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This is Turkish food: Peppery radishes in a hummus-like sesame dressing. Grilled quail, faintly sweet-sour from marinating in tomatoes, yogurt, olive oil and cinnamon. Mastic ice cream, with an exotic flavor something like Juicy Fruit gum; on the side, apricots stuffed with toasted almonds and slightly soured cream so thick it's almost butter.
It may be little known in this country, but in the last few years, European foodies have been discovering Turkish cuisine, and in the process a remarkable food writer named Nevin Halici (her name is pronounced something like "Neveen Halaja"). "Nevin Halici's Turkish Cookbook," recently printed in England, is the first book by a Turkish cookery writer ever translated into English. The food heavies see her as a sort of Turkish Paul Prudhomme.
In fact, she is not really anybody's image of a cookbook writer. The daughter of a Sufi family long associated with the Mevlevi Order (known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes), she is very much a traditional Muslim woman who wears long-sleeved dresses and covers her hair with a sort of pleated turban. Some people have the feeling that if the veil weren't illegal in Turkey, she'd prefer to wear it.
But her quiet, pious manner should not lead anyone to underestimate her. Halici's English may be halting, but it represents a triumph over centuries of family opposition to educating women. And if that doesn't impress you, I have seen her get a provincial Turkish Air Lines agent to change a plane reservation in under half an hour, simply by an invincible sort of gentle persistence.
She is a diligent researcher and has published book-length studies in Turkish of her country's various regional cuisines, which are quite various indeed. Two years ago at a symposium on food history in Istanbul, she read a paper on the little-known poppy-based cuisine of Turkey's traditional opium-growing area-a cuisine likely to disappear because of the Turkish government's campaign to restrict opium-growing.
And she is certainly an excellent cook. At a dinner she prepared for the American Institute of Wine and Food in San Francisco some months ago, she made a very ancient pasta dating from the days when the Turks were nomads in Central Asia. Called manti, it is tiny triangular...