Melek Erdal's Yayla Çorbası with Cucumber Cooler
An introductory essay, and a recipe. Text and photography by Melek Erdal
A Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to the whole Vittles back catalogue — including Vittles Restaurants, Vittles Columns, and Seasons 1-6 of our themed essays.
Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Melek Erdal. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
A living etymology of cooking
An introductory essay and a recipe for yayla çorbası with cucumber cooler. Text and photography by Melek Erdal
‘When I have the land, I will sow the words’ – Mercedes Sosa
When I have the words, I will give you the recipe.
Can I tell you that I do not enjoy writing recipes? It is not instinctive to the way I cook or share food. So, when I write recipes, it is often a compromise and a surrender, because I do love so very much to share the food I cook so that you might cook it too.
When one wonders, ‘But I followed the recipe, why does it not taste or look like yours?’, I can tell you it’s because there is a hidden part of the recipe, the invisible spice that is salt-bae’d down your elbow onto the plate. It’s called context: the context behind the recipe, the thing that is earned over time and space, over kitchens shared. What our mothers call ‘hand taste’. The flavour added from the hands that are cooking it. So, no two dishes that have the same name are ever really the same. And that’s beautiful.
The women in my family, like many in our region, are poets and mystics. They do not cook with printed words, because printed words have failed us. There is a suspicion around the printed recipe because we come from a culture that has had to persist without existing in books.
The Kurds, you see, have lived for a century as minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, making them susceptible to oppressive regimes and tactics to suppress our existence. The Kurdish language was banned in Turkey (where we are in the southeast) for a long time. Listening to Kurdish music or learning how to read or write in Kurdish were illegal. ‘Mountain people with a mountain language’ was the line used to minimise and diminish the Kurdish sense of self – a sense of self that was formalised out of you when you got to school age and were taught the state language and read the state books that did not mention your place in the history of the land or the culture.
The printed word, therefore, does not hold superiority in our forms of communication for the preservation of culture and history – if it did, we would have long disappeared by now. We express and communicate in song, in stories, in dance, and in food. The act of cooking became subversive: an act of resistance. The women of our kitchens have been the gatekeepers of our stories, and they never knew it.
When you ask mama or aunty, ‘How do I make this?’, you will get an answer like ‘Well, come and watch.’ It is both an insult and an invitation, a generosity encased in slight shade, as with all forms of their love. They are opening up their kitchen and history for you – is there a more generous thing? But it is a love that requires you to do some work too. To earn the space. To earn the ‘hand taste’.
As you watch them cook, you will hear mysterious descriptions like ‘alabildiği’kadar un’, which means 'to add ‘as much flour as it can take’. You will then have to decode for yourself just how much flour this is. Aldi flour is superior apparently. This is a known thing among the aunty baking community.
The spoken word is important, the spoken words in our songs and stories. The spoken word is flexible and elastic. It changes shape, form, and meaning over time. It picks up its surroundings, it is formed by the earth it is from, and, in return, it shapes those who use it. I love to retrace a word, to imagine how it got here, just as I love to retrace a dish. How did it get to our table? What journey did it take and how did it survive? How did we make it delicious? When my baba embellishes stories, he manages to make our recent history legend-like with his hyperbole. I now realise that this is our survival: making words and food delicious so that they can survive to reach your table today.
It is with this sentiment that I start this series of recipes. I will savour a word, retrace it, and build a recipe around it, so that it might reach your table.
Xıyar (‘cucumber’)
There are two words for cucumber in Turkish: the formal word ‘salatalık’, which translates to ‘for salads’, and the less formal ‘hıyar’, which is not often used as it is considered an uncivilised, slang word – more rural speak. It is also used as a low-level insult to mean an idiot or rude or crude person. You could say, for example, ‘that Tom from accounts “tam bi hıyar” – proper cucumber’.
Incidentally, the derogatory version happens to be the Kurdish word for cucumber, spelled ‘xıyar’. The ‘x’ indicates the extra throat we give the ‘h’ at the beginning of a word. The modern Turkish alphabet doesn’t have an x, and so really misses out, I feel, on giving words throat and extra pizzazz, extra depth and intent.
According to my dad, this low-level insult is also a term of endearment; he used it often to refer to an ex of mine. But I would argue that many of these words are volleyed between abuse and affection. We can love and insult you with the same conviction, and often at the same time.
‘Salatalık’ is limiting as a word for a cucumber, because the very definition directs you to use it only for civilised salads. Yet the ‘xıyar’ can be used for endearment, for insult, and not just for salad, but for borani, for tursu – and confidently just on its own.
Yayla çorbası with cucumber cooler
Yayla çorbası is essentially a hot yogurt soup with cracked rice and mint butter. I make mine with added chickpeas, spinach, and a cucumber cooler as a topping. The cucumber here gives you a fresh hit of garlic, lemon, and cooling texture, bringing a welcome acidity and contrast to the warm, earthy, and creamy flavours of the soup.
‘Yayla’ means the ‘highlands’ or ‘pastures’: where you would retreat to in summer months for the cool air and abundant soil, where the shepherds would let their sheep roam for grazing. Our regions are really preoccupied with what shepherds eat, as if it were a seal of approval for a dish. Shepherds are a romanticised figure in folklore, roaming free in the mountains, eating humbly but heartily.
Yogurt is at the heart of our cooking. My mother’s homemade yogurt has a starter that has been kept alive with the help of neighbours and family for more years than I can remember. One’s yogurt is sacred, and the home should never be without it. The starter is simply a few tablespoons of the yogurt from your previous batch – hence why you can never let it run out. This probably also explains why so many dishes from our regions have yogurt in them: we must think of ways to utilise the yogurt since there is a constant supply, and it must be used in order to stay fresh and to keep the starter for the next batch fresh. For confirmation of the importance of yogurt to our cuisine, you only have to look to maybe the only Kurdish billionaire I know of (or at least the most famous): Hamdi Ulukaya, who made his wealth from yogurt. Incidentally, his brand is called ‘Chobani’, the Kurdish word for ‘shepherd’.
Nevertheless, don’t tell my mama that I’ve come up with a recipe for yayla that is delicious and uses shop-bought yogurt – although she doesn’t think I’m ready to keep a yogurt alive anyway, so I’ve already strayed from the enlightened path. Let’s stray together, but please at least use a strained yogurt. And if you can find it, get Chobani.
Serves 4 as a main or 6 as a starter
Time 40 mins
Ingredients
400g strained yogurt
45g plain flour
150g cracked rice (rice pudding rice), rinsed
1 egg
2 tbsp flakey sea salt
1 litre cold water
1 x 400g tin chickpeas, drained
1 garlic clove, grated
500ml boiling water
1 bunch of long stem or large leaf spinach or Swiss chard, finely chopped (stems and all)
for the cucumber cooler
1 cucumber
1 garlic clove, grated
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
½ lemon, juiced
large pinch of sea salt
for the mint butter
50g butter
2 tbsp dried mint
Method
1 Add the yogurt, flour, rice, egg, and salt to a large pot (preferably with a heavy bottom). Whisk together until smooth, then slowly add the cold water, continuing to whisk until fully incorporated.
2 Place the pot over a medium heat, and stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture comes to a simmer. This will take some time, around 10 mins, but you must keep stirring to ensure the mixture doesn’t split.
3 Once the mixture has come to a simmer, add the chickpeas and garlic, then add the boiling water and stir again until it comes back to a simmer.
4 Keep on a low simmer for 20 mins, stirring every 5 mins to ensure the rice doesn’t catch on the bottom of the pot.
5 While the soup simmers, make the cucumber cooler. Grate the cucumber on the large side of a box grater. Gently squeeze the grated cucumber to remove most of the water, then add to a bowl with all the remaining cooler ingredients. Set aside until serving – it’s simple but makes a delicious addition to the soup.
6 Once the soup has had its 20 mins, stir through the chopped spinach or chard and simmer for a further minute, then take off the heat.
7 Now make the mint butter. In a small pot, melt the butter, then add the dried mint. Once the butter foams and you start to smell a beautiful mint aroma, take off the heat.
8 To serve, add a few ladles of soup to a bowl, top with a generous tablespoon of the cucumber cooler, and drizzle with some hot mint butter.
Notes
If you can’t find strained yogurt, you can reduce the cold water added to the recipe by a third – so reduce from 1 litre to around 650ml.
You can often find long stem or large leaf spinach in local grocery shops or farm shops.
Instead of drizzling the mint butter onto each individual portion, you could also stir the butter into your whole pot of soup. The mint butter should be the last thing you make before serving, as you want to pour it on while it’s still frothing. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a beautiful sizzle when the butter hits the soup. If you don’t have butter, you can use olive oil instead.
Credits
Melek Erdal is an Alevi Kurdish writer, cook and community activist. Istanbul born, east London raised, Melek's background has been in both local government and hospitality. Her current work juggles community and public sector interdisciplinary projects; exploring culture, history and identity in stories, recipes and food spaces. Her recipes, voice and words have featured in the Guardian, BBC Radio 4 and Vittles. She stands by, however, that her best work is as the delivery person in her dad's kebab takeaway.
Vittles Recipes is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and are proofed and subedited by Odhran O’Donoghue. Recipes are tested by Tamara Vos.
Phenomenal! Not just the recipe, which I am totally making this week, but the writing. I read every word--and that’s not something you can say often about recipes. Thank you, Melek!
Ahhhh can’t believe it finally out. ❤️