So much cheese - muhlama and pide kaseri
"cheesy popcorn"
It was such a rainy day yesterday - a relief really after all that super heat, so in the afternoon I treated myself to catching up with Nigel Slater's TV program about the Middle-East. This one was about Turkey and I was particularly struck with two cheesy recipes which were distinctly Turkish, yes, but also really the same as a Swiss and Italian dish. Which got me to thinking again about why some dishes make it on to the world scene and some don't.
The first dish is called muhlama, mihlama, kuymak and yağlaş, but mostly muhlama. It comes from the Black Sea area in the far north east of the country around the town of Trabzon - also the name of the area. In the mountains here they grow tea and the women labour away in the tea fields with the men, so are pretty exhausted at the end of a day. So this very simple dish is a godsend. Basically you cook fine cornmeal in lots of butter, add water and salt, then cheese and finally more butter. The piping hot, stringy mix is eaten with chunks of bread and accompanied by tea. Nearly all the pictures I saw had the bread being speared on forks, but Nigel Slater, and, I suspect, all the locals used their fingers. There is a pretty good recipe and explanation on The Spruce Eats website. One of the things they said was that cheese like feta would not do and that you had to use the local cheeses like kashar cheese. I don't know if you can get that here - maybe you can, particularly in a Middle-Eastern store, but nearly all the recipes I saw suggested mozzarella. It seems that it has to be a stringy cheese, hence the mozzarella. The recipe on this site also does not add butter at the end but I did see this elsewhere and definitely on the television Nigel Slater's hostess added a pretty massive spoonful of butter at the end, which was stirred in. Not a healthy dish at all - just think of all that cholesterol - but probably extremely delicious - with that 'cheesy popcorn' taste.
Interestingly I also saw a couple of recipes that seemed to serve it with brussels sprouts, which somehow seems very weird to me. I do not think of Turkey and brussels sprouts!
But here's the thing. It's really a kind of cheese fondue isn't it? Swiss cheese fondue is a bit passé now but for a while there it was a really big thing. It's not quite the same - there is no flour or cornmeal and wine is the thing that makes it distinctive, but the idea is sort of the same. The French also have raclette, in which the cheese of the same name is melted, scraped on to your plate and eaten with bread and various other things.
The second cheesy dish was from the same region and was called Pide Kaseri - and this is really a gooey cheese pizza. Here you have bread shaped into a curved oblong dish and filled with cheese in the middle. Havoc in the Kitchen has a pretty authentic looking recipe. It has an egg in the filling and I cannot now remember whether there was one in the one Nigel Slater ate. What was really interesting about the one he had was the way it was eaten. He carefully cut away the crispy pastry edge - well not 'away' rather he sliced off the crispy bit on top, and then dipped this into the filling which was still bubbly and semi liquid. Rather like a version of the fondue above. Most of the pictures I saw seemed to just slice it across and I guess you then ate it with your hands. I guess that once Nigel had eaten all his crust he might then have tackled it with a knife and fork.
The cheese that is used in this recipe is a mix of mozzarella and feta. I don't think it has to be quite as stringy as the fondue.
To be truly authentic of course, the cheese is home-made and unpasteurised. But hey we live in an urban world and that is just not going to happen. So experiment a bit and find your perfect cheese combination.
Turkish pide, of course, sometimes called Turkish pizza - are exactly that. A flatbread with a filling on top that is baked in the oven. So why is it that pizza has taken over the world and not the pide? Well most likely that Italian diaspora in America. Anything that becomes big in America eventually becomes big in the world does it not? I wonder how long that will last. In the next century will it be China playing that role? South America? Who knows and I certainly won't be here to see it.
In the meantime, as Middle-Eastern food booms the Turkish pide is spreading. In some ways it looks more tempting than pizza and the other fillings are a bit different - minced meat, spinach and feta.
Nigel Slater did not give a recipe. His program is not really a 'how to' series. It's more of a travelogue with an emphasis on food really. Which is interesting and very scenic. This one was a little sad as it was all changing - the fish in the Black Sea were all being taken by commercial trawlers, leaving none for the locals, the vineyards in Cappodocia were disappearing in favour of tourist hotels and other ventures, leaving a rather bleak landscape, and the young were disappearing from the villages through lack of opportunity - even their grandparents who still lived the old way did not want their children and grandchildren to do the same. They saw a better future for them elsewhere.
So it was a little look into the soon to be past. Although those traditional foods are being transmuted into dishes for the hipsters of cities around the world. The traditions live on long after the places they came from and the way of life that existed has died. Just look at Christmas, pancake day, Easter ...
