Water Boils: Demystifying Brown Bagging

I am finally reunited with my childhood tiffin tin. I can’t exactly recall when I took lunch to school with it, but I know it was mine. From the wear and tear I can tell that it was very much used and loved; but knowing that my mom only cooked 3 dishes in her whole life, I am seriously wondering what I was carrying with it. The tiffin is a mystery, an important reminder of of my childhood amnesia and I accept this. When my parents visited me a few weeks ago, the only thing I asked them to bring here was my old childhood tiffin, just for the sake of nostalgia of things I don’t even remember. “There is everything here”, I said. I was lying.

The tiffin is perhaps the most common lunchbox in the planet. Through middle east and southeastern Asia, workers, students, state employees and travelers have used these tiered boxes to take lunches to work. In certain parts of the world tiffins are also sold at roadstops for travelers who are looking for a quick snack.

My tiffin is a part of a forgotten Turkish tradition, a symbol of old world romanticism. There were times the working men and women took their leftovers, or freshly prepared meals to work. There were times all kids were sent to school with a homemade lunch, even if it was a sandwich with a slice of feta cheese. There were times grandmothers made dolma, cold pinto beans in olive oil, and borek for this sole purpose, because they are the most perfect lunchbox foods. There were times, that a cartoon strip depiction of a civil servant wouldn’t be complete without a tiffin on hand, because it was the most recognizable accessory of the man. Well, not anymore.

While the Turks didn’t get richer, for various reasons some stopped taking lunches and started paying for takeout or delivery. Indeed there is still affordable and decent street food, but most people who couldn’t afford restaurant takeout decided to opt for bland cafeteria lunches. More importantly, they never bothered to bring last night’s leftovers. When I was in high school, it was almost an embarrassment to take lunch to school. Cool kids ate out at establishments with questionable food but attractive clientele, uncool kids (like me), ate at the cafeteria and worked out their gag reflex. Noone I knew bothered to bring food from home. Well I didn’t, because there was never food at home (that’s another story); but what about the others?

The tiffin recently became a central metaphor to protest the slow destruction of Turkish culinary heritage. Part slow food organization, part lunchbox activists, the Sefertasi Hareketi (tiffin movement) brought a minority together, those who liked their food to be made of real food. Not many people paid attention. They were too busy with the drama of big corporate chains opening stores in Turkey. Those who didn’t want to throw money on the street, or couldn’t afford a three dollar latte, continued to eat decent-but increasingly homogenized-street food.

I had such high hopes for taking my tiffin to work. But bewitched by $2 lahmacuns and bahn-mis, I really didn’t have any reason to take lunch to work. After escaping the Midwestern casserole-town with only a few dependable cheap eats that are walking distance to school (and most are closed after 5:00 or in the winter anyway), I wanted to eat everything in sight in this city where real people cooked for real people. I was hungry, and there was a buffet the size of a city.

Then I remembered one thing that that no takeout lunch, even the ones cooked by grumpy old Lebanese men, could provide: variety to the extent of decadence, affordable luxuries such as a great piece of chocolate or bergamot “Cyprus delights” (oh oh, here comes another world war). A bento / lunchbox / tiffin/whatever you call it, isn’t just a hunky sandwich, or even some “salad bar” takeout with ostensible variety. It is a small buffet, made by you or someone you know, lovingly. So I promised myself to make a brown bag lunch once in a while, even if it is once a week. With a little box of cucumbers that were bought for a mere 99 cents and a reasonable interest towards cold foods due to summer heat, I decided to make a cold soba noodle salad. I put some grapes, some Cyprus/Turkish whatever delights from a corner store, almonds, and crackers and I was ready to get on the subway with my 20 year old tiffin. And I assured myself that I will look cool carrying it.

Ingredients:

• 1 cucumber, peeled and diced
• Some dried wakame (a tablespoon perhaps). I decided not to reconstitute it in water, because I know that the cucumbers will release some water overnight and wakame will soak it. Next day it will be perfect. At least this is my hypothesis.
• 1 bunch of soba noodles, cooked, washed and drained
• 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise
• a pinch of cayenne, a pinch of wasabi powder (you know, the fake one)
• 1 tablespoon of soy sauce

Mix last three ingredients, well. Add the rest and mix until everything is coated. Put in the fridge overnight and hope that the wakame will be all right next day.

I’m on the subway after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundered eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car. Unfortunately, one miserable, fat bastard is taking up all three of them. As he sits glumly but defiantly in a center seat, his gigantic butt cheeks and thighs spill out of the molded plastic bucket onto the seats on both sides, and his beady eyes dare me to try and squeeze my bony ass into one of the narrow spaces next to him.

Dream sequence: I’m on a packed commuter flight and we’re going down for a forced landing in a Midwestern cornfield. Engine one is on fire, the cabin fills up with smoke, panicky passengers overturn their meal trays as they rush the emergency exits. The pilot manages to plow the plane belly-down onto soft earth, but the the plane - in flames now - comes to a full stop and the emergency doors pop free, the three-hundred-pound ectomorph in the window seat becomes lodged firmly and inexorably in the small doorway. At the dead of the aisle, another giant fuck collapses wheezing onto the floor, blocking egress. As my hair catches fire, the last thing I see is jiggly, crenulated back fat.

Whose fault is it? Who made my fellow American obese - if not morbidly obese? How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin? In whose evil snail tracks across the globe can we watch thighs expand, bellies pooch out over groins, so that fewer and fewer every year of the flower of our youth can even see their own genitals without benefit of a mirror? Who is making each generation from once normally proportioned countries swell up like grain-fed steer?

We know the answer. America’s most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis - or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.

The Evildoers of the major chains live nowhere near their businesses. Like crack dealers, they know what they sell is not good for you, that it makes neighborhoods uglier, contributes nothing but a stifling sameness to society. Recently, with Eric Schlosser, the author of the brilliant and terrifying Fast Food Nation, I debated two representatives of the fast-food industry at a “multi-unit food service operators” convention in Texas. Our position, unsurprisingly, was that everybody in the room basically sucked. The opposition countered with tortured reciattion of numbers and statistics, mostly to do with what a valuable service their industry provided, employing - for a few months at a time - hundreds of thousands of people who (they implied) might otherwise be sticking up liquor stores, setting fires, and sodomizing pets. They neatly deflected Schlosser’s own accurate and sobering numbers, mostly to do with workplace injuries in the meat-cutting industry, average length of employment, bankrupt “nutritional” value, the quantifiable path of balooning thighs following in their businesses’ wake across the globe, and so on. But when I asked these folks, one by one, if they would live anywhere near their own overlit, maniacally cheery looking restaurants, I got, more often than not, a stunned look and a “Fuck, no!” When I mischievously suggested (opportunistically taking advantage of the current fervor of flag waving) that their chosen enterprise was basically unpatriotic; that they were deliberately targeting children with their advertising, then knowingly raising them to be no-necked arterially clogged diabetics who’d “never in a million years make it through basic training. God help us if we ever have to hit Omaha Beach again, those doughy overfed punks’ll drown like rats!” - they looked, actually…guilty. They know, you see. You think they eat their own gruel anywhere near as frequently as the average rube? I don’t.

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? decidedly no. Fast food - which traditionally solves very problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the causally hungry - can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you’ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from strip malls in San Diego, across the USA, through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray “beef” patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavored-sprayed chicken nuggets, of “milkshakes” that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of “barbecue” that has never seen a grill, “cheese” with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.

There is delicious, even nutritious, fast food to be had in the world - often faster and cheaper than the clown and the colonel and the king and their ilk produce. In Japan (and increasingly in the West), there are quick, affordable sushi joints. In Tokyo, you can purchase yakitori, small skewers of grilled poultry and meat, from yakitori vendors clustered around business districts to serve executives looking for an easy after-work snack. In Spain, tapas (or pinchos) are served standing up; you grab something good at one tapas joint, then move over to another, a movable series of snacks, inevitably delicious - and again, usually good for you.

In Vietnam, fast food is everywhere, right out in the street: freshly made, brightly colored sandwiches on homemade French bread; steaming bowls of pho, noodles served from a portable kitchen carried on a yoke on the proprietor’s back; grilled shrimp kebabs skewered on sugarcane; tiny bundles of rice and pork wrapped in banana leaves; spicy calamari; crispy little birds; hunks of jackfruit; caramelized bananas and mango - all of it made and served by individuals, lone entrepreneurs for whom pride is not a catchphase or a slogan but an operating principle. In Mexico, one is likely to find happy swarms of people slurping posole, a sort of soupy stew, or menudo, a similarly delicious concoction, around primitive cars right out in the street, electric power provided by a chugging gas generator. A few pesos and a few seconds and you’re eating better than at any place run by evil clowns or steroid-overdosed action movie front men. Turn right and there’s an old woman making absolutely fresh quesadillas of zucchini flowers and farmer cheese, turn left and a mom and pop are slicing up a tender head of pork and rolling it into soft tacos with salsa fresca so fresh and wonderful you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. Total time elapsed from time ordered to actual chewing? About twelve seconds.

Even in Russia they’ve got blintzes and piroshkis, served on fire-engine-red plastic trays - in the worst American tradition - but again, made by a human, fresh, on site, from real, recognizable ingredients, not shipped in frozen, pre-portioned vacu-seal bags from some meat-extruding facility near a far-away turnpike. And that cherished idea of the Russian as stocky, Krushchev-like babushkas is way wrong, friends. Most of the Russians I saw recently? The guys all looked like Dolph Lundgren and the women were tall, slim, and hard-looking enough to handle themselves in a street fight.

In Cambodia, a desperately poor cyclo driver, munching on a crispy little bird at a market, engaged me in conversation. “Is it true,” he asked, “that all Americans eat only hamburgers and KFC?” He looked truly sorry for me.

I wouldn’t really care what they put in those burgers - if they tasted good. And though I do care that the rivers of Arkansas are clogging up with chicken shit to satisfy the world’s relentless craving for crispy fried chicken fingers, I don’t believe that we should legislate these cocksuckers out of business. My position is kind of the Nancy Reagan position on drugs: “Just Say No.” Next time you find yourself standing slack-jawed and hungry in front of a fast-food counter - and a clown is anywhere nearby - just turn on your heels and head for the lone-wolf, independent operator down the street: the pie shop, a chippie, a kebab joint, or in New York, a “dirty-water hot dog,” anywhere that the proprietor has a name. Even that beloved British institution, the chippie, is preferable to the the clown’s fare; at least you are encouraging individual, local business, an entrepreneur who can react to neighborhood needs and wants, rather than a dictatorial system in which some focus group in an industrial park in Iowa decides for you what you will or should want. Deep-fried cod or plaice with vinegar, haggis with curry sauce; these may not be the apex of healthy eating, but at least they’re indigenous to somewhere - and washed down with enough beer or Irn-Bru, they’re quite tasty. The kebab shop makes food that is at least fresh, and a beef shawarma does not require the addition of beef flavor to make it taste like food.

Whenever possible, try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody. And stop eating so fucking much. A little portion control would go a long way in slimming down our herds of heavyweights in their tent-like T-shirts, Gap easy-fit pants, and baggy shorts. (Apparently taking body-sculpting cues from some of our more humongous rappers, these guys ignore the fact that many of their heroes probably have to wash themselves with a sponge at the end of a stick.)

You may as well stop snacking on crap while you’re at it. You don’t need that bag of chips between meals, do you? You’re probably not even enjoying it. Save your appetite for something good! Take a little more time! All that rage and frustration, that hollow feeling so many of us feel - for so many good reasons - can be filled up with something better than a soggy disk of ground-up assholes and elbows. Eat for nourishment, yes, but eat for pleasure. Stop settling for less. That way, if we ever do have to get in there and “smoke the evildoers out of their holes,” at the very least, we’ll be able to squeeze in after them.

from The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006: Bloomsbury Publishing):

I made two meals for tomorrow, because I had so many leftovers from the weekend. This is a good excuse to work late and stay in campus until after dinner time. We see some borek, apple slices and almond butter for some protein. As usual, this should cost around 2 dollars. Everything is organic, well except the plastic.

When one needs to make some borek, it is almost impossible to find no. 10 phyllo, the thick kind, in small town USA. Of course you can use no. 2 phyllo, the common variety available in most supermarkets, but it doesn’t fit the purpose as finely. I guess this is my vulgar cultural bias, but I don’t like borek made with thin phyllo. In fact, Turks never use this type of phyllo at home, except for making baklava. And other than grandmas of the rare kind, no-one bothers to make baklava at home anymore. As a result, you cannot even find this product in supermarkets. You have to go to an old fashioned phyllo store, a phylloist I would call. Crazy as it is, we still have artisan shops that exclusively sell phyllo and kadayif, albeit decreasing in numbers. The one in our street corner would work through the night most weekends; and I would see his lights sometimes, coming home late at night, from a leisurely night of drinking and eating at the meyhane. I would feel embarrassed, concerned that if he sees me he will think lowly of me. The guy is working his ass off for my Sunday brunch borek while I am doing what? “Growing my ass” the Turkish idiom would state. The phylloist does overtime because some borek needs to be made. In Turkey, the issue of borek cannot be taken lightly. It is so central to the cousines of Turkey that, there are at least two dozen varieties, categorized by their ethnic affiliations, fillers, or the way the pastry is shaped.

For example, there is Kurdish borek which has said to originate from kombe, or possibly katmer which literally means layered. This is a south-eastern Turkish specialty but occasionally is seen in central regions as well. Since anything related to Kurdish (or any ethnic minority) culture has been taboo until very recently, it is hard to find any records on the etymology of the Kurdish borek and how it relates to the boreks of the region; but this guy claims to be the inventor of the concept. The article is in Turkish, but in summary this person got the rights of the name “Kurdish Borek” in Austria, and is complaining that he cannot do the same back home because of century long anti-Kurdish position of the state. See, like all ethno-political issues, even a piece of borek creates such controversy in my dear home country. You can write a full-on doctoral dissertation deconstructing the discourse around the issue, and I guarantee that you will lose your mind while doing it. For example, since no-one knows it with that name in Diyarbakir (a predominantly Kurdish city), some people claim that it has no roots in Kurdish culinary history, and hence is a misnomer. Oh, yes dear, there are similar types of food in the south, not known as “Kurdish borek”, but as katmer (qetmer in Kurdish); a version far superior than its impostor nouveau-Istanbul-Kurdish borek. Turks make it, Arabs make it, Zazas make it; in fact everyone in the region makes their own version of it.

Unlike katmer, which usually has clotted cream in it, the Kurdish borek has no fillers, just layers of pastry served with confectioners sugar atop. You cannot find it in the most casual of restaurants, because it is traditionally sold at street corners. It is the poor mans borek, just a step up from white rice with chickpeas, and the whorehouse fritters (another item that probably deserves a blog entry due to its name), again sold at street corners. For the majority of white-Turks -the popular moniker for the upper middle class secular population- the word Kurd bears meanings that resemble the ways “ghetto” is used in US. Naturally, an empty borek, an archaic form of food, deserves such a name in the eyes of the dominating elite. I bet most my friends from the private high school I graduated from would see the name fit, not historically or etymologically, but normatively, pertaining cultural inferiority. Things get even more complicated when we want to hear the take of the nationalist right. I’d rather not, but they speak anyway. For example, the Turkists would go in the opposite way and deny the existence of a concept like Kurdish borek. They’d rather die than use the word Kurdish, even the case is describing a piece of pastry. For them, there is no Kurdish borek, just “plain borek”. “How can it be?” as some radical nationalist in Eksi Sozluk (Turkey’s collaborative hypertext dictionary, encyclopedia and a fertile breeding ground for never-ending flame wars) would say: “Kurds have no culture, even their language is an ersatz one”

And then there is Laz borek, a specialty of the Laz people of the Black Sea. This is a sweet one as well, similar to the katmer, but this time, it is filled with custard. Like my obsession with custard donuts, I have a soft spot for this and I would marry any man, woman, drag king, drag queen, grandma, or perhaps a Republican (only if the borek is really good) if he/she/zhe would make some for me. Tatar borek, Bosnian borek and Albanian borek have their own intricacies (see I am getting too lazy to write the details), but perhaps the most ingenious ethnic labeling of borek is the Chinese borek, which entered the Turkish culinary lexicon in the early 90s. You guessed it, this is plain old egg roll. Name calling of boreks is a crazy game, it is as if all neighborhoods would like to have their own borek. Take for example, Sariyer borek and Karakoy borek, which get their names from respective districts in Istanbul where they are predominantly made and sold.

Categorization through fillings is equally complicated. The traditional ones are spinach, meat, cheese, and potato. The Aegeans like theirs with courgette, purslane, eggplant and lor (Turkish ricotta) while the central Anatolians who suffer hardy winters are partial to ones with dry goods: lentil-poppyseed and chickpea are favorites. In Thrace, people buffer their raki with pachanga borek made with pastrami and kasseri cheese. Nice pairing, a sommelier would say. Finally, there is the confusing su boregi, or the “water” borek, the most labor intensive of all kinds. No, it doesn’t have water as a filling; that would be silly, honey. See, the water is involved in the making. The pastry is rolled by hand, then sheets of pastry are parboiled before assembling the whole thing and baking it in the oven.

If this wasn’t enough categorization, perhaps you can define boreks by their shape. A kol (arm, branch) borek is shaped like a long thin log; a cigarette borek, as you might guess, is shaped like a cigar; rose borek is a round cinnamon roll type rollup; and talisman borek has a small triangular form. Then there is puf borek, which is a distant cousin of samosas and empanadas. When fried, it puffs up. Hence the name.

Borek, alongside with comparably labor intensive dolma, is a sign of traditional domesticity, care, hospitality and culinary competence. A good mom is the one who makes borek, as often as she could. A good host will serve borek to her quests with afternoon tea. Even my mom, who barely cooks anything edible, had made boreks once every other weekend when I was a kid. And she made them well. Because in reality, borek is not that hard to make unless you roll the pastry by hand. But it has the aura, a mystery that most comfort foods share. Like the matzo ball soup, the baked ziti and the dumpling, the borek becomes the metric of the good motherhood. In fact, the best moms are known to make their phyllos by hand; store brought phyllos are for “modern” and corrupted wifes. But I am neither a mom, nor a wife and rather corrupted; so I’d prefer get my hands on some phyllo dough and save time.

As I mentioned before digressing into the socio-politics of borek, the conventional store bought phyllo is unfit for my idea of comfort food. You need to add lots of fat to make it flaky, or else it gets brittle outside and sticky inside. Unlike spanakopita, which consists of a thick layer of spinach sandwiched between oily clusters of phyllo, traditional borek is multi-layered, akin to a sauceless lasagna. One layer phyllo is spread, one layer filling goes in; there is much more balance and stability. So if you wanted to use no. 2 phyllo, you need to use at least 2-3 layers stuck on top of each other, and provide some structure for the weight of the filling.

But there are alternatives. During my first week in the US a friend (then my newly made, later my best) started telling me about how one could make borek using flour tortillas. She was particularly excited about the fact that it tastes like rustic homemade borek; one that you make by rolling your own pastry; one that we never tasted at home since both our moms would never imagine rolling one. Yes, we talked about borek before most other things that you need to talk about when making friends; this is how things were between us. For the following years, we kept doing this, and gave each other 20 pounds of body fat as gifts.

Through my first year in grad school, I made a couple of dozen trays of borek for friends, visitors and classmates. It was my potluck dish. I used flour tortillas, they surprisingly tasted authentic to my clueless friends. Those who didn’t find it authentic had nothing better to eat anyway, they were too lazy to cook their own borek. No-one complained, no-one knew, or no-one attempted to make one better. I occasionally found my way into Devon Avenue and got the thick phyllo, but that was rare. When bored, I switched to thin phyllo, but always came back to a bag of good old Aztecs.

My interest wore off after a year, until the great borek backlash of this weekend, when I came home having no idea what to do with big bunch of kale. I was bored with kale, yet I kept buying it every week. Even the cashier recognized my patterns, he started recommending recipes. I didn’t want to make soup, I didn’t want to sautee it, and I definitely didn’t want to try that raw kale salad that the anemic cashier at Wholefoods kept talking about. “I am going to make whole wheat borek appropriate for my volatile insulin levels”, I wrote to one of my friends. “This time, I will use whole wheat tortillas”. And I did. It was my borek. I could name it.

Sabetaic Greko-Turk’s supposed spinach borek (wholesome diaspora remix)

Software

• 6 whole wheat flour tortillas (of course dear, you can make it with white tortillas but then please take the “wholesome” out of the name)
• 1/2 cup of feta (pick one: Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Serbian, Israeli, Persian, Romanian or even “fake” Danish feta)
• 1 bunch of kale (or any other green leafy vegetable)
• half a small onion
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons of yogurt (Optional. Most people don’t use this, but it helps with the golden color.)
• 1/4 cup olive oil, and some more for sauteeing (like butter? fine)
• red pepper flakes, salt, pepper

Hardware

• an oven proof casserole or a tray and other standard stuff

This makes one rustic borek. The end product is heftier and thicker than the way it is usually made in most households, if you want, you can adjust the recipe using 4 tortillas, but this is the way I like it. It serves four-five normal people or a single person suffering borek withdrawal.

Heat the oven at 400 degrees. Wash the kale, cut the leaves away from the veiny central stalk. Throw away the stalks. Chop chop chop. Chop the onions as well. Sautee onions until translucent and then add kale. Cook 10-15 minutes until the kale becomes very dark and loses most of its moisture. Season with red pepper, salt and pepper. Set aside to cool.

Mix egg, milk, oil and yogurt well into a thick liquid.

Put one tortilla in the greased tray/casserole. Wet the tortilla generously with the milk mixture (3 of tablespoons at least). Layer 1/5 of the cold kale mixture, sprinkle 1/5 of the feta. Spread a little bit more of the milk mixture. You need to ration your mixture here, you will do this five more times. Put another tortilla on top of this, repeat until you run out of tortillas. Spread the last of the egg mixture on top and the sides, ensuring all periphers of tortillas touch and stick to each other. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the top gets golden. Let it sit for at least 10 minutes, so that you don’t burn your esophagus. Slice like a pizza, or cut into squares and enjoy! I would say fresh orange juice or lemonade will be perfect with this.