Ottomans’ drink sherbet relegated to Ramadan

The restaurant prepares some 100 types of traditional Ottoman sherbet and offers 15-20 types a day to its customers. AA photos

The Ottomans’ popular drink, sherbet, known for its healing effects, has been increasingly forgotten over time and is now largely consumed ceremonially in Ramadan

Sherbet, once the most popular Ottoman drink, has been essentially relegated to symbolic consumption during the holy month of Ramadan even though it is a healthier alternative to today’s soft drinks, according to one restaurant proprietor.

“People of all ages are drinking soft drinks which are very harmful. We are trying to keep the sherbet tradition alive in our restaurant,” Abdullah Korun, general director of Istanbul’s 123-year-old restaurant Hacı Abdullah Lokantası, recently old Anatolia news agency. “We prepare nearly 100 types of sherbet but we serve 15 to 20 types a day to our customers. Restaurants should keep such natural drinks rather than soda drinks.”

During the time of the Ottomans, there were roughly 300 types of sherbets made from various fresh flowers and fruits such as rose, lily, jasmine, silverberry, lotus, violet and others. Today, this traditional drink is still kept alive in modern life but with fewer types. Korun said sherbet was one of the most important products both in the kitchen of the palace and the public in the past.

The director of the restaurant, which was opened during the era of Abdülhamit II, said sherbet, made from dried and cold stewed fruits, was a favorite and irreplaceable drink, particularly during the holy month of Ramadan. “In the past, there were no refrigeration systems like fridges and sherbet was prepared and consumed daily,” he added.

Forgotten through time

Korun said the Ottomans’ sherbet began to be forgotten through time. “Almost all housewives in Ottoman times used to prepare canned foods, pickles and sherbet in their house, but today, since women are involved in social and business life, this tradition is disappearing,” he said.

He said it was consumed both in winter and summer during Ottoman times since it had a significant place in social life. “People used to benefit from natural methods to avoid diseases in the past. But in Ottoman times, people used to drink sherbet to protect themselves from diseases. Of course, the medicine sector was not developed that much and there were not too many types of diseases. This is why sherbet was the most important medicine,” Korun said.

Cranberry, quince, black mulberry and wild strawberry sherbets are particularly good for tonsil problems and cold, he said. (ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency)

Wine lists: small is beautiful

A shorter wine list means less head-scratching and more enjoyment. Photograph: Alamy

Wine lists are following menus in becoming more focused and concise, and that's a good thing

At last in the UK, wine is becoming something we drink rather than revere, but wine lists can still be daunting things. Predominantly organised by price (if short), by grape variety or region (if long), or occasionally by style (if irritating). The latter too often manage to be simultaneously subjective and bland, including headings like "light and fresh" and "rich and spicy" depending arbitrarily on the list organiser's tastebuds: one person's elegant and nuanced is another's thin and anaemic. Descriptions of individual wines suffer similarly, although occasionally this tendency is elevated from the ridiculous to the sublime. Take this gloriously enticing note from The Parlour Room at Sketch accompanying an 1850 Madeira: "the year Balzac died and Liszt conducted the Premier of Lohengrin was a great one for Verdelho".

Thierry Tomasin, one of the UK's most respected sommeliers, suggests having a look at the list in advance of a restaurant trip to have a few selections in mind, while a recent discussion on the hardest-to-spell wines shows that knowing the list might help to avoid faltering over the correct pronunciation of something like Lafaurie-Peyraguey, if such things bother you. In any case, take advantage of an expert if there's one around - people worry about being upsold by their sommelier but the reverse is more often the case. Let them know how much you want to spend by indicating an appropriately-priced wine on the list and a good sommelier will find one under your budget.

We are witnessing the stirring of a revolution in wine lists. Menus have been shrinking as we become more interested in the quality and provenance of ingredients than extensive choice and wine lists are following suit. We are also opening up to new grapes and regions and sommeliers feel less need to tick boxes with generic staples. Chablis, sancerre, New Zealand sauvignon and pinot grigio; bordeaux, côtes du rhône, chianti and rioja need to earn their places on lists of 40 or less. Restaurants are more interested in selling wines than trying to impress with a vanity list.

Recommending specific wines with particular dishes on the menu is another basic but effective technique for demystifying the list - considering the drink to be as integral to the meal as a sauce. When the first spring lamb hits our plates it should be to the sound of corks being pulled from bottles of spicy and vivacious crozes hermitage; the arrival of asparagus should be heralded by accompanying muscat d'alsace. Many smaller restaurants and gastropubs have been doing this for years (as with beer) but until recently it's been considered a bit unsophisticated.

However arranged and whatever size, a list should be accessible - we should look forward to it as much as opening the menu; not be intimidated, bored or bewildered as though it were a foreign language primer. Smaller lists are more dynamic; smaller measures mean even if the wine is not to your palate, you can afford another. Good examples are more seasonally aware, showing fresher and lighter wines with the onset of spring, rosés you can pop ice cubes in at summer's height, moving to heavier reds and richer whites as the days draw in. Carafes, featured wine flights, monthly producer offers and enomatic machines all encourage us to experiment, to drink less, but better. (Source: guardian)

All eyes on the pies

Photograph: Alamy

The British Pie Awards are being judged today. What variety of pie always deserves a gold medal?

It's the British Pie Awards today, in Melton Mowbray (of course) where a vast panel of judges will masticate their way through 18 categories of stuffed pastries. As well as predictable pork, banal beef and stalwart steak and kidney, there are classes for "football", fish, "celebration" and "other meat", which offer more to the imagination.

The event takes place in a church hall bedecked with bunting; the logo has a union flag emblazoned athwart a handsome pie. It's touching and quaint, this English obsession with name-tags and rosettes for everyday stuff: white coats and serious, critical faces staring at a table of marrows.

We've loved pies for a long time in this country. Alan Davidson thought the word might be a contraction of "magpie": those birds collect a variety of things, and pies once contained a variety of ingredients.

The pies we have today, with their edible pastries and crinkled crusts, are probably indigenous. But until the 1600s, when people really started to systematise cookbook-writing, hardly anyone bothered to mention how pastry was made or what you did with it. We know that some cooks would get a lump of rye flour, mix it with hot water into a greyish putty, then punch this with their fists and raise the edges of the pie around the flattened bit. The meat – more usually, meats – would then be baked inside it, with water and flavourings. Once it was cooked, you'd drain off the gravy and fill the pie with clarified butter: it would keep for weeks or months in the larder. When you wanted to eat it, you'd make a fresh gravy, heat the pie up and discard the inedible pastry.

One of the loveliest things about pies is their universal appeal. From the start, everyone from the king down enjoyed them. At Hampton Court, the largest oven in the pastry house was 12ft wide and baked pies containing entire venison. Everyone else's pies contained a mishmash of meats or whatever birds they'd managed to snare. Dorothy Hartley includes a recipe for rook pie in her overrated and turgid tome Food in England. Most rook meat is "bitter and black," she says: you boil the breasts only in water and milk, put them on top of a steak, "weave bacon into a lattice over the birds", cover everything in pastry then bake it. "Serve with mustard," she enjoins (presumably before brisk vomiting).

Similarly vile, but rather more impressive, is an Arab traveller's description of an Egyptian pie from the 1100s. This included three whole stuffed lambs, 20 fowl, 20 chickens and 50 smaller birds stuffed with eggs and meat. The thing was then covered in further pies of meat and cheese – a meta-pie, if you will – and doused in rose water and musk. I'd rather have an Esso Ginsters.

No, bring me the confident simplicity of a one- or two-ingredient pie. A fruit or meat monoglot, or perhaps one of the great duos: beef and oyster, steak and kidney, chicken and ham. Hurrah for the gastronomic eugenics of the British Pie Awards, whose rules are unequivocal: "Entries which do not comply (lattice topped, fruit topped, potato topped etc) will NOT be submitted for judging." (Don't you just love the sneer and wrinkled lip in "potato topped etc"?) What do you look for in a good pie? (Source: guardian)