Francala

A baker in Istanbul slashes a long loaf of white dough with a blade before it goes into the oven, and the cuts open into pale ridges that bake crisp while the inside stays almost cottony. That loaf is the francala, and it sits on bakery shelves beside the heavier somun and the sesame-crusted simit as the lighter bread of the city. Tear one open warm and a little steam comes out smelling of plain wheat and yeast; the crust crackles and sheds flakes on the counter, and the crumb springs back under a thumb. Everything a sandwich counter needs from a bread is in that first tear: a crust that gives, a crumb that takes butter or a smear of kaşar without tearing.

It earns a place here as a carrier. Split along its length, a francala holds the fillings Turkish counters reach for all day: slices of sucuk fried until the fat runs and then pressed in with melting kaşar, köfte still spitting from the grill, white cheese with sliced tomato for breakfast. The bread soaks up a little of the sucuk's red oil at the edge and keeps the middle dry enough to hold. Home bakers make a fat, short version too, the mini tombul francala, for the same job. The loaf is sold by the piece or in half, and a half is a sandwich in the hand by the time the cheese has softened.

Texture decides whether one succeeds. A francala eaten in the first hours has a thin shell that shatters and a crumb that compresses and rebounds, so the filling sits snug and nothing slides. By the next morning the crust has gone leathery and the crumb has dried into crumbs that fall away at the first bite of a hot filling. That is why bakeries bake it in small batches through the day, and why the sandwiches made from it taste best close to the oven. Too soft and it collapses around wet köfte; too crisp and the crust rips the roof of the mouth. The slender shape helps, since a thin loaf has little crumb to dry out.

The word itself has an unsettled story. Francala names white bread made from low-extraction flour, and the word is traced to a bread term from Padua in Italy, possibly from the Italian frangere, to break. Another common guess is that it simply means Frankish or European bread, the loaf of foreigners. Either way, the label has stuck to a particular kind of loaf: finer than village bread, baked from sifted wheat that cost more than the coarse grain behind everyday ekmek, and long the bread of those who could pay for pale crumb.

That social history gives the loaf its place among Ottoman breads. Palace kitchens baked several kinds side by side, a flat white fodula, whole-wheat somun and a white fırancala, and each carried a different price and a different rank at the table. The long thin dough was scored with a knife before baking to crisp it, a habit that survives in the shop loaf. Over the following centuries the loaf drifted down the social ladder until it became the plain, everyday white bread of Turkish cities, found now in bakeries and supermarkets alike, and the language of the baker's counter keeps both the old name and the new ubiquity.

Origin and history

The earliest trace in print is a traveler's praise. Evliya Çelebi, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler, wrote of the white bread of Galata in his Seyahatname, and the English renderings that circulate spell it franjula and call it the first and best of the quarter's delicacies. Later readers tie the passage to Mudéjar bakers working in Galata, an identification that comes from a gloss on his text.

Evliya describes the loaf as light as sponge and well-eyed, which is a baker's way of saying the crumb was open and full of holes. He ranks it above the bread of Amasya. One English rendering names a Galata baker called Issa Çelebi, said to have received a boon from a dervish, though no other record fills in who he was or where his oven stood.

Galata was a Genoese-built quarter with a long Italian-speaking memory, which fits the Padua trail for the word. In the 1600s, then, a fine white loaf from its ovens was already good enough for a travel writer to rank it against the famous bread towns of Anatolia, and that mention stands as the oldest dated witness to a loaf that Istanbul still slashes and bakes today.