Salatalık Ekmek

On a hot afternoon someone lifts a cucumber out of a bowl of iced water, wipes it on a cloth, and splits a loaf to put it in. Salatalık is cucumber, ekmek is bread, and salatalık ekmek is exactly and only that, the most pared-down thing the Turkish bread-and-filling habit produces. It belongs to the same summer impulse that splits a loaf around nothing but tomato, or nothing but white cheese: a cool, cheap, deliberately light sandwich made for weather too warm to want anything heavier than crunch and crumb.

What lifts it above a snack is the cucumber, and Turkish cooks are particular about which one. The prized fruit is the small, slim, thin-skinned salatalık picked young, four or five inches long, light green, sweet, with very few seeds and a clean snap, a different thing from the big watery cucumber that rolls out of the loaf in soggy coins. Sliced into rounds or long thin batons and laid in fresh bread with a little salt, that cucumber gives the whole point of the sandwich: cold against warm, crunch against pillow, a faint grassy sweetness against the wheat.

The make is barely a recipe, which is why a careless one falls apart. The bread has to be fresh enough that the crust still shatters a little and the crumb is soft, because day-old ekmek goes leathery and chews like rope. The cucumber has to be cold and firm, salted enough to taste of something, and cut thin enough to fold into the loaf but thick enough to keep its snap. Leave it sitting and the salt draws water out, the cucumber goes limp, and the crumb turns damp from the inside. Cut it warm and thick and it slides; skip the salt and the whole thing reads of nothing.

The pleasure of it is almost entirely in the contrast of temperatures and textures. You bite through a crust that gives with a soft crackle into the cool snap of the cucumber, the salt landing first, a thread of grassy sweetness behind it, the soft crumb closing it all up. A pinch of pul biber adds a dry red sting; a few torn leaves of mint or dill lift it; a squeeze of lemon sharpens the edge. It is eaten cold in the hand on a hot day, fast, while the bread is fresh and the cucumber still cracks.

It sits at the low, honest end of ekmek arası, the between-bread eating of Turkish streets and home kitchens, next to the tomato-only and cheese-only summer loaves as a hot-weather, no-effort food, and the same crisp cucumber turns up as one cool element inside the bigger mixed loaves piled with cheese, tomato, olives, and greens. The small additions that keep it itself, a smear of butter or soft fresh cheese under the cucumber for body, a tomato alongside for a fuller summer build, stop short of turning it into a different sandwich. Closed around its cucumber, a split loaf with a cool green filling, it is a sandwich at its most stripped, and none the less one for it.

Pushed any further it stops being this dish. Add enough cheese and tomato and herbs and it becomes a mixed ekmek arası; fold in yogurt and garlic and it drifts toward a cacık loaf; pickle the cucumber and it is a different filling entirely. What the bare label reliably means is fresh bread, cold thin-skinned cucumber, and salt, with the cucumber cut to keep its crunch and eaten before it has time to weep.

The cucumber had a village

There is no origin to tell for cucumber in bread; it is the obvious thing a hungry household does with a loaf and a cool fruit in summer, made everywhere and recorded nowhere. What does have a story is the cucumber the best version wants, and in Istanbul that story has an address: Çengelköy, a village on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, in the Üsküdar district, long famous for the small sweet cucumbers grown in its waterside market gardens.

The çengelköy salatalığı became a kind of byword for the ideal of the type, a tiny, thin-skinned, crisp, fragrant cucumber that the city's gardens supplied to its tables. Those Bosphorus orchards have largely given way to the spread of Istanbul, and the cucumber that still carries the Çengelköy name is now grown chiefly around Kandıra, inland on the Kocaeli coast, the variety outliving the gardens that made it famous.

So the simplest sandwich Turkey makes turns out to ride a cucumber with a place attached. The loaf is anonymous and ancient and belongs to no kitchen; the fruit inside it, at its best, is the small crisp cucumber of Çengelköy, the market-garden village on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus whose orchards have mostly gone to the city, the variety it gave its name to now grown inland around Kandıra on the Kocaeli coast.