Category Archives: Istanbul mysteries

Don’t get lost…

Last night I was invited to attend a book club which meets in the oldest continuously-inhabited house in Dorset. We gathered in the old hall, with three beautiful 13th century lancet windows overlooking the croquet lawn. It was our host’s great-grandmother, I think, who had that part of the moat filled in for croquet. How civilised! We drank Venetian wine and nibbled on baklava, and people talked about the Yashim books, politely.

Something that emerged from the talk was the glaring demand for a map to accompany the books, and maybe a cast-list for people who get lost among the unfamiliar names. Let me know what you think.

Here is a pretty clear map of Istanbul/Constantinople, showing some of the major landmarks.

 

As I wrote in Lords of the Horizons,  ‘Constantinople resembled the head of a dog, pointing east on a triangular peninsula. Over its nose the channel of the Golden Horn meets the Bosphorus; its throat is caressed by the Sea of Marmara; and the land walls erected by Theodosius in the fifth century are slung across as a sort of huge loose collar from ear to chest…’

You can see the Phanariot Quarter – modern-day Fener – incorporating Balat, where Yashim lives. Pera, across the Golden Horn, was the ‘European’ quarter’, and Ambassador Palewski’s Residence stands a little inland from Tophane, among the foreign embassies.

The Galata Tower, one of the fire-fighter’s watch points in The Janissary Tree, is here labelled Christ Tower, and Topkapi palace, home of the sultans and their harems, is called the New Seraglio. The church of Hagia Sophia is just outside its walls. The Hippodrome, or Atmeidan, is the site of the Serpent Column in The Snake Stone.

Of the two bridges shown across the Golden Horn, only the more easterly Galata bridge existed in Yashim’s time: its construction features in An Evil Eye.

Yashim’s Kitchen III

I don’t know if you’re having turkey this year? Or a goose? We are going for guinea fowl because they are so tasty, with a duck for the crisp skin. I quite like turkey but it makes a greasy stock, and a good stock is what you want for this pilaf.

Mehmet the Conqueror’s Grand Vizier used to serve this as a working lunch in divan, the council meeting held on a Friday. Into it he tossed a gold chickpea for some lucky pasha to discover (or break a tooth on): the Ottoman version of putting a sixpence in the Christmas pudding, perhaps.

 

Ingredients:

Basmati rice

Chickpeas, soaked overnight and boiled for an hour (but tinned chickpeas are pretty handy, too)

An onion

butter, salt, festive stock

 

Rinse the rice in cold water until the water is clear – this is to remove the starch, which would make the rice too sticky. Leave it to soak while you melt the onions in butter. When they are soft, add the chickpeas.

Drain the rice, stir it into the pan and add enough stock to cover the rice and a little more.

When the stock has all been absorbed, check the rice; it should be a little nutty, but almost edible. If necessary add a little more stock until the rice is almost done.

Now comes the strange pilaf magic: cover the pan with a cloth and a lid. Over a whisper of heat, or none, let the rice steam for fifteen minutes.

Turn the rice out into a dish, helping to fluff it out with a fork.

This rice method sounds like complicated alchemy, but it’s simple really – and it works.

 

Yashim’s Kitchen II – lamb kebab

Effortless and classic, these kebabs are best gently grilled over a throbbing mass of hot charcoal.

Ingredients

2 lbs boned shoulder of lamb, cut into inch cubes

2 onions

some garlic cloves, crushed

A small handful of cumin seeds

Salt

Pitta bread

Red onion, sliced

Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Lemon wedges

 

Grate the onions into a colander set on a plate, sprinkle with salt, and leave to sweat for twenty minutes. Press the onions down with a spoon to extract all the juice, chuck the pulp and mix the juice with the garlic and the cumin seeds, roasted and crushed.

Stir in the lamb and marinade at room temperature for a few hours, then thread the meat onto skewers.

Sprinkle the pitta breads with water, and grill them on both sides for a minute.

Grill the meat for 2-3 minutes on each side.

Pop meat, onion and parsley into the bread, with a squeeze of lemon, and eat with both hands.

 

 

Yashim’s Kitchen – stuffed mackerel

With some trepidation I prepared this rather spectacular dish in front of sixty people at a literary festival one Summer. It was a complete triumph, as you can see from my expression in the photo.

 Yashim cooks this, too, in An Evil Eye.

Ingredients:

A large fresh mackerel, not gutted

Olive oil

For the stuffing: A few shallots, scoop of pine nuts, scoop of chopped blanched almonds, scoop of chopped walnuts, a handful of currants soaked in warm water, a few dried apricots finely chopped, and some herbs and spices – generous pinches of cinnamon, allspice, ground cloves, kirmiz biber or chilli powder, sugar and dill and parsley, finely chopped.

Cooking is easy – it’s getting there that’s the challenge. You have to make a small incision beneath the gills, and then draw out the guts, and chuck them away. Lay the mackerel on a board and beat it with a rolling pin, or an empty bottle, making sure you’ve snapped the backbone. Massage the skin gently, to loosen it from the flesh and finally – this is the bit that makes your audience, if you have one, groan out loud – squeeze the whole thing out through the incision below the gills!

It is not easy. Go gently, trying not to tear the skin, as if you were squeezing a tube of toothpaste. You are left with an empty skin, still attached to the head. Rinse it out, making sure to remove any little bones, and set it aside.

Now make the stuffing: sweat the chopped shallots in oil, add all the nuts, and let them colour. Add all the other ingredients except the herbs, and stir them around.

Pick out as much of the flesh as you can from the bones, and mix it into the stuffing, with herbs, a squeeze of lemon, and salt and pepper to taste.

Cook it through for another couple of minutes. Let it cool a bit, and stuff that mackerel! Use a teaspoon, and gradually fill the skin, squeezing the stuffing right down to the end. It looks like a mackerel again.

You can roll the fish in flour and fry it, or better still brush with oil and set it under the grill, hot, until the skin begins to blister.

Finally, with a very sharp knife, slice the mackerel thickly, lay it on a plate like a fish, and serve with lemon wedges.

Yashim’s kitchen I

Yashim, the protagonist of four novels in the award winning detective series set in 1830s Istanbul, is more than a sleuth – he’s also a great cook. In his apartment in Balat he prepares some of the dishes for which the Turks, with their long Ottoman heritage, are justly famous: not for nothing is Turkish cookery described as one of the three great cuisines of the world, along with French and Chinese.

Yashim loves cooking, which gives him time and space to think, and readers seem to love his recipes just as much. Like a turban glimpsed on the street, a draft of sweet coffee or the slender shadow of a minaret, Yashim’s dishes help to recreate the flavours of Istanbul – its abundance of seasonal vegetables, fresh fish drawn from the waters of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmora, the ubiquitous soups and grilled lamb, the yoghurt and the spices that scent the air of the Egyptian Bazaar.

Each of the novels, beginning with The Janissary Tree, has figured several recipes perfected in the sultan’s kitchens – although the fish stew which appears in An Evil Eye, the latest in the series, is really a Greek fisherman’s feast, and the recipe for that – kakavia – can be found here on my blog.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting some new recipes for readers to try – maybe for some people they’ll suggest a break from turkey leftovers (I mean the bird, not the country)!

The quantities are not precise. As I wrote in Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire: ‘The French emperor Napoleon III and his empress, Eugenie, spent a week in Istanbul as the Sultan’s guests in 1862. The Empress was so taken with a concoction of aubergine puree and lamb that she asked for permission to send her own chef to the kitchens to study the recipe. The request was graciously granted by their host, and the chef duly set off with his scales and notebook. The Sultan’s cook slung him out, roaring, ‘An imperial chef cooks with his feelings, his eyes, and his nose!’

Be warned.

An Evil Eye Reviews

From the Globe and Mail:

An Evil Eye

By Jason Goodwin, FSG, 304 pages, $29.95

The fourth novel in the marvellous Investigator Yashim series is the best of a great bunch. Goodwin’s grand evocation of the glories of the Ottoman Empire takes us into the heart of Istanbul in 1839. Admiral Fevzi Ahmet, Yashim’s old leader and mentor, has defected to the Egyptians. Why would one of the Sultan’s most honoured men show him such disrespect? The Sultan wants Yashim to investigate, but the search leads Yashim to the closed world of the Sultan’s harem, where it appears the secret of the Admiral’s betrayal lies. A great addition to a superb series with an unforgettable investigator.

And from the Literary Review:
‘It’s always a pleasure to visit Istanbul in the 1840s with Jason Goodwin and his sensitive, civilised detective Yashim … Both interesting and highly entertaining.’

CWA suspense – Dagger in the Library Nomination

Having rather diffidently gone online to check on the Daggers – phew! I’m in, along with five other devious and crafty crime-writers: SJ Bolton (Bantam Press, Transworld), RJ Ellory (Orion), Mo Hayder (Bantam Press, Transworld), Susan Hill (Vintage), and Philip Kerr (Quercus). Great company.

The Daggers are Britains’s own awards for crime writing, in various categories; what’s lovely about the Library Dagger is that it’s awarded by librarians and library users, and not just not for a single book but for all the books we’ve written.  Libraries are facing hard times as the other, duller ‘books’ get balanced, and local authorities look to make cuts in their budget. Protest is the only option: I am warmed to incadescant rage by the erection of new traffic lights in my local town, replacing a perfectly good zebra crossing, at a cost of millions (it’s construction, folks!) while local village libraries are closed. I suspect that transport departments build empires for themselves, and find pointless work to do, while libraries costing next to nothing are scotched.

Libraries are church. They are coffee morning, afternoon tea. They are beacons, they are surprising. They succeed because they are always there. They feed children with ideas, they provide mothers with respite, they comfort and counsel the elderly. They are radical and unfazed. The people who work in them – and I only recently addressed a feisty bunch, the ALA, in America – are smart and funny and paid for library work, not for being the counsellors or teachers that they are. They are the largest of the Little Platoons Burke spoke about, when he atomized civic life two – three – centuries ago.

Lending a book doesn’t create work in County Hall. It creates minds. It creates the synapses of society, any society worth inhabiting.

Hurrah for the Daggers! But all halloos for the libraries!

Get Yashim’s cooking on Kindle – free here!

We thought this would be fun for Yashim mystery fans – a mini e-book with some new recipes from Yashim’s kitchen.

You can download it here for free – provided you aren’t in the UK. An Evil Eye comes out in Britain on July 7th, so there’s some sort of embargo. Don’t blame me.

http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Yashim-Turkish-Recipes-ebook/dp/B004XHZ0EC/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304015289&sr=1-12

If you enjoy it, do pass it along so that everyone can have a go!

We interrupt this blog to bring you a news flash

A big thanks to all those librarians and library users – aka readers – who voted Yashim onto the long list for the CWA’s Dagger in the Library award.

As it happens, I’m addressing the Austin Library Association today, in Texas.

Where would we be without our libraries, and the people who run them?

http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2011/library.html

(and while I’m here, a great review for An Evil Eye in the Washington Post – http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-evil-eye-a-thrilling-vision-of-an-ottoman-hero/2011/03/01/AFcOohGD_story.html )