Kalamar Ekmek

Order fried squid at a Turkish meyhane and it comes as a meze: a plate of kalamar tava, golden rings under a bowl of pale tarator, a wedge of lemon on the side, set down among the little dishes to be picked at over rakı. Kalamar ekmek is that exact plate folded into a loaf and handed to someone standing up. The squid, the walnut sauce, the lemon, the whole tavern appetizer, lifted off the meze table and made into a sandwich you can carry down a seafront.

The squid has to be fried right or nothing else matters. Rings cut from the body are tenderised first, soaked in lemon and a little soda so they relax instead of toughening, then dredged in cornmeal rather than flour, which fries into a coarse sandy crust that stays crisp longer than a smooth batter. Into hot oil they go for under a minute, just until the coating sets gold and the squid inside turns from translucent to barely opaque. A second too long and the ring seizes into a rubber band; oil that runs too cool and the cornmeal soaks through and goes pale and greasy instead of crisping. The window is narrow, which is why a tired fryer gives itself away on the first bite.

Then come the two things that make it a meze and not just fried seafood. Tarator is the standing partner of fried squid in Turkey, a thick pale sauce of ground walnuts, garlic, bread, lemon, and olive oil, sharp and rich at once, and a spoonful smeared inside the loaf does for the squid what it does on the plate. The lemon is squeezed hard over the rings at the last second, its acid the line that keeps the fried richness from sitting heavy. A little shredded lettuce or raw onion goes in cold against the heat. With the crust crisp and the sauce sharp it sings; let the rings sit until the crust softens and the squeeze is forgotten, and it slumps into something dull.

You smell the hot oil and toasted cornmeal before you reach the stall, and the first bite runs through the warm bread into the brittle shatter of the crust, then the clean rubbery give of the squid, then the garlic and walnut of the tarator arriving cool behind the heat. The lemon cuts across all of it. The rings squeak faintly against the teeth the way only squid does, the crust crackles, the sauce coats. Eaten fast, while the oil is still loud, it is the meze experience compressed into a few mouthfuls and put in your hand.

It belongs to the coast and to the tavern at once. Fried squid is a fixture of seafood restaurants and meyhane tables wherever the Aegean and the Marmara meet Turkish cooking, from the Izmir waterfront to the fish-and-rakı houses of Istanbul, and the street loaf is the cheaper, faster reading of the same thing, sold near ferry landings and harbour fronts where the restaurant version would cost ten times as much. Some stalls swap the tarator for a garlicky yogurt or a tartar-style mayonnaise; the lemon never changes.

The other things in a loaf along this coast are close cousins but distinct builds. The grilled-fish sandwich of the Istanbul waterfront, a whole boned fillet charred over coals, solves the same problem of seafood in bread with fire instead of a fryer and a single fish instead of crisp rings. The shrimp version fills the loaf with fried prawns on the same logic as the squid. What sets the kalamar reading apart is the ring and the crust: a fried, cornmeal-jacketed mollusc that holds a crunch a grilled fillet never has, dressed in the walnut sauce that follows fried squid wherever it is served.

A Meze That Left the Table

The sandwich cannot be dated and names no creator, and any account that supplies either has invented it. Fried squid in bread is the obvious move once kalamar tava already exists as a popular dish; the loaf is a delivery format, not a creation, reached for by harbour cooks who wanted to sell the tavern's squid to people who were walking rather than sitting.

The part with a real history is the meze, not the bread. Kalamar tava is one of the most established of Turkish seafood appetizers, a fixture of the meyhane, the rakı-and-meze tavern whose culture of small dishes shared slowly over the anise spirit is a documented institution of Istanbul and the Aegean coast. Fried squid sits on that table beside the cold mezes and the grilled fish as a standard of the warm-meze course, served with tarator and lemon, long before anyone thought to wrap it in a loaf.

So the lineage runs from the table outward. The squid earned its place as a meze first, paired with a walnut sauce and an anise spirit in a tavern setting that Turkish food culture treats as a tradition in its own right. The sandwich is what happens when that warm-meze plate is taken off the rakı table, given a loaf, and sold to the street for the price of a snack, the crust and the tarator carried over intact and the tablecloth left behind.