Çinekop Ekmek

The çinekop sandwich begins in the first week of September, when the Marmara fishing ban lifts and the boats go out again. The young bluefish that spent the summer in the Black Sea start moving south through the Bosphorus, and by October the stalls along the Istanbul shore are stacked with them, silver-blue and no longer than a hand. Turkish fishmongers grade lüfer by size and give each grade its own name. One 2006 newspaper column counted çinekop at sixteen to twenty fish to the kilo, which puts a single fish at a few mouthfuls. That is the right scale for a bread roll: one fish, or two, laid head to tail in a split loaf, with nothing to carve and nothing to trim.

Small size changes the cooking more than the seasoning does. A fish this thin is cooked through after a single turn in the pan, so the cook either dusts it in flour and fries it until the skin blisters and rattles against the pan, or lays it over coals until the edges blacken. Either way the flesh stays pale, oily and finely flaked, softer and sweeter than the firm steaks of a full-grown bluefish. Autumn matters too: the fish fatten in the Marmara in September and October, and that fat is what carries the flavor. It runs into the crumb of the ekmek and turns the inside of the loaf glossy, so the first bite is hot bread, then a crackle of skin, then the rich, faintly briny flesh.

The dressing follows from the fat. Raw onion sliced thin, a few lettuce leaves or a pinch of parsley, and lemon wrung on at the last second give the sandwich a sharp, cold edge against the hot fish, and the juice soaks straight into the crumb. Bones are the cost of a small whole fish. Cleaned and butterflied, a çinekop eats almost clean; left whole, it asks the eater to work around a spine and a fringe of fine ribs, and the sandwich becomes slow, careful food. Heads are often kept on in Istanbul fish cooking because the cheeks are prized, which is a good argument for the whole-fish version at a table and a better one for the boneless version on the street.

Why the size became a public argument is a matter of record. Worry over bluefish stocks made the minimum catch length for lüfer a campaign issue in the 2000s. A fisheries federation officer said in 2011 that the limit had stood at 18 cm, was lowered to 14 cm in 2008, and was being raised back to 20 cm, with conservation groups pressing for 24 or 25 cm. That is the fish inside this sandwich: a size class sitting right on the line between a legal catch and a juvenile, bought at the stall and eaten within the hour.

Seasonality gives the sandwich its calendar. Bread stalls and fishmongers around the Bosphorus sell it while the fish is cheap and plentiful, and when the run thins out, the same bread fills with other fish instead. In autumn, çinekop often replaces the palamut as the fish that fills the stalls, and the price drops as the catch swells; Turkish press reports describe prices swinging by half from one week to the next. A sandwich priced by the week, eaten standing on a ferry pier with a paper sleeve around the loaf, marks the point in the year when Istanbul decides the summer is over.

Origin and history

Fish in bread has been sold on the Istanbul waterfront for well over a century, and the best-known version, balık ekmek, belongs to the quays of Eminönü and Karaköy. Nothing documents who first put çinekop in a loaf. The fish is a seasonal catch that any waterfront cook could grill, and each autumn it simply took the place of whatever was running before it.

The size vocabulary is older than the sandwich, and it explains the fish: lüfer is graded as it grows, with defne yaprağı (bay leaf) for the smallest, çinekop next, then sarıkanat, then full lüfer, and kofana for fish of a kilo or more. The names sort the fish by count to the kilo, and fishmongers still use them across the Marmara.

The most precise date attached to the fish is 2011. That August the fisheries minister, Mehdi Eker, announced that the minimum catch size for lüfer would rise from 14 to 20 cm from the season opening on 1 September, with measurement switching from fork length to total length. Under the old method the new 20 cm was worth about 18.5 cm, one fisheries officer argued. From that September the çinekop that ended up in a Bosphorus sandwich had to clear a higher bar than the ones eaten in 2010.