Turquoise: A Review

All photographs contain details within photographs from Turquoise.

I read cookbooks like other people read novels.

I have given away more cookbooks from my Kitchen Library Shelves than I still possess. And I still possess a awful lot. More than is sensible.

I don’t buy as many these days as I used to. It takes a bit to tempt me now. Food is fashionable at the moment and there are a lot of fluffy cookbooks out there. When you have been cooking and reading cookbooks for a Life (Time) sometimes you know more than the authors.

But I bought a great one yesterday. turquoise: A chef’s travels in Turkey by Greg and Lucy Malouf. Australian.

This is not a fluffy book. It is a wonderful book of tales of Turkey and colour and photos and recipes to die for. Recipes that you can create in your own kitchen.

I don’t restrict myself to vegetarian cookbooks. I don’t like looking at the meat and fish sections and cannot stand shots of raw flesh, so I skip over those parts. Also I don’t cook with eggs, so the eggy sections of cookbooks are also sealed, at least virtually. But as long as there is a significant focus on vegetables, lentils and beans, diary, rice and other vegetarian fare, I am happy to peruse its pages.

Turquoise is such a great book. Before I bought it, I would browse it at a friend’s coffee shop every afternoon over a cup of her wonderful coffee. I would bring home scratchings and notes on the back of envelopes of ideas to try. It all got too much. I had to buy it.

Greg and Lucy are Aussies. They are chefs and travel writers. Greg is a master of modern Middle Eastern cooking and runs Momo restaurant in Melbourne as well as writing and consulting to other restaurants world wide. Lucy is a food and travel writer.

In this book they bring both travel and food together. And no, it is not a book of 101 ways to cook eggplant. Against a backdrop of diverse landscapes, architectures and local Turkish traditions, they visit spice markets and tiny soup kitchens, feast on Ottoman banquets, eat sandwiches on the Bosphorus, and drink cay in ancient tea houses. This is a book of a journey and the food it inspired.

Try such tempting dishes as Red Pepper Soup with bulgur, chickpeas, mint and chilli; Silky celeriac dip with lime; flat breads and lavosh; Black Sea corn bread; Gruyere and spinach gozleme and yoghurt and honey sorbet. Some of the dishes are traditional, but in the main they are Greg’s creations in response to their experiences.

The photos are lush. The colours and textures captured are amazing. The focus is on the people of Turkey, the architecture and scenery, and the ingredients. This is not a cookbook full of over exposed shots of food on white plates as is the fashion. This is a book of large proportions, coffee table size, 350 pages capturing slices of what it is like to be in Turkey, of what it is like to be Turkish, at least from a food perspective. The stories are about the people as well as the food, about actual experiences and meetings, and meals and dishes and recipes.

This is a book to treasure. I am not sure that I can find a bookshelf large enough to sit it on, but it will remain in my kitchen library for a long long time.

Read some more:

• Elegant Sufficiency also loves turquoise: A Chef’s Travels in Turkey
• More recently Only Turkish Food found turquoise in a bookshop, but didn’t buy it!!!. Such strength.

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