Karides Ekmek

On a harbor front in Bodrum a cook tips a handful of peeled shrimp into a little earthenware crock of butter and garlic, lets it bubble and go fragrant, then slides the lot into an opened length of ekmek and crushes a pinch of pul biber over the top. That move, sauce and all going into the bread instead of being mopped up from the crock, is most of what separates the karides ekmek from its surroundings. The Aegean already eats its shrimp this way at the meze table: tereyağlı karides, prawns in foaming garlic butter, or karides güveç, prawns baked in a garlicky tomato sauce under melted cheese, both served with bread set beside the dish precisely so nothing goes to waste. The sandwich is the day the cook stops handing you the bread on the side and packs the shrimp and their butter into the loaf itself.

So the loaf has a job the fish version rarely asks of it. Grilled mackerel sheds smoke and a little oil; garlic-butter shrimp shed a hot, salty, garlic-loaded fat that wants somewhere to go, and the toasted cut faces of the ekmek are there to catch it without dissolving.

Where a stall runs the cleaner grilled style, the shrimp come off the skewer with a faint char and the butter is brushed or spooned rather than poured, and the bread stays drier. Either way the cook is racing the same clock, pulling the shrimp the instant they turn from glassy to white, because a few seconds past that and they tighten into rubber that no amount of lemon will rescue. Tomato, raw onion tossed with sumac, a leaf or two of something green, and a hard squeeze of lemon go on at the end to cut the richness the butter brought.

This is an Aegean thing, and the distance from Istanbul does most of the work of telling it apart. The famous fish-in-bread belongs to the Bosphorus and the cold-water bluefish and mackerel that run through it; the shrimp sandwich belongs to the warmer Aegean and the small sweet prawns the southern boats bring up cheap. You buy it at a seafront stall or a small balıkçı in Bodrum, in İzmir, in the harbor towns down the coast, where shellfish is a daily glut rather than a catch of the season. The order is fried or grilled, kızartma or ızgara, and a regular might ask for the garlic heavy or the onion piled on. The pul biber that flecks so much Aegean shrimp cookery carries straight onto the sandwich, a low warmth under the lemon that the northern mackerel loaf never has.

The variation runs along that fried-or-grilled line and along how saucy a given stall is willing to let the thing get. The fried build leans on the crackle of a thin flour coating against soft bread; the grilled build is lighter and lets a little smoke through. The garlic-butter and güveç readings sit at the wetter end and lean hardest on the bread to hold together, while the plainest stalls keep it nearly dry, shrimp and lemon and onion and not much else. Some add a spoon of ezme or a garlicky yogurt, though on the coast the butter and the pul biber usually do the seasoning a hotter sauce would. It stays light for fried seafood, eaten standing with the boats in front of you and the salt air doing part of the work.

Origin and history

The shrimp sandwich has no inventor and no documented origin, and any single date offered for it should be treated as a guess. It is an obvious coastal variation, harbor cooks running the day's shellfish through a format the coast already had, and the meze it borrows from, garlic-butter prawns and prawns in a güveç crock, are old and ordinary along the Aegean rather than anyone's invention. What can be dated belongs to the parent it copies, the fish-in-bread, and that record is genuine. Balık ekmek, grilled fish in a Turkish loaf, has been eaten on the Istanbul waterfront since the mid-nineteenth century, when fish pulled straight from the Bosphorus were grilled and served on bread by the shore.

The Eminönü boat trade is the documented heart of that parent. By the late nineteenth century families from the Black Sea coast worked it at Eminönü, grilling fish on small boats moored to the quay and passing the sandwiches up to the crowd, a profession handed father to son. The shrimp version carries none of this paper trail; it takes the established move, the split loaf and the onion and the lemon, and runs prawns and their garlic butter through it instead of a mackerel fillet.

The dateable history of the parent has lately been municipal rather than culinary. The Istanbul Preservation Board ordered the fish-sandwich boats out of Eminönü in 2004 on the grounds of visual pollution, and in 2007 the city ran a tender for a handful of formal mooring spots, open only to fish sellers with at least five years in the trade. Just four bidders qualified and three boats were granted the spots, the elaborately decorated Ottoman-style craft that grill fish on the Eminönü waterfront to this day. The shrimp sandwich down on the Aegean has no such ledger, only a coast that has long mopped garlic-butter prawns with bread and one day simply closed the bread around them.