Mezgit Ekmek

Start with the fish. Mezgit is whiting, a small lean cousin of cod that the Black Sea lands by the tonne, and at a stall it gets handled fast: the fillets come off short and bone-light, the pale flesh dredged through seasoned flour or a thin batter and dropped into oil already shimmering in a shallow tava pan. A couple of minutes is the whole cook. The coating blisters and sets, the flesh underneath stays soft and faintly sweet, and the fillets come out to be slid straight into a split length of crusty white loaf. This is fish in bread at its plainest, built on a catch that costs almost nothing on the northern coast.

The flour is doing real work. Whiting carries no oil of its own, so the thin shell of fried batter is what keeps the flesh moist inside the loaf and gives the bite something to crack through. Cooks on the Black Sea call the method tava, the same shallow-fry that turns out plates of crisp anchovy farther east, and they keep it quick so the close white flesh reads as flaking rather than dry. Boned with a little care, since a stray pin bone tells loudly in so mild a mouthful, the fish goes in three or four fillets to a loaf, hot enough that the steam fogs the crumb.

The loaf has to earn its place too. A firm crust wicks the oil from the fish and carries the weight without folding, where a soft roll would slump to paste under the heat. Into that bread go the standard quayside trimmings: a handful of roka, the peppery rocket whose green bite cuts the fry, raw onion sliced thin for a cold sharp crunch, and a hard squeeze of lemon that lifts the whole thing off the flat. Many stalls finish it with a thin run of nar ekşisi, the sour pomegranate molasses, dragging a dark tang across the white fish. Folded shut, it eats in a few bites, grease soaking up the crumb as you go.

Whiting earns its spot in the loaf by being plentiful and plain. It is among the cheapest fish off the northern coast, sold by the crate at the Black Sea ports where the trawlers land it, and it has none of the prestige of a line-caught sea bass or the seasonal draw of fresh anchovy. That is the point of it here. A fish nobody pays much for can be floured and fried by the basket and sold for the price of a snack, which is what fish in bread has always been on the working docks: a way to turn the morning's most ordinary catch into something you eat on your feet.

The taste is quieter than its oily relatives. The first bite cracks the fried coating and gives way to soft flesh that tastes barely of the sea, then the lemon and onion arrive sharp and cold behind it and the rocket keeps the last mouthful from sitting heavy. Where the mackerel version of the quayside sandwich comes off the grill dark and strong, the fried whiting stays mild and light, a fish you taste more for its texture than its flavour. It is cheap food eaten standing up, near the boats or well inland, wherever the Black Sea catch turns up cheap enough to flour and fry by the basket.

The Fish the Bridge Left Behind

Fish in bread on the Istanbul water is an old format with a documented home: the boats around the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, where since the middle of the nineteenth century fishermen brought the day's catch in from the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara to sell at Eminönü. The trade that made the sandwich was simple. Boatmen built grills and fryers into their craft, cooked the fish on the water, and handed it ashore in bread ready to eat. No single name is attached to it; it grew straight out of the fish market and the working dock.

What swims in that bread has shifted under pressure, and that part is well recorded. The old standard was uskumru, the Bosphorus mackerel, but heavy postwar trawling and purse-seine fleets drove the migratory stocks of the Marmara and Black Seas down hard; chub mackerel was reckoned commercially extinct in those waters by the early 1980s, and the decline has only deepened since. Today's sandwiches lean on imported and farmed fish and on cheaper local species, and lean Black Sea whiting, landed in the thousands of tonnes off the northern coast, is one of the everyday fish that fills the space a vanished mackerel left.

The working boats themselves were pushed off their Eminönü berths in 2004, when the Istanbul preservation board banned them over what it called visual pollution and the historic texture of the waterfront. Three ornate Ottoman-style boats now sell a tidier, more touristed version of the old trade from the same pier. The plain fried fish carries on best away from there, at the small stalls of the Black Sea ports, where mezgit comes off the boats cheap, gets dredged in flour and dropped in oil by the basket, and goes into bread with onion and lemon for the price of a snack.