Nohutlu Pilav Ekmek

At noon in an Istanbul business district a man in a white smock lifts the glass lid of a wheeled cabinet, and the steam off a deep tray of buttered rice fogs the inside of the case. This is carbohydrate sold to people with twenty minutes, rice and chickpeas scooped into a dish or packed into a length of bread, eaten standing on the pavement before the lunch hour is over. The bread is not a wrapper for a filling here; the rice is the meal and the soft white ekmek is the tool you eat it with, torn off to scoop or folded around a portion in the hand. Carb wrapped around carb, hot and salted and barely a lira, it is one of the cheapest filling things a Turkish street will sell you, and it has been for a very long time.

The rice carries the dish, so the rice is where it is won or lost. Long-grain is washed, then cooked in butter and a good stock until each grain stands separate and glossy rather than clumping, and the chickpeas, soaked and simmered soft but still whole, are held in the same tray so every scoop pulls up a few. Done right, the rice is loose and buttery and the chickpeas give a soft, nutty bite against it. Done wrong, it fails in obvious ways: rice that sat too long dries into a congealed mass at the edge of the tray; chickpeas left hard chalk in the center or, oversimmered, blow out to mush; a tray nobody topped up goes lukewarm and sticky. A pilavcı lives on turnover, because the rice is only good while it is hot and fresh, and a slow cart is serving yesterday's clump.

The bread does a specific job and has its own failure mode. A fresh soft loaf scoops and folds; it gives way under the thumb and soaks up a little of the butter without falling apart. A stale one shatters into shards that cannot pick rice up, and a loaf left to go damp under the rice tears and turns to paste. The vendor tears a piece to the size of the portion, and the eater uses it as a flat scoop or wraps it loosely around a spoonful, the grease and salt of the rice soaking just into the crumb. There is no construction to speak of, no layering, no sauce; the whole engineering is keeping a tray of rice hot and a stack of loaves fresh, and both are harder than they sound across a long lunch service.

Lift the lid and the smell is butter and stock first, plain and savory, with the faint earthiness of the chickpeas under it. Steam rises off the loose grains as they spill from the scoop, and the bread is soft and slightly squashed in the hand. The first mouthful is butter and salt and the clean starch of good rice, then the chickpeas arriving in soft nutty pockets that break against the teeth. Where chicken is laid over the top it pulls into mild savory threads through the grains. It is warm, plain, and filling in a way that sits heavy and satisfying, the kind of food eaten fast and not lingered over, washed down with a glass of cold ayran from the same cart.

The grammar at the cart is short and spoken. You ask for nohutlu, with chickpeas, against the plain pilav, and tavuklu adds the shredded chicken over the top, the usual upgrade for a few coins more. Acılı gets a spoon of chili, turşu adds pickles on the side, and a glass of ayran is assumed. The cart itself is the institution: a glass-fronted box on two wheels, parked at a corner or outside an office block at lunch and trundled away after, and Istanbul has its famous fixed pitches where the queue forms nightly rather than the vendor going looking for it. It is working food, sold to taxi drivers and clerks and students, and the price is half the point.

The variable is the topping and whether the bread is a side or a wrapper. The plainest is rice and chickpeas with bread alongside; the common build adds shredded chicken; a few carts let you have the whole thing packed into the loaf as a rough sandwich rather than eaten off a dish with bread in the other hand. The constant is the buttery rice and the soft chickpeas. The chicken-topped rice that shares the same cart and the bean-and-rice plates worked the same way are close cousins, separate orders off the same wheeled cabinet. What this is, at its plainest, is hot buttered chickpea rice and a piece of bread to carry it, sold fast and cheap from the street.

Origin and history

Chickpea rice was never invented by anyone in particular; rice cooked with chickpeas and a little fat is old, common Ottoman home cooking, and the street version is simply that pot wheeled out to a corner and sold by the scoop. Its history is the history of a staple and a cart rather than a dish with a date. Pilav with chickpeas was eaten across the Ottoman table long before anyone sold it on a sidewalk, and the move that made it street food was logistical, not culinary: put the tray in a heated glass case on wheels, park it where hungry working people pass at midday, and hand it over with bread for next to nothing.

The cart is the part with a recognizable modern history, and it is an Istanbul one. The pilavcı, the rice seller working a glass-fronted wheeled cabinet, is a fixture of the city's lunch hour, scooping rice and chickpeas and shredded chicken into dishes for clerks and cab drivers in the business districts. The dish reaches into Turkish literature as a marker of exactly that street life; selling rice with chickpeas is one of the trades the wandering vendor Mevlut works in Orhan Pamuk's 2014 novel of the Istanbul street seller, A Strangeness in My Mind, set across four decades of the city's hawkers.

What can actually be pinned about it is modest and worth stating plainly rather than dressing up: the recipe is old and undated, the seller is anonymous, and the durable thing is the cart. Its most concrete landmark is a single famous rice cart at Unkapanı, in the Fatih district of Istanbul, which for decades has held one corner and run its queue into the small hours while every other cart in the city rolls off hunting for customers, this one stays put and lets the crowd come to it.