The Hindu Business Line : Truly Turkish, chicken breast pudding!

M. Resat Akkan is an interesting and colourful producer and exporter of table olives and olive oil in Turkey and one of the rare people in organic olive farming. With intense passion for all things Turkish, except, of course, the politicians, he is great company at the dinner table.

Each evening of the Anatolives fair organised by Zeytindostu - Olive and Olive Oil Association - is a treat with dinner organised at some fancy Istanbul restaurant overlooking the Bospheros river. At one such dinner he stoutly defends the Turkish policy of mandatory military enrolment for all able-bodied young men.

"You have to defend your country, otherwise what's the use of being a citizen," argues the man who had himself served a two-year commission. "But, nowadays, people find all kinds of ways to get around this obligation. For instance, if you've worked abroad for a certain number of years, then you'd have to serve the military only for a few months and then pay your way out, by giving a certain stipulated sum," he shrugs.

We are a group of three international journalists invited for the olive/olive oil exhibition, but with Michelle, our American colleague being down with a nasty flu for the first three nights, Isabelle Huot from Canada and I had to brace up for Turkish hospitality that was in full flow at each meal. Isabelle has a doctorate in nutrition and is a food specialist; just as we reach the dessert stage on the second evening at the fancy Feriye Restaurant that earlier used to be, of all the things, a police station, and are digging into an array of Turkish sweets, Akkan tells me that the white dessert I'm about to try out is "made of chicken's breast, milk and sugar".

Dropping the fork hastily, I convey this information to Isabelle, the gourmet expert, who has almost finished the chicken pudding. She looks aghast, goes all white, and screams: "chicken in a dessert?"

As she refused to believe that chicken could be used in a pudding, an English-speaking waiter is summoned to convince her. And the next 20 minutes are spent on spooking her more with somebody saying that "the pumpkin sweet is covered with a sauce you don't want to know about." Of course, that's a yarn, but the next tale that Akkan relates is not.

Apparently, when he was studying in the US "and was young and handsome" he had a Scottish girlfriend. One day they were celebrating something — one forgets what — and he took her to a restaurant with international cuisine and "she said order for me something that is genuinely Turkish. So I ordered one particular delicacy, which she enjoyed immensely and after finishing it asked me about the ingredient. So I told her it's made of ram's testicles." A mouthful of colourful curses and that was the end of the relationship.

Later, when Michelle is up and about and we do a tour of the Blue Mosque, etc at a small restaurant, she insists on ordering chicken's breast pudding, and all of us try it. Now that the initial shock is over, the verdict is unanimous — it is simply delicious.

(To be continued)

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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