For many years now, I've been on a mission. I haven't pursued it relentlessly or even with any sort of dedication, but whenever the chance to advance the mission presented itself, I eagerly took it. And while the mission is far from completed, I've added some important pieces to it during my recent stay in Syria.
The mission began when a friend who is as infected by the travel bug as I am and, importantly, as eager a traveler in books and written words as me, forwarded me a travel essay by Eric Hansen. The piece appeared online at salon.com and described a most curious delicacy, orchid ice-cream, where the orchid does not just add flavor to the dessert but is an integral component. In Turkey and the Middle East, the tubers of a particular kind of orchid are ground into a powder that is the basis for an ice-cream unlike any other.
The orchid powder, in appearance similar to potato starch but containing rather different polysaccharides, is known by its Arabic name of sahlab (a bowdlerization of the Arabic term for fox testicles), which refers to the shape of the tubers before they are ground. I've never seen these tubers, not even in pictures, and I haven't touched a fox indecently. For all I know, the name could be completely bogus. But I like it.
I also like good ice-cream, and I was intrigued. Back then, I was doing my Ph.D. and far from testicular orchid tubers. The story remained in the back of my head, and only came knocking when a friend from high school and I went to Istanbul in March 2006.
It was cold, and sahlab was everywhere. Nearly every small snack shop and fast-food restaurant sold sahlab. What you got when buying it, however, wasn't ice-cream but a hot drink. Before leaving the city, I bought a pack of the powder in a little grocery store. Back home, I cooked it up, and the thick hot beverage was perfect for a cold night. Trying to make ice-cream from it, on the other hand, turned out to be a complete disaster.
In 2008, I went back to Istanbul. It was the same time of the year as the first trip, but it was much warmer – and I was with the friend who had originally sent me the link. One fine sunny day, we sailed over to the Anatolian side of town and walked through the neighborhoods of Kadıköy and Moda to find Ali Usta's ice-cream parlor. Eric Hansen had mentioned this as the best place for fox testicle ice-cream in Istanbul. Disappointingly, the ice-cream looked, felt and tasted like any old ice-cream.
A year and a half later, the mission that I had all but forgotten after the incident in Turkey came back knocking. I was walking through the main souq in Damascus when the crowd suddenly became double-dense. Two steps later I was stuck – right in from of the brightly lit window of Bakdash, Damascus's fabled ice-cream store, lauded in every guidebook as preparing Syria's best.
My jaw dropped when I saw white-clad employees pummeling something inside chilled receptacles with large wooden plungers. In ways I had never seen before but which were uncannily reminiscent of what Hansen had written about, they were preparing ice-cream, increasing its density and toughness with every thumping pound.
Once the cold mass had been sufficiently compacted, it was lifted onto the counter, with no protection from the Damascene heat besides the badly bullet-pierced roof of the souq. The ice-cream, however, had no time to melt. Four vendors scooped chunks off the main block as fast as they could, dipped them into a huge tray of chopped pistachios and dispensed servings the size of cricket balls into bowls and onto cones, which people were practically ripping from their hands. It was madness.
The ice-cream tasted different. There was an unusual solidity to it, and yet it was creamy. There seemed to be lumps of something inside, but they inevitably melted upon contact with an investigative tongue. It wasn't exactly what Hansen had described but getting closer.
Two weeks ago, I was back in Damascus and back at Bakdash. This time I managed to detect an element of chewiness in the ice-cream that I had missed earlier. Or maybe the makers had missed it. I noticed that the quality of the ice-cream fluctuated between visits. Owing to the extraordinary demand, the shop cannot produce the highest quality consistently. People are crazy about it anyway, but maybe the real deal is somewhere else?
Four days after leaving Damascus on our road trip, we got to the city of Hama, the fourth largest of Syria but rather smallish and very relaxed. It is famous for ancient but gigantic wooden wheels that used to distribute water from the river running through town to fields lying on higher plateaus.
Next to the al-Nuri Mosque is a small café that exists in no guidebook. After a series of fortuitous events, my sister and I found ourselves there, standing next to a Syrian we had met half an hour earlier and who now proceeded to buy us ice-cream at al-Qahef's. We walked away with a clear plastic drinking cup filled with a heavy paste, off-white and mottled with pistachio bits. What we didn't dare to hope confirmed the first taste: We held outstanding fox testicle ice-cream in our hands. It was very chewy, somewhat elastic, thick, and absolutely delicious. We had no idea how it had been prepared, though.
Upon returning to London, I read through Hansen's piece again and was excited to find that there is still more. We didn't need knife and for to eat our treat, and there was no way of stretching it into a jump rope. Five to ten centimeters was all we could get. I've also not seen the tubers themselves or studied a fox. The mission is thus still not accomplished, which is great. More traveling will be necessary.
This was probably the last post on the vacation. It defies the idea of a blog to rehash things that are weeks old. While I'll return to current events as they happen, I will also put something comprehensive together about the vacation, which will either go onto my homepage or, fingers crossed, an actual publication.
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