Entertaining angels unawares

‘Her yiğidin bir yoğurt yiyişi vardır: Each man has his own style of eating yoğurt.’

Turkish proverb

A recent visitor from England, walking round the local supermarket with me, stopped in front of the chiller cabinet – actually, the series of chiller cabinets - devoted to yoğurt, and said:

‘That’s interesting. In Turkish they have the almost same word for yoghurt as we do. Is that a word they’ve borrowed from English?’

I stared at him, appalled.

‘It’s a Turkish word. The Turks INVENTED yoğurt. The English stole the word from them. And MANGLED it.’

My visitor looked slightly bemused by the vehemence of my reaction, as  well he might.  He had no idea of the central importance of yoğurt in Turkish life and culture, although the stream of people lugging huge 5 litre BUCKETS of the stuff  into their supermarket trolleys might perhaps  have given him a bit of clue.

So, let’s talk about yoğurt. There are some things you really need to know.

First, spelling and pronunciation: the British, when importing the word yoğurt into the English language, came a cropper over the fact that is spelt with a silent ğ which  was transliterated into English as a ‘gh’. This was fair enough, as in English, as a general rule

Vowel + g + h   --   silent gh    as in  Dough

but it ended up being pronounced as a hard g, when it shouldn’t have been pronounced at all.

What were we thinking?

Yes, I know. I still haven’t properly explained the Turkish silent ğ. But there’s a lot to get through. There will be a post on the strangeness and difficulty of the Turkish language very soon. For now, all you need to remember is that it is an

(WARNING: do not click the following link if you suffer from any kind of Grammatical Anxiety Disorder)

 agglutinative language and features a silent ğ, the use of which simply lengthens the vowel in front of it.

So it’s not yo-    as in  ‘But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’   -urt   (William Shakespeare)

It’s yo - as in ‘I said Yo, Jay, I can rap’  -urt   (Kanye West)

So there it is: a silent ğ and  a long ‘o’ –  yo’urt.

The word is derived from the root yoğ- , which is the basis of a number of Turkish words relating to density, and the process of thickening or condensing: e.g. yoğun – thick,  yoğunlaşmak – to become dense, thicken, or condense.

But enough with matters linguistic, before you lose interest  entirely and  wander off to  Awfulplasticsurgery.com  (No, of course I didn’t make that a hyperlink; I’m not entirely stupid. But do go there later to marvel at the bizarre juxtaposition of photos of  Hollywood celebrities with surreally bad plastic surgery and … adverts for California plastic surgeons. Only in America).

Let’s get on to the more – and you’re going to have to trust me on this - interesting stuff: the history of yoğurt.

In the beginning, for thousands of years, the original Turks  were nomadic tribes, roaming the steppes of Central Asia (they didn’t turn up in what is now Turkey until considerably later).  They were pastoral nomads: indeed, Central Asian Turks were the first people ever to domesticate sheep and cows, during the Neolithic age. Living in a climate where summer temperatures were around 40 degrees Centigrade, and frequently travelling long distances,  they needed to find ways to preserve food, particularly the milk from their herds.

At some point it was noticed that when milk fermented, it turned into a denser, slightly sour substance which stayed fresh much longer than raw milk: and thus was yoğurt invented. It was first made and stored in animal skins, easily transportable when the nomads were travelling. Exactly how long ago this happened is a matter for conjecture, but it’s likely to have been not long after the first domestication of sheep and goats in the Neolithic age, so at least 5 or 6 thousand years ago.

Perhaps yoğurt’s earliest appearance in the written historical record is in the Bible: in the Book of Genesis, (which in its current form dates back to 500BC or thereabouts) we find the famous story of Abraham putting together an impromptu al fresco meal for some strangers who arrive unexpectedly, and later turn out to be divine messengers. The menu included ‘curds (i.e.yoğurt) and milk’ – perfect for a light lunch should you find yourself  ‘entertaining angels unawares’.

Another very early written reference to yoğurt comes from Pliny the Elder’s  ‘Natural History’ (written around AD 77-79), in which this cheese-loving Roman imperialist, happily unaware that one day there would be yoğurt-fuelled barbarian hordes frolicking in the ruins of the Coliseum, rather snootily observes:

"It is a remarkable circumstance, that the barbarous nations which subsist on milk have been for so many ages either ignorant of the merits of cheese, or else have totally disregarded it; and yet they understand how to thicken milk and form therefrom an acrid kind of milk with a pleasant flavour".

It is entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion, but nonetheless interesting, that Pliny the Elder died during the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii, after sailing from a position of safety across the Bay of Naples towards the eruption, in order to study what was happening at closer quarters. Pleasingly, this self-immolation  for the sake of furthering human knowledge did not go entirely unrewarded: Pliny is still remembered in volcanology, where the term Plinian refers to ‘a very violent eruption of a volcano marked by columns of smoke and ash extending high into the stratosphere’.

I’m sure Pliny would have been thrilled.

The historical significance of  yoğurt to the Turks is demonstrated by the fact the  word yoğurt is included, with the same meaning, in the oldest known dictionary of  the Turkish language, Kasgarli Mahmut’s ‘Divân-i Lûgat’i Türk’, published in  the 11th century. There is an entire thesis to be written on the role of yoğurt  in Turkish epic poetry and other literature, but to gauge how important yoğurt still is in the average Turkish home, let me just point you to the following short extract from the section devoted to yoğurt on the fascinating Turkish Cultural Foundation website, a fount of information on all aspects of Turkish culture:

A dish that is to be accompanied by yoğurt is a must on any traditional Turkish table - unless of course, there is already another dish whose main ingredient is yoğurt. For thousands of years, yoğurt has been an indispensable element on Turkish tables. It is consumed plain or as a side dish, and it is a crucial part of Turkish Cuisine. Yoğurt is used to make soups, sweets, and the favorite drink ayran, which is made by mixing in water, mineral water and salt. Another reason why Turks hold yoğurt dearly is that all over the world it is consumed and known as “yogurt,” which is a word of Turkish origin.

A few months ago I visited  Diyarbakir, an old city in south-eastern Turkey famous for its dramatic black basalt city walls, and was delighted to find there an entire bazaar, many hundreds of years old, devoted to yoğurt - the Eski Yoğurt Pazar:

Inside, I saw where they got the idea for the plastic buckets in which yoğurt is now sold in Turkish supermarkets:

In the rural south east of Turkey, they still make and sell yoğurt the old-fashioned way, something  I was to witness for myself a few days later when I went to stay with a family in a village on the Mesopotamian plain between Diyarbakir and the ancient city of Urfa (the biblical Ur, and birthplace of the yoğurt-loving Abraham).

This happened purely by chance: ready to move on from Diyarbakir, I was looking on the internet for hotels in Urfa, and came across a local company called Nomad Tours, which conducts short tours around south eastern Turkey, and also arranges home stays in Yuvacali, a remote, very poor, village some distance from Urfa. The home stays (which Nomad Tours organises on a voluntary basis) enable villagers, who make a meagre living from subsistence farming, to earn some money, and provide their guests with an insight into rural life which it would be impossible to obtain in any other way.

I’m going to write in more detail at a later date about the time I spent in Yuvacali, which was the highlight of  a month-long solo trip exploring south-eastern Turkey for the first time. For the time being, let’s focus on the yoğurt-related elements of my stay  there with my hosts Pero,

 

Halil,

and family:

 

in their partly concrete, partly mud house looking across the Mesopotamian plain to Mount Nemrut in the far, far distance, on the other side of the Euphrates:

The concept of  ‘food miles’ is not really applicable in Yuvacali, where virtually  everything the villagers consume (except tea) is produced on their own smallholdings: Pero and Halil grow wheat, vegetables and fruit, and raise sheep, cows and chickens, to provide eggs, meat and milk, which is made into cheese, yoğurt, butter and ayran.

Truly, Yuvacali is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s spiritual home, although even he might find the stand-pipe which provides water, and the outhouse in the middle of the vegetable garden, a little challenging:

My hostess Pero, a woman for whom my admiration knows no bounds, shoulders a work load which would fell most Western women about half way through the first day, including as it does rising at dawn to sweep the farmyard, before feeding the chickens, milking the sheep and cows and cooking the day’s bread over an open fire. All this before breakfast.

But for the moment, let’s focus on the yoğurt.

You’ve probably seen yoğurt recipes before; you may even have got yourself one of those nifty little electric yoğurt-makers and brewed up at least one batch of this life-preserving superfood for yourself and your loved ones before relegating it to the back of the kitchen cupboard which houses all the gadgets that will never be used again.

You are unlikely, however, to have seen a yoğurt recipe which provides you with a step by step guide from sheep to breakfast table.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: 

How to Make Yoğurt in 6 Easy Steps, Yuvacali-style

Step 1: First catch your sheep

Step 2: You and the sheep, up close and personal

Step 3: Milking done, disengage from your sheep and rise gracefully in one swift movement, taking care not to allow the sheep to kick over your bucket of milk as you do so (this may require a little practice).

Step 4: Take the milk to the dairy, built with thick mud walls to withstand the baking heat of the Mesopotamian plain*

Step 5: Boil the milk, add the ‘starter’ from the previous batch of yoğurt and then leave it to ferment, a process which takes only a few hours.

Step 6: Preside over the next day’s breakfast table, with yoğurt that has travelled all of 3 yards, from the dairy into the house, and is still within spitting distance, literally, of its sheep of origin.

* Should you try to recreate this recipe in its entirety in, for example, the English Home Counties, it might be wiser to focus more on the water-proofing aspect when constructing your dairy.

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‘Sütten ağzı yanan, yoğurdu üfleyerek yer: A man who’s burnt his mouth drinking hot milk will drink even yoğurt very carefully’.

Turkish proverb