Tasting Memory

In the dappled light of a grove of 50-year-old pomegranate trees, a table is being prepared. The crunching sound of gravel is animated by rushed footsteps in and out of the kitchen that drowned out a waltz by Stavros Lantsias playing on the radio. White linen cloths unfurl over wooden tables and a chilled carafe of visinada, a sour-cherry cordial, is placed next to Sephardic delicacies such as tarama, a white, fluffy fish-roe dip, that is to be smeared on top of the roska, a sweet bread shaped like sponge cake and topped with almonds. A polished silver kucharera – a silver vessel with spoons to serve guests dulce de naranja (bitter-orange preserve) and a paste of gum mastic – is ready and set aside for after the meal.

Lina Eskinazi, Ester Antebi, Nüket Franco, Jinet Sidi Sarfati and Sara Enriquez have come together to cook their ancestral recipes in the garden of Mitera 1905, a boutique hotel in a traditional stone villa just a 30-minute drive from the centre of the Turkish city of Izmir. These five friends are members of the city’s Sephardic community – a Jewish diaspora that settled on the Aegean in the late 15th century after fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition and finding refuge in the Ottoman empire.

Ever since, food has been an expression of their unique identity. “[Food] is a place of belonging, of coming together, a space of remembrance,” says Lina Eskinazi as she leafs through a stack of her mother’s hand-written recipes, passed on for generations. And over the years, their rich cuisine shaped Izmir’s cultural heritage. Little do many urban Izmirians know, for example, that their city’s dish of boyos, a savory pastry, is an heirloom of Sephardic Jewish cuisine. “Food and the rituals surrounding it were the only belongings our ancestors could bring with them from Spain,” adds Eskinazi. “The dinner table has always been a place where the rest of the world fades away. The family gathers around the table for a meal, and everything else falls into place.”

A few years ago, after realising many of their family’s word-of-mouth recipes were in danger of being lost, the quintet of old friends began getting together to cook and record their Sephardic dishes and the project took on its own momentum. “At first, we simply wanted to make a leaflet to be passed around in the community, to be the keeper of our parents’ recipes,” says Ester Antebi, as she polishes a silver dish destined for the table. “But then, suddenly, as we started asking around, there was an outpouring of shared memories – forgotten dishes resurfaced and we decided to turn the project into a book.”

There was a time when 35,000 Sephardic Jews lived and worked in the city but this number currently hovers at about 1,000. Kosher butchers and Jewish bakeries are now thin on the ground. Many Sephardis left to live in Israel when it was founded in 1948, and more recently, a younger generation has found opportunities in big cities. “In the case of our children, they went to study in the US, Canada or Istanbul, and never came back,” says Nüket Franco, another member of the group who is polishing a silver menorah for the table.

For the five women, this exodus is even more of a reason to preserve the culinary secrets of Sephardi cuisine, which are unique to Izmir. “With most of our children abroad, this project is a piece of home. It is more than passing on a tradition. It is an homage to our ancestral roots, which are bound to disappear as people relocate,” says Franco, who adds that the kitchen of Mitera 1905 is crowded and animated like the ones from their childhood, when neighbours, cousins, uncles and grandparents crammed into tiny spaces to help each other prepare meals. “We were four siblings and lived together with our parents and grandparents. All under the same roof. The kitchen was rarely empty,” says Ester Antebi. “They do not say, Ke bien se here, en poko lugar se have [Those who love each other a lot can fit into tight places] for nothing.”

Lina Eskinazi nods in agreement as she squeezes the water out of the spinach that will become the base of the fongos – a type of frittata. “It is great to be able to cook together,” says Eskinazi as she beats the eggs in a cup and pours them into the spinach mixture. “We don’t all live close by anymore, so it is harder to come together and pay tribute to the old ways. And now, of course, the pandemic has made things worse. This year many of us had to celebrate Rosh Hashanah separated from our friends and families.”

Next in line is boyos, a savoury pastry prized among the many rich baked goods that make up the heart of Sephardic Jewish cuisine. Sara Enriquez dons her apron for the task. She sprinkles some flour on the counter and kneads the dough thoroughly. “These were the leftovers,” Enriquez says as she rolls out the balls of dough with her hands, recalling her grandma’s scratch lunches of frittata, salad, rice and fish. “Boyos needs the human touch to become homogenous and soft.”

Outside in the garden, the table is set with white tablecloths. “White is very symbolic for us. It represents new beginnings and is reflected throughout the Sephardic kitchen, rituals and practices,” says the fifth in the group, Jinet Sidi Sarfati. Her father, for example, would always bring home a bouquet of white flowers on the eve of each religious holiday. White rice, peeled white almonds and white clothes are all an extension of this belief.

Aromas of freshly baked pastry travel through the air. “It just smells like my childhood,” Antebi says as she catches a whiff of the baked boyos and joins the group for the luncheon uttering a fervent “Kon savor de boka” in Ladino, the Sephardi language, which bears a resemblance to old Spanish. Most of the group admit they don’t use Ladino so much these days. “I still do, especially on religious holidays,” says Enriquez. “Unfortunately our children don’t. It was more common for our grandparents to speak Ladino but, as the community has become smaller, the language shrank with it.”

“In spoken form, Ladino sounds similar to 15th century Spanish, much like Cervantes used in Don Quixote, which nobody today would understand in Spain,” Franco says. Most of them still use some idioms and phrases they grew accustomed to from their grandparents. “Blanca i alegre – I think that was my grandmother’s favourite,” Sidi Sarfati remembers. “That is mainly used for young women, as a way to wish them happiness and peace that mirrors the colour white,” she says. Another phrase that pops up is “Un bokado, un dokado” meaning “a piece of food is worth a piece of gold”. “As you see, our Ladino consists of well wishes and is based around food,” Sidi Sarfati says and the women dissolve in laughter.

Like Ladino, Sephardi food has its origins on the Iberian Peninsula, but, over hundreds of years, has been adapted and mingled with the traditions of the Aegean. “The set-up, the richness of food, the sheer range, this all reminds me very much of my grandmother’s house,” says our host and owner of Mitera 1905, Mehtap Susuzlu, who sits at the table. Susuzlu’s family hails from Thessaloniki, and Mitera 1905 serves kasik tallisi (“spoon dessert”), a jam-like sweet of her Greek ancestors. A passionate exchange of jam recipes ensues. At the table, the ratio of sugar used in the preserves is compared with animated intensity. It all settles down with an offering of subya – a milky drink made from melon seeds. “I’ve been wanting to try this,” Susuzlu says as she takes a sip. “It is less milky than I thought it would be and the taste of melon in the end is very refreshing,” she adds. “When we were little there would be street vendors selling subya,” Franco says. “We used to collect the seeds of melons all summer long so that we could make it,” Eskinazi says as the group recalls another favorite snack, pipitas de karpuz – watermelon seeds roasted in the oven with salt. “Back then nothing would be thrown away, not a single seed, even that of watermelons.”

The five friends are keen to point out that they are not the only keepers of Izmir’s Sephardic traditions. Emili Sen, the owner of Patisserie Angelina in Izmir’s centrally located district of Alsancak, has been making Sephardic delicacies, such as boyos, börekitas and bishochos, for the past 28 years. Sen attributes her success to two key features: foremost, that she still uses an old oven. “To make quality baked goods, one needs a tiled oven so the pastries become puffy, yet crunchy on the sides. It is all in the balance between those two.” The second thing is that the dough is always kneaded by hand. “What you need to understand when it comes to Sephardic cuisine is that it has been about survival. It carries with it the hidden scars of a war mentality,” Sen says. “Most recipes are based on the idea of making something out of nothing or creating a dish out of a very few ingredients. The main ingredient is the human touch, this sense of affection.”

Across town, Maryo Gabbai, the owner of Gusto Confiserie, is a champion of biskutin (almond cookies) – one of Izmir’s oldest Sephardic traditions. “Every holiday, engagement, birth or bar mitzvah, it is a must to give out biskutin,” says Gabbai. The kezada, a layered bridal cake that is broken into pieces during the wedding ceremony above the bride’s head, is another. “It is shared with the guests, so that they too can marry or have good fortune in their lives,” explains Gabbai. He is the only one who still makes the kezada – the last-standing cultural ambassador for such delicacies. “But I do not know for how long,” says Gabbai, confessing that none of his children are interested in keeping up the family business.

Back at the table in the garden of Mitera 1905, talk turns to memories of the chicken-wire cabinets present in every Sephardic household where mogados (marzipan), biskutin and travados (walnut and honey turnovers) were kept. “When my mother left the brimbiyo (quince purée) out on the counter to cool down, it would always be eaten up. She had to constantly move it around to hide it so there would be some left,” Antebi says with a laugh. “Of course, it ended up locked in that cabinet.”

Tea is served as the lunch draws to a close and the savoury dishes are swapped with sweets. The crown jewel of the table is the baklava, and a Sephardic version made with blanched almonds (one of the most important ingredients of this cuisine). The five friends and their guests laugh and exchange stories of their childhood. Each Saturday morning, they used to attend the havra, return home for a luncheon much grander than that of today with a table ready to accommodate more than 20 people, and dine until the late afternoon.

There is a bittersweet joy to these memories. Over the last decade Erdogan’s “New Turkey” has become less accepting of its non-Muslim citizens who have inhabited the country for centuries. Erdogan’s repetitive narrative of being the shepherd of the Ottoman heritage often excludes the role religious minorities played and disregards their contribution to it. For instance, Turkey has the Sephardic Jews to thank for its artichokes, an import they carried with them from Spain.

Sidi Sarfati says there are fewer and fewer neighbours to drop by for coffee, fewer walnuts being roasted in the oven for guests, and fewer chicken-wire cabinets filled with smells of honey, clove and almonds. “It is unfortunate that everyone is drifting away like this,” she says.

For now, as the late afternoon sun filters through the branches of pomegranate trees and the chatter of old friends fills the air, the world’s troubles fade away. There’s a powerful sense of solidarity around the table. The women know that, like their ancestors who set sail from Spain in the Middle Ages, food will always be something they can call home. “Before this book came together, the chickpea and eggplant dish known as avogados was forgotten. Now it is revived,” says Franco. “That is already a success. In the long run we just want the next generations to enjoy the tastes of our childhood.”