Turkish Cuisine in English
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 19 h
G und S CharlottenburgWilmersdorfer Str. 102/103
10629 Berlin
Cooking class in English
Turkish Cuisine in English
Turkish Food meets English Tongue and German Wine
with Lisa Shoemaker
No, we’re not having tongue, the class will be held in English ;)
Berlin abounds with Turkish snacks at every street corner – döner, gözleme, lahmacun - but there are surprisingly few restaurants with good Turkish cooking that venture beyond meat. Sometimes the resourcelessness of chefs is glossed over with folkloristic performances (aka belly dancers). Though perhaps you just ordered the wrong dishes.
I fell in love with Turkish food (I had never been a great döner enthusiast) in an imbiss cum semi-restaurant (i.e. a few formica tables in a dimly lit back room) in Kreuzberg, now long gone. They had the usual menu you’d find any place, plus two house specialties. On my first visit I ordered one of them – fantastic – and on my second the other – even better. Then I got bold and ordered from the regular menu – and got the same okay-ish, forgettable food that is served anywhere else. However, I was convinced there had to be more interesting Turkish dishes and on my quest for Turkish food I sampled loads of egg plant dishes, compared tripe soups, went reconnoitering in Turkish markets. And thank God for friends, friends of friends and neighbors who will share food and recipes (though the latter usually involves a long distance call to a Granny in Turkey).
So here are some highlights from my collection:
Menu:
- Kısır (bulgur salad)
- Pomegranate-walnut-olive salad
- Beet root salad with tahin
- Squid stuffed with pine nuts, currants and herbs
- Tepsi Böreği (casserole style börek)
- İskender kebab (first had at one of those formica tables)
- Revani (delicious pistaccio cake – though not quite authentic, I’ll have to admit: I adjusted the amount of sugar to what I think is sweet enough)
Lisa Shoemaker
Lisa’s culinary coming-of-age was multi-cultural long before the term was coined. It was – of course – her mother’s fault. As a German language teacher, her mother would invite her students to her big, late 19th century flat in Charlottenburg. The deal was: she bought the booze, the students cooked and little Lisa was delegated to the kitchen to „help“. So Lisa chopped chili with Korean nurses – lured to Germany in the 1970s to overcome a shortage –, rolled rice balls stuffed with canned tuna with Japanese students, and after her mother had crossed first North Africa and then Turkey in her Peugeot 404, students from the Southern and Eastern coasts of the Mediterranean steamed couscous, wrapped rice into vine leaves, Israelis and Palestinians bypassed politics and instead discussed whether the chopped salad typical to their region should be called Israeli or Palestinian salad. Lisa did not care, all she knew was that she had encountered herbs and spices that perfectly matched lemon, her favorite ingredient. A lifelong love affair with Middle Eastern food ensued.
Lisa Shoemaker won 2nd place in the ideas competition organised by the state of Berlin as part of its Zero-Waste Strategy 2021. The sustainable use of food and energy is very close to Lisa's heart and she enthusiastically passes on her experimentally acquired knowledge in all her cooking classes. And of course she cooks with food from organic cultivation, seasonal and regional wherever possible.
G und S CharlottenburgWilmersdorfer Str. 102/103
10629 Berlin
- Kısır (bulgur salad)
- Pomegranate-walnut-olive salad
- Beet root salad with tahin
- Squid stuffed with pine nuts, currants and herbs
- Tepsi Böreği (casserole style börek)
- İskender kebab (first had at one of those formica tables)
- Revani (delicious pistaccio cake – though not quite authentic, I’ll have to admit: I adjusted the amount of sugar to what I think is sweet enough)
