Review: A Recipe for Daphne

I'll probably never go to Istanbul in spite of it being a very enticing destination; my husband's Armenian heritage isn't compatible with Turkish politics or revisionist history. However, I was very pleased to read and review Nektaria Anastasiadou's  new novel A Recipe for Daphne, for Cha: An Asian Journal, which is based in Hong Kong. It's an engaging, well written novel about the dwindling Rum (Greek Orthodox) community of Istanbul, their complicated history and challenging future. I also reflected on the history of the different religious and ethnic minorities under and after the Ottoman Empire, including that of my Armenian and Protestant in-laws. When doing the research for the review, I learned a lot more about the history of the ethnic and religious minorities in former Ottoman territories and in Turkey -- and it is not a happy story. Please go to the review page on Cha if you'd like to read the full piece; I'll just excerpt a little of it here. Kosmas, mentioned below, is an Istanbul pastry chef who falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful American woman visiting her aunt in Istanbul and searching for her own roots.

Kosmas also turns out to be a romantic idealist, as symbolised by his search for a recipe for a once-famous pastry called the Balkanik. While Daphne returns to the United States to see her parents and make a final decision about moving, he spends months trying to recreate the delicacy for her, from notes in an old Ottoman cookbook unearthed by his Muslim assistant. The Balkanik was a sort of large éclair, filled with eight differently coloured and flavoured creams, representing each of the original tribes of the Balkans: Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Greeks, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and Turks, all existing together in harmony.

---

I understand this longing. My own father-in-law was an Arab Protestant from Damascus who had lived under Ottoman rule, in a family that had survived persecution, and yet spoke movingly of the vibrant multiculturalism of all the great cities of the Near and Middle East, and his friendships with the local Orthodox priest, and Jewish, Muslim, and Maronite schoolmates. He too was a lover of proverbs. My mother-in-law was an Armenian, born in Turkey, whose father was killed in the Armenian genocide along with all the other men of their village, and who had managed to escape with her mother and small brothers for a life in Alexandria and then Beirut. During their lifetimes, they watched as the once-thriving Christian communities in many of these ancient cities became smaller and smaller, and deplored the religious and political fanaticism that caused it. Like Daphne’s parents, they had wistful memories, but little desire to go back.

A few months ago, I was in Greece myself, and spent a week in Thessaloniki, the largest major city close to Turkey. Once under Ottoman rule, and still retaining many ties to Istanbul through the Orthodox Church, Thessaloniki also offers many Turkish culinary traditions—like the Rums of Istanbul, we ate gilt-head bream, sesame bracelets, cream-filled pastry shells, and honey-drenched baklava, and sat for hours over our plates of delectable mezze while watching ships come and go on the sea. I could well imagine wanting to stay there for a lifetime. In Thessaloniki we also saw an exhibition of Armenian photographs taken in Turkey between 1900 and 1950, documenting the history of a family whose lives mirrored that of my mother-in-law. Thessaloniki is close to the Turkish border, but the exhibition would never be allowed in that country, where the Armenian genocide has never been acknowledged.

Thank you to Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor of Cha: An Asian Journal for publishing this review, and for all the tireless work she does on behalf of Asian literature and writers. I first "met" Tammy when Dave Bonta and I were editing qarrtisiluni, where she submitted excellent work that we published on several occasions. That was a long time ago! It's always a pleasure to find these old connections circling back around, and to make new ones.