Sigara Böreği Dürüm

The fried object at the center of this wrap has a name the Turkish trade tried to take away. Sigara böreği, the slim cheese cigar of the meze table, is thin yufka pastry coiled tight around white cheese and fried until it is rigid and gold and snaps like a breadstick, and the word sigara is simply Turkish for cigarette, a flat description of the shape. In September 2011 a federation of Turkish bakers and pastry makers voted to rename the pastry kalem böreği, pen börek, on the argument that a snack named after a cigarette should not be sold to children, and the temperance society Yeşilay floated calling it yeşilay böreği instead. The new names never took. The cigar is still a cigarette on every case and menu, and the dürüm built around it turns that single fried snack into the core of a handheld wrap.

The construction is a fried thing wrapped in a soft one. The cigars are made or held ready first: a triangle of thin yufka is smeared near the wide edge with crumbled beyaz peynir worked with parsley, the sides folded in, and the whole thing rolled into a tight pencil, the tip brushed with water or egg so it seals and does not unspool in the oil. They fry until stiff and bronzed. A sheet of lavaş is warmed just enough to turn it supple, and three or four cigars are laid in a line along one edge of it, never the middle, often with a little greenery, a slice of tomato, or a streak of sharp sauce set beside them. Then it is rolled snug, the seam tucked under, and eaten while the cores are still hot enough to crack.

The pull of it is texture against texture. The lavaş meets the lip soft and warm, and a half-second later the pastry inside cracks audibly and the cheese behind it pulls into a short, salty stretch, faintly tangy from the brined beyaz peynir that the standard cigar is built to carry. The white cheese is not incidental: it is the same rennet-set, salt-brined cheese the Turkish food codex governs by fat-in-dry-matter, the staple that anchors the breakfast spread, and the version from Edirne carries a Turkish geographical indication of its own, registered in 2007. Inside a fried tube inside a wrapped flatbread, it is doing the job it was bred for, holding a salty, melting line through everything crisp around it.

Wrapping the cigar rather than eating it loose changes what kind of food it is. Off a meze plate the sigara böreği is a shared starter, three or four to a small dish, picked up between other small plates and a glass of rakı. Rolled into lavaş it becomes a single-hand street order, the kind sold from a büfe counter to be eaten walking, the cheese sealed inside the pastry sealed inside the bread so none of it drips on the way. The same snack reads as table food in one form and pavement food in the other, and only the wrap makes it the second.

The cigar has a close sibling that the wrap could just as easily use, and the difference is only in the fold. Roll the cheese-smeared yufka into a cylinder and it is sigara böreği; fold the same square flag-style into a triangle and it is muska böreği, named for the muska, the triangular paper amulet stitched into cloth and worn against the evil eye. Both fry from the same pastry and the same brined cheese; one is shaped like a cigarette and the other like a charm. The cigars admit other fillings too, potato or a spiced mince, which carry whole into the roll, but cheese and parsley is the form the name is built on.

Origin and history

This particular wrap has no inventor and no datable beginning. It is a recent layering of two existing Turkish forms, one fried snack set inside one rolled flatbread, and any founding story for the combination would be invented. What carries real history is each half on its own. Börek is old food across the former Ottoman lands, a whole family of pastries built from yufka, the thin hand-stretched sheet that defines the category; an archaic form of the word, yuvgha, is glossed as folded bread in Mahmud al-Kāshgarī's eleventh-century dictionary of Turkic, compiled in the 1070s.

The cigar shape is the younger detail, and it is not recorded in the older pastry literature, which reads as a later refinement rather than an ancient one; the word dürüm itself, from dürmek, to roll or fold, is first attested in writing only in the twentieth century. A first-recipe date for the cigarette form circulates online, tied to a nineteenth-century European cookbook, but it traces back to a single unsourced post and is best left unstated.

Both doughs in the wrap carry weight beyond the kitchen. In 2016, at its eleventh session held in Addis Ababa from late November into December, the UNESCO committee added the flatbread making and sharing culture of Lavash, Katyrma, Jupka, and Yufka to its Representative List of intangible cultural heritage. The listing names both halves of this very roll at once, the lavaş sheet on the outside and the yufka the cigar is rolled from within it, and Turkey filed it jointly with Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.