Melek Erdal’s Lamb and Chickpea Stew
A story about kuru fasülye, a dish Melek first ate at the Turkish Kurdish community centre, and a recipe for the lamb stew it inspired. Words and photos by Melek Erdal.
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Kuru Fasülye at the Community Centre
A story about kuru fasülye, a dish Melek first ate at the Turkish Kurdish community centre, and a recipe for the lamb stew it inspired. Words and photos by Melek Erdal.
‘We have a saying, “Berxwedan Jiyane”, which means “resistance is life”. If you are resisting, you are living. If you are in resistance against the system, everything that wants to dehumanise you, then you are alive.’
—Mehmet Aksoy
I don’t remember the summers of my first few years in London, only the winters – a sweeping grey blur dotted with a few vivid images. Like the salt shakers on the Halkevi canteen tables that had grains of rice inside. I didn’t know the purpose of the grains, but I didn’t ask either. I was silent then, my temperament not suited yet to the climate.
Set in the front of a grand art-deco-style former menswear factory, the Halkevi – or people’s house – was the Turkish and Kurdish community centre, our shelter and first rite of passage. These were the doors most immigrants from Turkey passed through when arriving in London in the mid 1980s and 1990s, seeking immigration advocacy, housing, work, or a place to gather for cultural and political events. When I was little, the large double doors of the entrance made it feel like a fortress. Few things are more unifying than collective alienation from language and shelter and the labour market. It was fortifying to pass through gates that enclosed behind them a space where we breathed and sighed in unison, a space with the familiar sounds and gestures of people who spoke the same tongue.
I remember a girl named Dilek in the canteen. She missed her grandmother too and she didn’t know why there were grains in the salt shakers either. She also wondered why the caffs on the high street had bright yellow jars on the table. What was in them? What was mustard and why did the smell hurt? We exchanged our grandmothers’ names as if we were doing time away in prison and had loved ones waiting for us back home. Common woes and common aims: whether you were five or thirty-five, you found a comrade at the Halkevi. It was a collective project in which everyone was responsible for helping each other to navigate the snakes and ladders of becoming a British Citizen.
The double doors would take you straight into the main hall, which had dark floors and magnolia walls, and which was dotted with thick pillars. The hall was surrounded by rooms for different activities: dance practice, advocacy, committee meetings. The canteen was in the main part, with linoleum-covered tables. Kuru fasülye on rice and with bread was the main dish served – a winter dish, a worker’s dish, deeply orange in colour from the salça, thickened and hearty because of the starch of the slow-cooked white beans, with savoury depth added by a small amount of lamb. In the sea of whispers that told us every day that we didn’t belong in this city, a bowl of fasülye in the Halkevi canteen seemed to say, ‘You are welcome and protected here.’
As the years passed and people built their lives, what was once a bustling hub where people married, grieved, and sought advice, education, and meals, became a quiet shadow space in the backdrop. By the early 2000s, the menu was reduced to toast, tea, and Turkish snacks like gofret and çubuk crackers – kuru fasülye no more. The canteen became a teahouse where elders and retired revolutionaries met, where framed photos of political martyrs lined the walls, and where I rarely visited.
In the late 2000s, I met Mehmet on the top deck of the 341 bus when I was on my way home. He introduced himself, adamant that we knew each other, with a takeaway container of kuru fasülye – complete with a plastic cutlery set, wet wipe, and serviette in a sealed packet – in his hand. I was distracted by the box of food that he seemed fully ready to eat on the bus, as he asked why I never visited the community centre. He was brazen, I thought – and it was the beginning of a decade-long friendship.
Mehmet was committed to bringing the community centre into the lives of younger people. He was a filmmaker, writer, journalist, and activist, who believed in the power of everyday people. He lived the ideals that many people think are just abstract ideology: the notion that love is resistance – to cynicism and everything that might oppress the essence of a person – that love is active and lies in care for a community that you build yourself. He romanced so many people back into the community centre, planting the seeds for a younger generation to develop a sense of self by connecting with elders, attending Newroz celebrations, and getting to know one another. He knew that autonomy begins with knowing your history and your language.
Mehmet and I shared many bus rides with foil containers or wraps in our hands. We’d go to house raves and friends’ uni plays and protests all at once. We ripened as people together. We had been blurs of grey without bearings and we became Kurds and Londoners all at once.
Our friend Mehmet died in Raqqa, Syria, in 2017, while documenting the front line of the Kurdish resistance against ISIS. He was not only an observer of things. He lived his words. There were 10,000 people at his funeral, for the 10,000 people he touched and connected with in his young life. People from across the world came to honour him. At the community centre hall, where the funeral procession began, a priest spoke, as did a Guardian journalist, and so did the beautiful youth he had revived. His father read a poem whose lines I cannot forget:
‘It is very difficult to describe Mehmet. You have to live Mehmet … My son was a drop. He became the river, he became the sea.’
In the march from the community centre to his grave in Highgate Cemetery, right around the corner from his comrade, Marx, I held hands with his friends, many of whom I had met only as we marched that day. Some came back to my place. I made kuru fasülye on rice, with bread. I used my pressure cooker because it made it extra-special: that way the beans amalgamate with the meat and the liquid better. I browned the lamb as I listened to the voices of his friends remembering him in the living room. I took my time cooking down the onions, because that is the key to the dish, but also because I did not want to speak – I just wanted to be silent again, like when I was five. I added extra sundried tomatoes and salça to bring more depth and intensity. I added my boiled haricot beans, I poured in the water, seasoned it, stirred it, and tasted a little with my wooden spoon. I closed the lid of the pressure cooker. I leaned my back against the counter and watched the dial slowly rise as it came to boiling point and let the whistle sing before I turned the heat down to simmer and the sound quietened. I wished I could be the child back in the Halkevi, sat opposite my friend Mehmet. I wished we had met as children eating fasülye together, safe in the fortress.
Lamb and chickpea stew (etli nohut) with vermicelli butter rice (şehriyeli pilav)
This is a lamb dish inspired by the one I used to eat at the community centre, made with chickpeas instead, that I cook at home.