Kuru Fasulye Ekmek

Kuru fasulye is the closest thing Turkey has to a national stew, dried white beans cooked down in a tomato-red sauce until they turn soft and glossy, and it is everywhere a person eats cheaply. It is the workhorse of the esnaf lokanta, the tradesmen's restaurant where the day's cooking sits in deep trays behind glass and a cook ladles to order. The bean pot is the one that never goes off the line, topped up rather than emptied, and a plate of it costs next to nothing. Most often it lands beside a mound of buttery pilav, beans and rice together, the pairing every Turk pictures at the word kuru fasulye. The sandwich is the same stew without the plate, a ladle of beans pushed into a split length of soft ekmek and handed across the counter to be carried off and eaten standing.

What goes into the pot is plain and slow. Dried white beans, navy or the prized Dermason kind grown in the east, are soaked overnight and then simmered with onion softened in oil and a heavy spoon of tomato paste until the sauce reduces and thickens enough to coat the beans instead of running off them. Time is most of the technique. The beans have to cook through to a soft mealy centre without breaking apart, and the sauce has to lose enough water to turn from thin and red to thick and clinging, which is what separates a stew that holds inside bread from one that soaks straight through it. A pot left to sit unstirred catches and scorches on the bottom, and the bitterness from that runs through the whole batch.

In the sandwich the bread does the carrying that the rice usually does, a folded loaf holding a ladle of beans inside it. It is a loose, hot, heavy thing to eat. The smell coming off it is cooked tomato and onion first, the earthy starch of the beans under that, a thread of oil over the top. The beans break soft against the teeth and the sauce is rich and gently sweet from the onion and paste cooked down long, while the ekmek goes warm and a little squashed where the sauce has soaked into the crumb. A pickle bitten alongside cracks sharp across the richness, and a glass of cold ayran cuts it again. It fills a person out of all proportion to what it costs.

At the counter it is ordered in a few words. You point at the pot and say whether you want it etli, with pieces of meat cooked into the beans, or sade and plain, and whether it goes on a plate with rice or into bread to take away. Turşu, the pickles, come without asking, and so does the ayran. The plated version with pilav is the proper sit-down meal; the bread is the shortcut, the lunch a builder or a student takes standing on the pavement when there is no time and no money to do more with it. It is hot, heavy, and over in a few minutes.

Turks are particular about the bean itself. The kind most prized for the dish is the Dermason, a flat white bean grown around Erzincan in the eastern highlands, and the better bean houses name their beans the way another kitchen might name a cut of meat. A good dry bean keeps its shape through a long simmer and turns creamy inside rather than collapsing to mush, and where the beans were grown counts toward a place's reputation almost as much as how it cooks them. The stew is humble, and the raw material behind it is taken seriously.

From an American Crop to an Istanbul Bean House

The white bean came to Turkey from a long way off. Phaseolus vulgaris is a New World crop, carried out of the Americas after 1492 and spread east across the Mediterranean over the next two centuries, and it settled into Ottoman cooking as a cheap, storable staple for rich and poor alike. The word for it is older than the bean it now names: fasulye comes through Ottoman Turkish from the Byzantine Greek phasolin, from the ancient Greek phasēlos, the same root behind the Latin Phaseolus. A Greek name for an old-world legume was waiting to be handed to the new arrival.

Erzincanlı Ali Baba, a bean house in Istanbul, is the name most attached to the plated dish. It opened in the Direklerarası quarter in 1924 and is said to have been the first dedicated dry-bean shop in the city. It later moved to a spot near the Süleymaniye Library, where the stew is still cooked in a copper pot and served with rice and pickles, and the family is said to have kept it going across three generations from grandfather to grandson. The beans it built its name on are the Dermason type from around Erzincan, the eastern town the shop took its name from.

The bean even has a festival of its own. Each autumn, the town of Kaymaz in the Sivrihisar district of Eskişehir province is said to hold a kuru fasulye festival around its local crop, with cooking contests and folk dancing drawing people in from the nearby provinces. None of that ceremony touches the sandwich. The version handed out in bread keeps no date and needs no shop or festival behind it, because the pot is already on the lokanta line every day, and a loaf and a ladle are all it takes to turn the national stew into a lunch a person eats walking away from the counter.