Jason Goodwin's Blog: Talking Turkey, page 7
September 12, 2012
Chard hard, and chard easy
When I think of chard, I think of the handsome town across the Somerset border with a reputation for toughness (in spite of its boast as ‘The Home of Powered Flight’, which I mean to investigate one day).
The children report a rhyme that does the rounds on the school bus:
We’re from Chard,
We’re well hard,
We just nicked your credit card.
Swiss, rather than Somerset, Chard is a fashionable leafy vegetable much loved by the Ottomans. This year I’ve grown rows of it, and it has all the virtues: it’s beautiful to look at, with its thick, flat white (or red or yellow) stem and shiny green leaves; far more patient and forgiving than spinach, which tends to bolt; gives you two vegetables in one – the stems can be cooked like celery, the leaves like spinach; and tastes good, too.
Here’s how to do it as a dolma, Yashim style:
Blanch the chard for a second in boiling water, rinse in cold water, and strip the stalks from the leaves.
Make a stuffing by mixing up half a pound of minced lamb or beef, a grated onion, a generous handful of raw Basmati rice, and all the seasoning you want – parsley, thyme, mint, coriander, cumin, allspice in any combination or quantity you like, and of course salt and black pepper. A chopped tomato if you want.
Put a leaf face down on the board, stem end towards you, and lay a thumb-sized roll of stuffing on it. Fold the bottom over, fold over the two sides, and roll it up. Hold it tight until you’ve laid it in a saucepan, so it doesn’t unravel.
Make a dozen.
Pour boiling water or stock over the rolls, to almost cover, and lay a plate on top, to keep them squeezed. Cover the pan, simmer for half an hour until most of the water has evaporated and the rice is cooked, and eat them dressed with some yoghurt beaten with garlic and mint.
We just had it for lunch, and it was very good. It’s a doddle to make, with about five minutes childish industry and thirty minutes to wait, but for some reason everyone thinks it must have been difficult – which may be what you want from cooking, really.
August 17, 2012
Free book!
Phew! Just letting everyone (and everyone’s wife, husband, child, neighbour) know that my first book, The Gunpowder Gardens: Travels through India and China in Search of Tea, is available on Kindle for free this weekend.
The weather looked a bit dodgy, so I thought I’d give the book away instead of doing the garden…
Download it – share it – and if you enjoy it, please don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon…
July 16, 2012
Istanbul reads
Back from a whirlwind visit to the city with two new essentials for anyone thinking of travelling to Istanbul. The first is a book, and a website, called Istanbul Eats: Exploring the Culinary Backstreets – a lively canter around the food treats of the city. Lots of my favourites in there, and others I hadn’t taken in – street food, stall food, cubbyholes and restaurants, clearly orgainsed by district. Authors Ansel Mullins and Yigal Schleifer have an infectious enthusiasm for discovering new things, and eating them. Lots of photos, good maps, and all in a book so small you can slide it into your pocket…
The website is at http://istanbuleats.com/
Next essential is Istanbul: The Ultimate Guide by Saffet Emre Tonguç and Pat Yale. These two know their Istanbul like nobody else, and their award-winning new guide is everything it promises to be – thousands of photos, maps, vignettes and snippets of information, taking you into – over and under – everything worth seeing in the wider city.
Both books are available abroad, or you can buy them easily on Istiklal Caddesi, the old Grande Rue de Pera.
June 21, 2012
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
In Istanbul, at any rate. So much changes as the years go by: it’s prosperity, of course, which does it – and the corrosive ways of global finance, which encourages people to get rich by trashing things we like.
Now that the Pera Palace has had a facelift, I’m shifting my bags along the road to the Grand Hotel de Londres, partly because the name is so evocative, and partly because it has what some call faded glamour (and others depressing plumbing). It’s here: http://www.londrahotel.net/ Note: they take bookings without taking a credit card number! How’s that for old world politesse?
While we’re at it, are there any places like that which you’d recommend to us all? I can think of some in India, like the Ooty Club; and I remember staying at the Peace Hotel (nee Cathay) in Shanghai, when the old men played jazz downstairs and your room could swallow a London bus. There was a Greek cafe, Makarios, on Jermyn Street in St James’s till a few years back where you could get a dish of mussels for, I think, £4.50; it was full of minor civil servants and the old waiter had a voice like molasses running over gravel. Now, pimped up, overpriced, Italianated and lost, it’s like this:
Still, all is not yet lost – so take a moment to share your nostalgic travel treats with the rest of us, below – if you can squeeze a photo in, so much the better!
June 18, 2012
Yashim – the soundtrack!
Complete joy! I did an event for An Evil Eye, talking about the harem, at the wonderful bookshop in Bath, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. It was rounded off by this appearance from the Bookshop Band… They’ll be on Radio 4′s Today programme this week, too.
Watch and enjoy – and share it with friends: the band deserves it!
As the band said, if Yashim’s adventures were done as a children’s tv programme, this would be the soundtrack.
June 13, 2012
Order, order
Over the course of the Istanbul series of Yashim novels it’s inevitable that new readers will begin to discover them in random order – which is why, like JK Rowling, I make sure the characters are re-introduced in each book, subtly enough (I hope) that regular readers won’t be bored.
Here is the Yashim hit-list (linked to Amazon.com) in strict order of appearance:
4. An Evil Eye
A fifth, provisionally entitled The Latin Reader, is currently entertaining me each day…
This is Gentile Bellini’s 1501 Turkish Painter, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston
May 16, 2012
Liking stuff – including a duck shoot
Setting up a modern online publishing venture is like picking at a loose thread: before you know it you’ve made a hole in the world wide web and all your schedules are unravelling…
Sunita, the glamorous publicity director of Argonaut Books, insisted that The Gunpowder Gardens should have a Facebook page. Then, that the page should be liked by as many people as possible. So if anyone has a minute – and why should you? – please go over to https://www.facebook.com/GunpowderGardens and click Like: apparently it’s an open sesame.
More congenially, I took Yashim’s friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador to the Sublime Porte, duck shooting this morning. It’s September, barely dawn, just outside Istanbul at the Çekmece Lakes, where the duck comes in from the Crimea… Both lakes have bridges built by the masterly Sinan.
May 4, 2012
Museum Secrets
Last year I did some filming with Kensington TV for a series called Museum Secrets, airing on Canada’s History Television channel.
Episode 14, Topkapi palace, is going out today.
Why were so many Sultans assassinated?
What would be the perfect way to murder a Sultan?
Topkapi Palace Museum is peaceful at night. But when the Sultans lived here, it’s likely they had trouble sleeping.
A traitorous vizier, a jealous wife, or an ambitious son – many might have reasons to murder a Sultan. During the Ottoman Empire, 19 Sultans were assassinated.
In the broadcast episode, we meet a man who is an expert in such matters. His name is Jason Goodwin – a detective novelist who sets his stories in Topkapi Palace during the Ottoman Empire.
We follow Jason as he examines murderous possibilities in the Sultan’s bathroom, at Istanbul’s famed spice market, and as he returns to Topkapi to consider the homicidal potential of the Sultan’s kitchen. Here Jason investigates if poison could be secreted into a Sultan’s food.
Is poison the best way to murder a Sultan? Or are other nefarious methods more likely to succeed?
All is revealed in Museum Secrets: Inside Topkapi.
Further Questions
Jason’s detective novels, set in Topkapi Palace, are filled with mystery and history. We invite you to check out a complete list of his works to date on Amazon.com.
April 29, 2012
The Gunpowder Gardens or, A Time for Tea
Is Amazon a predatory monster monopolising the book trade? Do e-books mean the death of publishing? Are we standing at the edge of a bright new dawn, as readers and writers – or staring into the abyss?
Is it a storm in a teacup?
I have no idea – but I may have a better answer in the months to come. I have just published – with Argonaut Books, whose CEO, staff and publicity director are all me – the Kindle edition of the first book I ever wrote, The Gunpowder Gardens.
Published in the USA as A Time for Tea: Travels in China and India in Search of Tea, it’s a travel book, a history book – and a book about tea. It was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, ran to numerous editions on both sides of the Atlantic, and is now out of print. Until today, at least.
Having proof-read the digital edition myself, I can say that I am still as proud of this book as I was on the day it first came out, with beautiful covers done by my friend Mark Kesteven.
For UK Kindlers: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Gunpowder-Gardens-Time-ebook/dp/B007YANR90/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1335700500&sr=8-4
For more about the book, click this link
April 20, 2012
Cornucopia
Many readers have written to me to say that Yashim’s exploits have inspired them to visit, or re-visit, Istanbul – where the official city guides, as it happens, recommend the Yashim series to prospective tourists, as a gentle introduction to the city’s long and tumultuous story. My thanks to them all.
If any further spur was required, then Cornucopia should provide it. Cornucopia describes itself as ‘the Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey’, and it is that and more. It is an astonishingly beautiful magazine, published quarterly, with features on everything from old Bosphorus interiors to nomads of the steppe, from attar of roses to neolithic Anatolia, very lavishly illustrated, as the brochures would say, and intelligently written.
One way to look at what it has to offer is via this link, which begins with a review of the Yashim books by Barnaby Rogerson, author and publisher at Eland Books – of whom, and of which, more in a later post.
http://www.cornucopia.net/store/books/an-evil-eye/
A browse through the website to begin with is highly recommended!
Celebrating and chronicling all things Ottoman-inspired and influenced, Cornucopia is a cross between World of Interiors and National Geographic, with a gentle Turkic twist. Tyler Brülé, The Financial Times
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