There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry!

By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — In 1990, the year that globalization shifted into high gear and McDonald’s opened an outlet in Moscow, a paper delivered at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery entitled “The Bayeux Tapestry Shish Kebab Mystery” had French academics reaching for indigestion tablets. Its author, the textile specialist Robert Chenciner, pointed to a panel of that famous embroidery in which Norman knights celebrate their victory over the Saxons by grilling skewers of meat over an open fire. From this, Chenciner drew the bold conclusion that the tapestry must be a forgery or at least a much oversewn bit of cloth. There were no kebab takeaways in the Hastings of 1066, he reasoned, and it wasn’t until the Ottomans visited Versailles in the mid-18th century that Turkish food came to France.

Julia Child, the renowned populist of French cuisine, was in the audience that day. She clapped enthusiastically. But curators at the museum housing the Bayeux Tapestry found Chenciner’s theory hard to digest. They countered that archival sources from the late 15th century confirmed the cloth’s authenticity. If there was a problem at all, it must be with the shish kebab itself. Was it even Turkish?

Can any one cuisine call the kebab its own? Was the meat skewer born somewhere — or everywhere, of the primal urge to put flesh to fire?

This year commemorates the 50th year that Turks were first recruited to work in Germany. Many believe that these gastarbeiter managed to wriggle a way into their hosts’ affection by presenting to them an alternative to wurst. A cylinder of meat spinning on an upright spit in front of a vertical open fire — the famous döner kebab — became Germans’ entrée into the culture of their new neighbors. Or so they thought. But no less an authority than The Economist claims that the kebab is an example of cultural reflux: a bit of ethnicity cultivated in Germany and transplanted back to Turkey, where it then thrived.

This argument is pooh-poohed by someone who should know: Beyti Güler, the Horatio Alger of grilled meat and probably the only man alive to have a kebab named in his honor. After spending his boyhood peddling fruit from a barrow in the abattoir district on the outskirts of Istanbul, Güler was to turn his family’s kitchen into the landmark restaurant that bears his (first) name. He opened his first grill house in 1945, but he was soon forced to move it to a barn of a place in order to cope with the throngs who queued up for the house specialty: lamb and beef döner kebab cooked in front of a wall of oak charcoal. In 1983, Beyti’s moved to even grander premises near the airport.

Beyti’s namesake kebab is now served widely throughout Turkey — only it’s nothing like Beyti’s beyti. The street-food favorite is ground lamb and beef kneaded together with parsley, garlic and flakes of red pepper. The original is an outer cutlet of lamb wrapped around loin, a combination inspired by a butcher named Möller whom Beyti met on a trip to Switzerland – in other words, it isn’t Turkish at all.

Some of Beyti’s other delicacies are made of a well-kneaded mince that has a slight spring under the tooth. This is very different from the feel of kebabs from the Kurdish and Arab southeast of Turkey. The meat of those is chopped by hand, with enough fat left in so that while cooking the fat drips onto the slow-burning coals, sending fragrant smoke back up toward the spit. The result is a crispy, crumbly lattice of meat.

Chewy or crusty, kebabs are now part of a global multimillion (some say, billion) dollar industry. There are fine Turkish restaurants outside Turkey, but most spots are takeaway joints that cater to anyone on the prowl for a snack and a brawl after a night out. A British government official once bemoaned the “kebab and fight” culture plaguing pub land. Like most Chinese restaurants — and Indian or Thai ones, for that matter — kebab houses operate like unbranded franchises. Customers recognize the décor and know what to order. These outlets are to McDonald’s or Burger King what Linux is to Microsoft: a free and open resource controlled by users, not large corporations.

But in Turkey itself, there’s now a move to drive the little guys to the wall. Food engineers are busy converting local delicacies into supermarket standards. Within the last decade, they’ve turned the simit — a sort of bagel — from street food to fast food, and many now hope that the kebab will follow suit. Food courts in ever-mushrooming shopping centers boast kebaberies every bit as characterless as their foreign cousins. Unforgivably, some of them even deep-fry their meat.

No one has yet found the way to prepackage the taste of a slowly grilled kebab, whatever the mince or the seasoning. The limp, bluish döner kebab that sells in a wrap outside every German bahnhof doesn’t hold a candle to what I think of as the real thing: a thin sheet of freshly grilled lamb mixed with beef, crisp on one side and moist on the other. For the moment at least, the kebab’s juicy mystery seems to have halted the forces of globalization.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” will be published next year.

via There’s a Kebab in My Tapestry! – NYTimes.com.