It’s rather wonderful how an interview can turn into a conversation, and food is a great implementer: Who doesn’t like talking about it?
You can travel through time and space with food, you can engage old and new relationships, you can imagine dishes and meals, picnics and dinner guests, hardships and flush times. You can talk politics if you want to. It’s a straight line back to childhood, to grandmothers and to visiting far-away places, traveling by the plate. It makes, mends and reinforces friendships. (I suppose sometimes it can break them: A quarrel over the definition of a dumpling raised fears of a break once!) Food talk is my super power. And it seems it is also Ana Sortun’s.
The night before my meeting with Sortun, I’d been the lucky recipient of a Siena Farms box of produce that contained more bok choy than I’d ever had at one time, settled in among much more greens than I can cook up for one evening. I figured chiffonade and freeze. But I was soon going to be talking with not just the chef and founder of Oleana, Sofra and Sarma, but the woman whose husband, Chris Kurth, is Siena Farms, and whose daughter is Siena herself. So no worries.
I’ve been going to her restaurant-delis since they opened (in 2001, 2008 and 2013, respectively). When there’s been something to celebrate, such as a birthday, there’s no better place than a table at Oleana. If wrapped up in too many events and chores and assignments to cook, I take advantage of wonderful little “casserole” bento at Sofra and call them dinner.
One of the first times I met Sortun was thanks to another food friend, Yotam Ottolenghi, the London chef, restaurateur and cookbook writer. We met at Sofra to talk about Ottolenghi’s first son, about to be born, and to make plans to settle the family in for a time. We planned a day or two of food-hopping (and layette-shopping). Sofra was crowded. There were no private conversations; a young woman nearby took me aside and asked, sotto voce, “Is that really him?” and “Can I talk with him?” She told an affecting story about how she and her siblings had been unwilling to eat their mother’s terrible cooking; she gave her mother one of Ottolenghi’s cookbooks, and the food turned delectable. Now the family can’t wait for their Sunday dinners. “You saved our family,” the woman told Ottolenghi. By then Sortun had arrived and it became a real party, a celebration.
The Sortun repertory resembles Ottolenghi’s geographically and aromatically, but the styles are very different. Ottolenghi’s food is a mix of Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi and more from the region. (The “hummus belt” covers a lot of turf.) Sortun’s forte has been Turkish fare, but she has defined her own referential space that’s elegantly beyond geography.
Education of a chef
How did she learn? When she was 14 and working a nine-month stint as a dishwasher at a Seattle restaurant, she knew food was her future. Scrubbing dishes, she noticed everything, and the owners noticed her noticing. Within the year, they helped her attend a local department-store cooking school. By 19 she was at La Varenne, the cooking school in Paris and Burgundy begun by Anne Willan, where the professional courses were meticulously French, aiming at preservation and mastery rather than innovation.
She traveled. In 1997 she was in Gaziantep, in southwest Turkey, and got treated to a sumptuous feast of regional dishes cooked by a local woman and her friends. “Each of them had … a different version of the bulgur-based kote or kibbeh, some with lamb, others with potato and pumpkin,” Sortun remembers. There were “salads dressed with sweet-tart pomegranate molasses,” and much more. This event still flavors her memory, and she found her culinary home. Working with Moncef Meddeb, chef and restaurateur at Casablanca in Harvard Square, introduced Sortun to the heightened flavors of the Middle East and North Africa. Reading Paula Wolfer’s Moroccan cookbooks, Sortun knew the span of flavors she’d engage. It was well before the rest of us had “normalized” Eastern Mediterranean tastes and North African savors, well before we threw fresh cilantro on every dish and before we had stocked up on the spice mixtures ras-el-hanout and baharat. (It’s amazing how our vocabulary has grown – though the menu at Sofra and Oleana include glossaries for further instruction.)
France and Turkey supplied Sortun the lesson of good ingredients: She learned to touch, look closely, smell and taste acutely, that the most important thing is their quality, and locality and seasonality really matter. Marrying a farmer has guaranteed a supply, and more education: That Swiss chard with those fibrous, crunchy stems? Leave the chard in the ground until after frosts and “the stems are like candy.” The stresses the plants experience create flavors.
Generational knowledge
Skill training, learning the ways of ingredients and culinary tools, must be learned before a novice chef creates “her own” foods. Knowing the rules before breaking the rules. There’s a good reason for “heritage” and “tradition” being in a food curriculum.
It’s concerning, Sortun noted, that so many dining trends are now governed by social media, and that young people seem to establish their tastes and consider themselves knowledgeable without reference to expertise, to cookbooks, to chefs and farmers and real kitchens, to older relatives or neighbors or repeat visits to restaurants. For a time, “books were everything,” she said, with a nod at instructional television shows, quite different from sensationalist television “food entertainment” from which you cannot learn to cook.
Though there is a new generation of young cooks who are committed to making their way in food and who feel the richness in its practice and are not riding trend waves, Sortun said she regrets the lack of heritage in their lives.
We talked about how children learn to eat, bite by bite, learning to try things, learning what seems inedible. Siena, age 14, was never “picky.” “We got lucky,” Sortun said. Learning by mouth was Sortun’s own pathway, and now, teaching by mouth takes her back to Turkey.
Sharing the feast
She brings tour guests, friends and staff, once or twice a year. By chance, in deepest northwest Maine this summer I met a person who’d been on one of her Turkey tours and still felt the excitement of discovery, and of course remembered the meals vividly. Another woman in my neighborhood recalls her own Sortun Turkey trip. Remembering food, Sortun and Turkey, we became friends.
Sortun collaborates, learns from her associates, and enjoys being a partner. Food is relationships: Maura Fitzpatrick, pastry chef at Sofra, has worked with Sortun since 2008, and Cassie Piuma of Sarma is a chef-partner. Their skill and creativity spark across the establishments. The green spiky bits of pistachio, the deep gleaming red of pomegranate seeds, a glaze of fruity plum or peach and a sprinkle of rose petals feed us visually. The shapes, color and contrasts preview flavor. The uses of crunchy kataif and phyllo and soft lavash flatbreads to wrap and soak up juices from chicken or lamb shawarma make eating a multisensory pleasure. Tahini, sesame paste, is to Sortun’s savory (and sweet) foods as butter was to Julia Child’s. Fitzpatrick’s signature Maureo, a cookie at Sofra so much better than the store-bought treat it puns after, employs the sweet sesame paste halvah.
Did I warn you that reading this might induce hunger?
Sofra, Sarma and Oleana
The other day I visited the cafe Sofra in Cambridge – a newer one is in Allston – in part as fieldwork to write about it and Sortun, in part because that’s what to do when I need or want a treat. (These are close concepts.) I was stuck at the glass case, as always, even knowing what would be there, hard pressed to choose something special when everything is special. Besides a morning bun for my friend and a slice of orange-soaked olive oil cake, I wanted two dishes that could make up our supper. Flavor rules: One was a dish of feta dumplings and other a chicken with orange and fennel. The aromas from lifting their lids certified my choices. The small casserole dishes appeared insufficient for two people, but there were leftovers enough for lunch, so rich were the flavors.
Sarma, where Piuma guides the food, is full of surprises. There is nothing on the small-plates menu I wouldn’t order on repeat, but I’ve learned not order to too much and to wait for the spontaneously appearing, off-menu items the staff brings out from the kitchen, which are always creative, always delicious.
I’ve been lucky in birthdays: Almost every recent one has been spent at Oleana, indoors or out, eating more small plates that arrive to share, each giving four people a hearty forkful. But let me count up a recent meal’s treasures.
The topik, a small potato stuffed with hummus, tahini and topped with sesame dukkah.
A ball of warm buttered hummus wrapped in a thin slice of bastourma, that air-dried beef that is the antecedent for pastrami.
For a contrast with an acidic edge, the white bean piyaz, a bean salad that smacks of lemon and sumac.
A slightly deconstructed moussaka, with slices of eggplant slipping unctuously over lamb bits. A small platter of charred broccolini on a tahini sauce provided color and texture contrast.
The flavors are intensely compelling, and even if some elements recur, there’s never a dull moment. Keep the menu on hand in case there’s a corner of appetite left.
A Sortun recipe
What should you make for supper? Consider the provender in the Siena box, for which Sortun offers generous advice. For all that bok choy filling my vegetable bins, Sortun suggests blanching with salted boiling water. (Put the vegetable in a large colander and simply pour the hot water over it.) The leaves wilt, the stems stay crunchy. It can be chilled and used as a salad, or warmed with perhaps some toasted sesame seeds, a little tamari and lemon juice.
What of these experiences at Sortun’s establishments could be reproduced at home?
One of the dishes Sortun learned in Gaziantep was a tomato-walnut-pomegranate salad. I offer an approximation of this dish she’d learned early, with that pomegranate molasses, something I use nearly ubiquitously in dressings, marinades and drizzles and the only thing that’s “exotic” in an otherwise easily found ingredient list. Whisk together juices from a few cups of cherry tomatoes that have been cut, salted and sat in a sieve for a time; a couple of tablespoons of pomegranate molasses; a spoonful of lemon juice; 4 Tb of olive oil; and some black pepper. Toss this dressing with the tomatoes, a cup of toasted walnuts (I use pecans because of a slight walnut allergy), and some parsley and mint, chopped. Sortun’s recipe calls for a bit of cinnamon that gives a subtle hint, a reference to sweetness. With apologies for the condensation and possible misrepresentation of this nice addition to a tomato-season meal, this version of her sparky little salad is offered in gratitude for all the past experiences and for those to come.
Oleana, 134 Hampshire St., Cambridge. (5 to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday; 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday)
Sarma, 249 Pearl St., Gilman Square, Somerville. (5 to 10 p.m. Sunday to Thursday; 5 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday)
Sofra Bakery & Cafe, 1 Belmont St., Cambridge, and 210 North Harvard St., Allston. (8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
