominated by the processed food industry, and the idea that food preparation is somehow anathema to modernity and convenience. But that isn’t the whole story.
Food culture, like all culture, is never static. In recent years, my mother-in-law has added pickled jalapenos to her seasonal repertoire. Indeed, most pazars now sell these peppers by the kilo during pickling season. And on any visit to my in-laws in winter or early spring, I’m likely to find avocado, transported fresh from Antalya, in the south. Even Turkish staples (onions, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley) are readily available for far longer than Ankara’s typical growing season. A neighbourhood pazar will be selling melons, say, in late spring or early summer, fresh from Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast, months before they ripen in northern Anatolia.
It is not only the products available that change, but their preparation adapts to the 21st-century urban environment. In late summer each year, kilograms of green peppers are chopped, then transferred to plastic bags to be frozen. A technique that was almost certainly not widespread in Central Anatolia in the 1960s. This negotiation between place-based cooking traditions, seasonality, new household technologies, and the evolution of global food networks is inevitable. And one that I hope is possible in the country of my birth.
A few years ago, my parents moved to rural coastal Maine, six hours north of Boston, where, on a recent visit, I spent hours driving from farmers’ market to farmers’ market with my Mom. We stopped at Four Season Farm in Harborside and looked at their varieties of tomatoes. Excellent, though far more expensive than a typical grocery store. Then to Quill’s End, a local dairy farm, where she buys yoghurt and milk. Finally, we picked up her subscription farm box at King Hill Farm. I walked through the herb fields, filling up my canvas shopping bag with flat-leaf parsley, basil, and thyme.
The interest in local produce, small farms, and seasonal eating in the US has been rapid and is to be celebrated, surely. But when I look in the farm box and see the assortment of vegetables, too few to be preserved, or even to be easily combined into a week’s worth of coherent, rooted dishes without supplement, I can’t help but feel that this American revival is still in its earliest stages. An appendage, maybe, but not yet the blood that pumps through our food system. It’s also a reality that much of the country has not been touched by this revolution, and has no greater access to quality food today than they did decades ago. Even within affluent communities, I suspect it is years away, if possible at all, for it to be a given that meal preparation is based on what’s in season or what can be naturally preserved. Likely, a change of this magnitude would require economic change and political will. Interest alone can only do so much.
I’m confident that if I were shown a photograph of kapama pilavı on my in-laws’ dining table, I could identify the time of year by its accompaniments. But I worry that this knowledge could begin to die with my generation in Turkey, as well, at least in urban environments. To date, my wife and I have never preserved our own tomatoes or made our own tarhana. Like in the US, economic pressures eat up more and more leisure time, and restaurant delivery and processed foods are pushing their way into urban Turkish kitchens. How many generations does it take for this knowledge to be lost completely? If the US is the example, not many.
My daughter is Turkish and American. I would like to think that in twenty-five years, no matter where my wife and I reside, if she comes to visit in the summer, she’ll know instinctively what we’ll be serving alongside the kapama. We’ll see.
