Balık Ekmek

A fillet of mackerel goes skin-down on a grill set up at the edge of a Karaköy pavement, and the first thing that reaches the street is the sound: a hard hiss as the fat hits the bars, then a spit of smoke that smells of salt and charred skin. The cook flips it once and sets it on a half loaf of white ekmek that has been split and warmed on the same grill, and lays raw onion and a few lettuce leaves over the top. Lemon goes on last, wrung from the hand so the juice runs into the crumb. The sandwich is wrapped in paper and handed over before the skin has stopped crackling, which is the only window in which it eats properly.

The fish is uskumru, Atlantic mackerel, and the way it is cooked tells you why it was chosen. Mackerel carries enough fat to stay moist over direct heat, and the skin blisters and crisps rather than tearing away. The fillet is boned in advance, though a stray pin still turns up now and then against the tongue. Much of the fish sold in Istanbul is reportedly imported on ice from Scandinavia and sold through the city's wholesale fish market, so the sandwich on a Kabataş pavement and the one on a Karaköy quay start from the same crates. The bread is nothing special, and it is meant to be: soft, quick to compress, and absorbent enough to drink the oil and lemon without falling apart.

The raw onion stands in for a sauce. It is sliced thin, sometimes dusted with sumac, and its sting and crunch cut through a mouthful that is otherwise fat, bread and char. Many stalls pour a cup of şalgam, the tart purple juice of fermented carrot and turnip, or hand over a pickle with the order, and the acid of either picks up where the lemon leaves off. Cold from the cup, the juice makes the next bite taste hotter, and the heat of the fillet makes the juice taste sharper. Eaten standing at a rail with the ferries behind, the whole thing takes about four minutes, and the paper is translucent with oil by the end.

The trade has moved around the city more than the recipe has. Grilled fish on bread was being sold from the Golden Horn and Bosphorus waterfronts in the nineteenth century by some accounts, and the village shores up the strait, Bebek and Arnavutköy among them, had their own fishermen who cooked what they landed. Karaköy kept a cluster of sandwich stands beside its fish market for decades, and a restaurant in Arnavutköy known as Adem Baba is reported to have begun as a boat at Bebek. Today the grills that remain cluster at Kumkapı, Sirkeci, Kabataş and Karaköy, sold from pavement counters and small shopfronts where the fish rides on a metal grate instead of a pitching deck.

What a seller is really managing is the clock. A fillet pulled off the heat a minute early is pale and slick at the bone, and one left a minute late dries into something closer to cardboard than fish. The bread goes soft within minutes once lemon and fat soak in, which is why stalls with a queue grill in small batches and assemble to order. A loaf that has sat out goes tough at the crust and shatters when folded. A fillet held warm under a lid loses its crisp skin to steam. Locals judge a stall by the skin, and by whether the onion is still loud when the sandwich reaches the hand.

Origin and history

Dates for the start of Istanbul's fish-in-bread trade disagree, and the first cook goes unnamed. One account has fishermen selling grilled fish on bread along the Golden Horn and Bosphorus in the mid-nineteenth century; another places the first small grills on fishing boats in the 1960s. Both can be true if the practice was older and the boat grills were a later, more visible form of it. What is documented is the shape of the street trade from the late twentieth century: boats at Eminönü and Karaköy cooking at the water's edge, family operations in which a son inherited a boat from a father, and a steady stream of commuters stepping off the ferries.

The records that survive are mostly municipal. In 2004 the Istanbul Preservation Board banned the cooking boats from Eminönü, and in 2007 the city offered a small number of berth tenders at annual rents in the tens of thousands of lira; three boats took them. In July 2015 the sandwich stands west of the Karaköy fish market were pulled down overnight, the clearest dated break in the trade on the Karaköy shore.

The Eminönü boats followed. Istanbul's municipal real-estate directorate ordered the three that remained to clear the quay by 1 November 2019, and no new renters were to be admitted once they had gone. The sandwich went on being sold at Kumkapı, Sirkeci, Kabataş and Karaköy that same winter, grilled on land, with the same half loaf, the same raw onion and the same lemon.