Sufi Gourmet

Mevlana, the thirteenth-century mystic and poet, never knew the taste of a tomato. I know this because Nevin Halici told me, and these are the sorts of things she knows. She also told me that the sweetest peaches in Turkey grow in Bursa and that the honey from Kars is particularly fine. She told me that mothers in Afyon used to lull their babies to sleep with poppy seed paste, that Turks in Konya were drinking coffee three centuries before it arrived in Istanbul, and that the best yufka bread is so thin you can read a newspaper through it.

“Mevlana also never ate peppers,” Nevin says from the backseat of her brother’s car. “Tomatoes and peppers were not popular in Anatolia at that time.” Nevin’s brother pilots the car into Meram, a suburb of Konya, in central Turkey. We follow a dirt road alongside a field until we reach the tomb of Ates-baz Veli, a Sufi saint and Mevlana’s beloved chef.

Nevin eases herself out of the car, smoothes down her jacket with her palms, and asks for my camera. “I will take a picture of you beside the famous chef,” she says. I smile, but Nevin has trouble with my digital camera, leaning too far back to see the viewscreen, the same way my mother does.

We climb the stone steps of the mau­soleum. “The bricks are the colour of fire,” Nevin says. “‘Ates-baz Veli’ means ‘he who plays with fire.’” I follow her inside the chamber, where a gravestone lies shrouded in green cloth embroidered with gold tulips. There is a green turban on the head of the stone – typical – for the graves of Mevlevi Sufis. Nevin tells me that women suffering from fevers come to pray here sometimes. They hope that “he who plays with fire” can coax their own fire away. Most visitors, though, come for the salt. There is a tray of white salt in the corner of the mausoleum. The juxtapos­ition of the salt and the great chef is a holy one, and pilgrims believe that taking a pinch from here to their own kitchens will ensure good health and enhance their own cooking.

I spoon some of the salt into a bag and tuck it into my pocket, then join Nevin outside the tomb. She is speaking with the woman who lives in the adjoining house and who is Ates-baz’s caretaker. Nevin asks if she can unlock the tomb’s lower chamber so we can see the actual ground under which the Sufi chef is buried, but the woman shakes her head. “She is old,” Nevin explains, “and she can’t find the key.”

On the way back to the centre of town, Nevin says, “Konya has produced two famous chefs. The first is Ates-baz. Do you know the other?”

I look back at her. She is smiling. “Is it you?” I ask.

Nevin tilts her head back to laugh, and sunlight flashes from a chip in her bifocals. “You are correct! It makes me happy that you say that!”

Nevin wears a tight, neat turban instead of the headscarves most women in Konya wear, and it makes her look regal. She is royalty, in a way. Nevin is one of Turkey’s most respected food writers and a leading authority on trad­itional Turkish cuisine. She consults with chefs at some of the country’s top restaurants and hotels, holds a Ph.D. in food sciences, and has authored ten books.

I first learned of Nevin, and of Ates-baz Veli, when I came across Nevin’s most recent cookbook, Sufi Cuisine. In it, Nevin recounts the history of Mevlana, known better in the West as Rumi, introduces readers to Ates-baz, and explains the kitchen rituals of the Mevlevi dervishes. Most of the book, though, is made up of recipes for dishes mentioned in Mevlana’s poetry: stewed quince, sour spinach, sweet buttery soup. The result is a remarkable work that is at once a cookbook, a book of ancient verse, and a treatise on the spiritual importance of food and eating.