Poetry in every plate

TWO years ago I visited Nevin Halici, one of the most important Turkish food writers, at her home in Konya, Turkey, which is also the town where the famous 13th century Sufi poet Rumi spent most of his adult life. In showing me around her city, she took me to an ancient stone building in a quiet suburb. It turned out to be the tomb of Rumi’s personal cook, Atesbaz-i Veli.

In the thousands of lines of ecstatic poetry Rumi wrote, still read and loved throughout the world, he referred to a surprising number of foods and dishes. Sometimes the food references are metaphors (God “hides the apples of meaning among branches of letters, leaves of words. The smell of apples wafts out ... only He remains unseen”); sometimes they’re images (“no sooner does the saucepan boil than the chickpeas start leaping up to the top, in hundreds of manifestations of ecstasy”). And sometimes they seem to be literal (“Just before daybreak I heard an excited voice: the lovely aroma of kalye [meat fried with vegetables] and borani [vegetables dressed with yogurt] is wafting toward us”).

Given the centrality of food images to his work, revering his cook’s tomb makes perfect sense to Rumi’s followers. Halici and other members of the Mevlevi Sufi order (which originated with Rumi) make pilgrimages there.

“Now you are a pilgrim too,” she said gently as we left.

Her sentiment was in keeping with Rumi’s tolerant, non-sectarian nature. During his life, the Christians and Jews of Konya revered him as a saint just as Muslims did. When he died, members of all three faiths accompanied his coffin to its tomb, all reading from their own scriptures.

(This is the sort of thing that enrages political Islamists such as Al Qaeda and the mullahs of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, who tend to regard Sufis as heretics. As recently as Feb. 14, Amnesty International reports, Iranian authorities bulldozed a Sufi house of worship in the city of Qom and imprisoned more than 170 Sufis. A lawyer who came to the town to defend them was himself arrested.)

One day during my stay in Konya, Halici and her sister cooked me a dinner of attractive dishes mentioned in Rumi’s poems.

They were a little like Turkish food, even more like Persian, but with a touch of medieval strangeness. Some used sour plums to give a tart note where modern Turkish dishes would use tomatoes, because the tomato was unknown in Turkey at Rumi’s time. Others used boiled-down grape juice instead of sugar for sweetening. Unripe melons were made into stuffed dolmas.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Halici was working on a book about this mystical food tradition. In November she published “Sufi Cuisine,” which includes recipes of dishes mentioned in Rumi’s poems, of other dishes referred to in a history of the Mevlevis written a century after Rumi’s time, and also of more recent dishes from a 19th century collection of Sufi recipes.

Recently I decided to give a dinner of these recipes at the home of Los Angeles-based filmmaker Aryana Farshad, who made the 2002 documentary “Mystic Iran: The Unseen World” on Sufis in Kurdistan and currently has a film in production on Rumi’s life. At the time of the dinner, she had just returned from the annual observation of the mystic’s death in Konya. She invited a number of friends who share her interest in Sufism.

The first thing everybody noticed was that many of the dishes were attractive to the eye. A simple lettuce salad is supposed to be surrounded by deep-red rose petals. Plain boiled apricots, sweetened with grape molasses (pekmez), develop a beautiful copper color as well as a richer flavor. A fish soup thickened with an extract of boiled crushed wheat is colored yellow with saffron and then decorated with an invocation to Rumi written in ground cinnamon.

Since Rumi’s family originated in northern Afghanistan, there was a pilaf in a Central Asian style, hearty, rather than elegant like a modern Turkish pilaf.

This earthy dish, called hassaten pilaf, is mentioned in the 14th century book “Manaqib al-Arifin” (The Deeds of the Wise). It is in the style of Balkh, the town in northern Afghanistan from which Rumi’s father immigrated to Anatolia (Turkey).

“Hassaten” means particularly (that is, particularly good). Like other pilafs, it balances sweet and savory elements -- rich chunks of lamb, pine nuts, garbanzos, currants and, when in season, chestnuts -- in a rice dish. The meat, vegetables and spices are cooked together in a stew-like mixture, then arranged in a pot as layers alternating with rice. The whole is then cooked so the layers are kept separate.

The dishes that were appreciated most were the ones most closely drawn from the poetry: sour spinach and sweet spinach. These closely related one-bowl entrees combine, in the case of the former, spinach, lamb, bulgur and pomegranate molasses. The latter has garbanzos rather than bulgur and the sweeter pekmez rather than pomegranate molasses.

Each offers a delectable window to the pleasures of long-ago tables, with pleasingly balanced flavors and textures in a pastoral dish that speaks of spring. Young lamb, tender spinach, a handful of grains or beans from the larder -- and the poet was fed.

And inspired.

One of Rumi’s most beloved verses is, “O God, I am your spinach -- cook me sour or sweet, however you wish.”

**

Sour spinach

Total time: 1 hour, 25 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From “Sufi Cuisine” by Nevin Halici. Pomegranate molasses is available in Middle Eastern markets.

1 1/4 pounds spinach (about 2 bunches), stemmed

3 tablespoons butter

1 onion, minced

1/2 pound boneless lamb, cut into 1/2 -inch pieces

1/4 cup bulgur

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup pomegranate molasses or to taste

1. Wash, drain and chop the spinach. Set aside.

2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and fry until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the lamb and brown with the onions, about 5 minutes. Add 2 1/4 cups water and simmer until the lamb is quite tender, 30 to 40 minutes.

3. Stir in the bulgur and salt and add the spinach. Cover and cook over low heat until the spinach is done, 8 to 10 minutes.

4. Stir in the pomegranate molasses. Bring the mixture to a boil, remove from the heat and let stand 10 minutes before serving. Serve with rice.

Each serving: 289 calories; 15 grams protein; 22 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams fiber; 16 grams fat; 9 grams saturated fat; 60 mg. cholesterol; 698 mg. sodium.

*

Sweet spinach

Total time: 50 minutes

Servings: 4

Note: From “Sufi Cuisine” by Nevin Halici. Pekmez is available at Middle Eastern markets.

1/2 pound fatty lamb ribs

(riblets)

2 tablespoons garbanzos, soaked overnight

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 pounds spinach (about 2 bunches), stemmed

2 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 cup pekmez (grape molasses)

1. Cut each riblet in half. Put the meat and garbanzos in a medium pot; add 2 1/4 cups water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer until tender, about 30 to 40 minutes, removing any scum that comes to the top. Add the salt and cook 5 minutes more. Remove the meat and beans from the water. Strain the cooking liquid and skim excess fat from the surface. Reserve 1 cup and discard the rest.

2. Wash, drain and chop the spinach. Put the spinach in a large pot with the reserved 1 cup cooking liquid, butter, vinegar and pekmez. Bring to a boil; reduce the heat to simmer and cook, covered, until the spinach is soft, 8 to 10 minutes.

3. Stir in the meat and garbanzos and cook over medium heat until warmed through. Serve with rice.

Each serving: 233 calories; 11 grams protein; 25 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams fiber; 10 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat; 37 mg. cholesterol; 323 mg. sodium.

**

Hassaten pilaf

Total time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Servings: 5 or more

Note: From “Sufi Cuisine” by Nevin Halici.

Meat stock

1/2 pound lamb scraps or 1 pound lamb bones

1/4 onion

1/4 carrot

1 peppercorn

1/2 teaspoon salt

Put 2 1/2 cups water, the lamb, onion, carrot, peppercorn and salt in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to simmer and cook, covered, 1 hour. Strain. Makes 2 1/4 cups.

Pilaf

1 1/2 cups long grain rice

Salt

1 1/2 pounds boneless lamb, cut into 1-inch chunks

1/2 cup butter (1 stick)

3 onions, sliced

1 tablespoon pine nuts

2 cups julienned carrots

1 cup cooked garbanzos

1 tablespoon currants, soaked in water 30 minutes

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 1/2 cups peeled grilled chestnuts, in season (optional)

2 1/4 cups meat stock

1. Soak the rice in 2 cups hand-hot water salted with 1 tablespoon salt until the water is cool. Drain.

2. Wash the meat, pat dry. Sprinkle with one-half teaspoon salt. Fry it in a pan without grease until the juices it exudes dry up. Set aside.

3. In a separate saucepan, melt the butter, add the onions and pine nuts and fry until the onions are golden brown. Add the carrots and fry until they soften. Add the garbanzos, currants, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and one-fourth teaspoon salt. Remove from the heat. Stir in the optional chestnuts and reserved meat.

4. Wash the rice in several changes of water until the water runs clear. Ladle a layer of the carrot-meat mixture into the bottom of a saucepan. Cover it with a layer of rice, and repeat with layers until the ingredients are used up; the last layer should be meat and carrots. Place a plate or flat lid slightly smaller than the diameter of the pot on top of the meat to keep the layers separate as they cook.

5. Bring the meat stock to a boil and trickle it over the plate or lid. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the pot, keeping the plate or flat lid in place, and cook, checking occasionally, until all the liquid has been absorbed and small craters appear in the rice, about 12 to 14 minutes. Remove the plate or flat lid.

6. Cover the pot lid with a clean dishtowel and replace firmly on the pot. Lower the heat to lowest setting and continue to cook for 15 minutes.

7. To serve, place a serving dish upside down over the top of the pot. Holding the pot and dish firmly together, turn the whole thing over so that the pilaf comes out on the plate.

Each of 5 servings: 579 calories; 19 grams protein; 71 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams fiber; 24 grams fat; 13 grams saturated fat; 75 mg. cholesterol; 913 mg. sodium.