Sardalya Ekmek

On Turkey's Aegean coast the sardine keeps a calendar. The fish shows up lean in early summer, fattens through July and August while the figs ripen on the same hillsides, and drops out of the fresh market as the water cools. Sardalya ekmek, sardine bread, exists inside that window. For a few hot months the harbour grills of the coast turn from squid and köfte to trays of small silver fish, and the sandwich becomes the cheapest hot lunch on the waterfront; by November it is gone, and a stall still advertising it is selling the frozen memory of August.

Nothing is filleted. The sardines are gutted, scaled, and salted, racked in a hinged wire basket, and held close over coals until the skin blisters and the flesh barely sets. Three or four fish, laid head to tail, fill a split somun whose crumb has been pinched out to make them a bed. Onion sliced thin goes over them, then a handful of parsley or rocket, then half a lemon squeezed hard, and the loaf closes over fish that were swimming that morning if the seller is honest, and that week if he is not. There is no sauce. The fish's own fat, loosened by the fire and cut by the lemon, is the dressing.

A sardine is too small to fillet at street speed, so the sandwich hands the bone question to the eater, and the coast has table manners for it. Larger fish give up the skeleton in one piece, a pinch at the tail lifting spine and ribs out of the opened flesh; the smallest ones are eaten entire, their fine bones softened by the fire into something between texture and seasoning. The failures belong to the fish. Grilled past setting, it collapses into dry shreds. A day too old, it tastes of the bottom of the boat. Put on wet, it glues to the grate and leaves its skin behind, and the skin is where the char and half the flavour live.

The smell announces the season before any sign does: sardine fat dripping onto coals smokes hard and sweet and flares in little spits that make the cook step back. Some kitchens wrap each fish in a brined vine leaf, cigar-style, the Aegean's asma yaprağında sardalya, so the leaf chars while the flesh inside steams tangy and intact. In the sandwich the contrasts sit side by side: fish hot enough to need care, onion cold and loud, lemon running down the wrist, bread toasted only on the face that rested near the fire. The flesh is sweet for something so oily, and the last bites are the best ones, after the juices have had time to reach the crumb.

This is a coast sandwich, not an Istanbul one. The famous balık ekmek of Istanbul's old quays runs on mackerel fillets and runs all year; sardalya ekmek belongs to the Aegean towns, Ayvalık, Dikili, Foça, the İzmir kordon, the Çanakkale shore, sold from beach buffets and harbour carts to people still dripping from the sea. Hamsi, the Black Sea anchovy, is a different fish with a winter cuisine of its own and does not appear here. Kalamar ekmek shares the same counters but not the same months. When the grills are packed away, a flour-dusted, pan-fried sardine version stands in, crisper and heavier, the off-season reading of the same idea.

Gelibolu, the sardine town

Grilled fish in bread on this coast is older than any paper about it, and no town, cook, or year can claim the sandwich; nobody seriously tries. The sardine itself is another matter. At Gelibolu, on the European shore of the Dardanelles, the fish has been a livelihood and an identity for generations, caught where the shoals move through the narrows and worth money beyond the summer only if something was done to keep it.

What Gelibolu did with the surplus was salt it. Tuzlu sardalya, the town's salted sardine, is headed, layered with coarse salt, and cured into something closer to anchovy than to fresh fish, packed flat in tins and eaten with rakı through the winter. The trade once kept a whole row of packing houses busy; most have closed, and among the survivors the Selahattin Kemerli works dates itself to 1950 by its own company history.

The fresh fish got a festival. Gelibolu staged its first Altın Sardalya, the International Golden Sardine Culture and Art Festival, in 1995, and has brought it back most summers since: an August week of concerts, folk dancing, and open-air cinema arranged around long public grills of the town's catch. The timing carries the argument, because August is when the fish deserves a party and the same weeks are when the sandwich is at its best on every waterfront south of the strait. The first Altın Sardalya was held in 1995.