Gastroville

The Black Sea Turbot is unique in appearance in the sense that it has buttons on one side. As a child I remember my grand mother, who adored turbot, sucking these buttons and also the bones as the meat attached to the bones is very tasty, and the gelatinous fat contained therein is the most prized part of the great fish. When I was young I considered this practice of sucking the bones to be undesirable. I must have missed a lot. Nowadays, I don’t miss any meat from a good turbot, including its cheek, and I don’t care if other clients stare at me when I attack my turbot in Michelin starred restaurants, such as L’Ambroisie and Apicius where I recently ordered a turbot for two. I simply ask for a bowl of warm water with a lemon slice to wash off my hands afterwards, and the staff approvingly obliges irrespective of the status of the restaurant. Life is too short to worry about aesthetics when the latter is at odds with the dictates of nature which bestowed this ugly fish with such deliciousness that can only be fully exploited by gnawing at the bones. Besides, I know that my grandmother, Handan Milor, would have approved of it!

Like it is the case with other highly prized goodies, such as beluga caviar (alas, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is very hard to put hands on a good version) and Perigord truffles, in order to appreciate fully the taste of the turbot from the Bosphorous, one should eat a good quantity of it. We usually prefer to prepare turbot at home, because I want to choose my own fish, and it is always risky to order turbot in restaurants when there are only the two of you, as the restaurant is likely to serve pre-cut slices which may have been cut some time ago and or may have been frozen (unless of course you are a good client and they assure you that they will cut fresh slices from a whole turbot). Typically most turbots are 3 to 4 kg. (although bigger ones exist), that is 7 to 9 pounds, and one good size turbot should be plenty for 6 persons or so. Smaller turbots (turbotin) do not have much taste, and I was quite angry when I was served the latter in one of France’s foremost seafood temples (Maison de Bricourt or Roellinger) last summer under the name of turbot.

When it comes to cooking the turbot, Turks are quite conservative, and any method other than frying is viewed with suspicion. Hence when I told friends that I had a wonderful whole grilled turbot at the Basque restaurant Elkano in Getaria, nobody is impressed or even curious. It looks like, as far as good quality turbot is concerned, the undisputable fact that it should be fried and all other methods are heresy, is written in the annals of the local mindset in such thick letters that to offer alternative suggestions risks being labeled as nonsense. Hence, when we came together with friends for a whole turbot dinner, my suggestion that we may perhaps try to grill it, was vetoed heartily and decisively by the other two couples. In return I received the concession that we would fry it not just in sunflower oil but a fifty-fifty combination of the former and olive oil and that we would properly salt the thick fillets with crystal salt prior to frying.

The first step was, of course, selecting the best turbot from among 10 or so good sized ones we found in a fish market near my house in Yenikoy. Unlike, say a Dover Sole, which can be eaten later, Turbot is definitely at its best within two to three days of its catch in the sense that it retains its moistness and tastes very pure and dense. But to be honest I can’t quite tell about the degree of freshness other than looking at the brightness of the eyes and poking into the skin, and I know that my tests are inadequate at best. I have a trustworthy fishmonger in Beyoglu, but unfortunately Beyoglu is quite far from Yenikoy, and the day we wanted to cook the turbot (May 24 to be exact), none of us wanted to drive all the way in the rush hour traffic and face the uncertain parking problem which makes living in Istanbul quite fun. Hence we decided to take the risk of buying our turbot from an unknown fishmonger whose display of daily fish looked quite fine indeed.

I left my wife in the car, who looks and acts non-Turkish --- Turks are very hospitable and friendly to foreigners and partial to good looking women, but the risks in this case were too high, as we would then be perceived as wealthy and not real connoisseurs, and this would have been fatal --- and approached the fish monger with caution as one should approach a car salesman in the States. After initial mutual sizing up and exchange of stares, I told him that my damn luck was being abroad during the last two months as, from the looks of the turbots that he displayed in his storefront (three turbots were hung from the head and visible even from long distance), it looked like nothing of interest for me had remained. A long silence ensued as he looked at me and tried to figure out if I knew what I was talking about and, to tell the truth, his turbots looked just fine! So, I did not want to lose the momentum which was building to my advantage, and I added that “well, your turbots do not look farmed, which is fine, but don’t you have something a little more interesting for us if you know what I mean”. Of course, I didn’t know what I have exactly meant and nor did he. He paused for a second and then he threw me off balance by the sheer utterance of the following sentence: “which team (football team) do you support”?

Now, I am a diehard supporter of Galatasaray and our arc rivals are Fenerbahce which I detest and detest not only because they are our nemesis but also because their $ billionaire President, who is a NATO contractor, has friends at the highest levels of the Turkish State, and this man is very adept in using carrot and stick methods — the latter has taken the form of allegedly arranging the shooting of several journalists from their legs who have dared to speak against him -- to reach his goals. Unfortunately, on Sunday, the day before our turbot feast, Fenerbahce, playing at home, had beaten Galatasaray 1 to 0 and had clinched the champion title in the league, and personally I was still recovering from the shock as we had clobbered them 5 to 1 to win the Turkish Cup 10 days before, and I was hoping to repeat this victory in their home field. At any rate, Fenerbahce is the team with most fans in Turkey and the chances of the fishmonger being their fan was quite high. In the very tense atmosphere two days after the match, any conversation between the fans of Fenerbahce and Galatasaray was bound to ensue in a disaster as Turks do not mince their words and are passionate people, and I would have expected this man to be wiser and not ask this very sensitive question.

As I was weighing the pros and cons of telling the truth and triggering warfare, my friend came to the rescue by exclaiming that he supports Trabzon (which is actually a very powerful team from the Black sea and, had they not been victimized by the referee when they played Fenerbahce in Istanbul, they would have become champion this year) as he is from the village of “Of” near Trabzon. The people of Of have the uncanny reputation of being tough bullies, but they also form a closely knit network and are known to be solidaristic.

Upon hearing that my friend Kemal was from Of, the fisherman began jumping up and down. It turned out that he himself was from the same village and was very excited to see a comrade. He then asked my friend if he ever met Oflu Ismail. Proudly, my friend said that he is the “nephew” of Oflu Ismail, and I know that this is accurate. Now, as a way of analogy, this would be tantamount to somebody bragging during the Prohibition years in the States that he is a close relative of Al Capone. There is no exaggeration here as Oflu Ismail is reputed to be a Mafia kingpin, and his tentacles do reach deep. At any rate in a country where the IMF and the World Bank supported governments are deeply embedded in corruption, more straightforward figures, such as Oflu Ismail, are often perceived as relatively benign as they inspire a combination of awe and admiration. Personally, although I have never been too keen of meeting Oflu Ismail, I now feel I am indebted to him as this happy coincidence of the two people from Of meeting each other the first time in the wild metropolis of Istanbul, and one being a relative of the legendary Mafia figure did save my day and ensured a culinary feast.

That is, in a split second or less, a whole turbot of 3.3 kilogram was pulled from behind the counter and proudly waved to us, and we were assured that it was delivered the same morning and caught early the same day. To make things even better, its price was reduced by about a third (which the fisherman said is their profit margin), and we were charged a very reasonable price.

As soon as we nodded our approval for the turbot, it was whisked aside and taken behind the counter for a swift operation of cleaning and hacking it into several fillets from the bone. The fisherman operates with a special half moon shaped and extremely sharp instrument which is pictured below.

We got lucky in the sense that the turbot turned out to be female, as I prize the eggs. The fisherman separated the eggs and the liver and placed them in a separate container without deforming the delicate eggs. At this point my interest in eating the eggs and my questions about possible cooking methods enhanced my status which seemed to be overshadowed by the fact that my friend was from “Of.”. Obviously I was asked about my “origins”, and I confessed that my parents came from Konya in the interior of the country which is bereft of seafood and, to my knowledge, we have not produced any notorious gangster and contented ourselves by being the home town of a poet and spiritual leader, Mevlana Celalettin Il Rumi. At any rate, my association with the right person had already given me some credentials, and when I also told them that I like fish liver, they started patting my shoulders, and expressing astonishment, as their clients normally discard internal organs. We were clearly set for a hopefully long term relationship which is very important for getting good quality fish in Istanbul.

Of course I deferred to my friend from Trabzon on the cooking method, and he fried the fish, as he was adamant not to leave this task to somebody from Konya! And he is quite an expert at it, so much so that he would make an Andalusian jealous. He made sure that the oil was very hot before placing the lightly floured fillets in the pan, and he used his judgment rather than his watch to decide when they were ready.

On the average each person got about three filets (we cooked them gradually) and plenty of fish eggs, and two of us ate the livers which are creamy and reminiscent of monkfish liver served in Japanese restaurants. The turbot was extremely pure and clean in taste, juicy, indescribably dense, and multi-dimensional in taste. We served it with spicy Turkish arugula called roka, fresh green garlic, and fresh scallions, which are much better in Turkey than the States, and some Turkish cured green and black olives which I adore.

My three years old daughter was at the table and was watching in awe and perhaps a little disgust as her mom and dad were gnawing at the bones. I doubt she will ever accept to taste Black Sea Turbot before she hits a certain age. She will then miss a lot, as I did, but now am trying to make up for the lost first 18 years of my life without the turbot!