Keralan food at Thattukada, East Ham

Another recent trip to outer edges of the Tube map took me to East Ham, home to one of London’s largest South Indian populations. (The other is in Wembley.) With a branch of the State of India bank, a large Bollywood cinema and a number of Hindu temples, even the non-food offerings on the high street were enough to make me feel like I had gone much further than to the edge of Zone 4.

As for the food, one could dine well without ever sitting down, grazing the stands on High Street North and nearby Green Street for chaat (combinations of potatoes, chickpeas and small hollow biscuits layered with texture-adding crisped rice or fried vermicelli made of gram flour, herbs, yogurt, spices and tamarind chutney), sweets, lentil or rice-flour steamed dumplings (vada) and what are likely far superior versions of standards snacks like pakoras and samosas. (Some particular recommendations can be found here and here.) And while the grocery stores and veg stands tend to be a bit smaller and less visually impressive than their counterparts in Tooting or Southall, they seemed to be well-stocked.

I had made the trip, however, with a very particular destination in mind: Thattukada, a small Keralan restaurant known for its thalis and fish dishes. When I arrived, the front room was filled with thirty or more women celebrating a birthday or reunion. Some women had ordered dosas, but there were also banana leaves being unfurled and waiters circulating with pots of rice, curry and dhal. I was escorted into an alcove otherwise occupied by men having a hurried lunch of idly (steamed rice cakes), chutneys and sambal.

Service was confused and confusing, but there was plenty to watch, particularly as the women began to get up to take photos, revealing jewel-coloured saris and lots of bangles. Rice arrived after a time, plumper than basmati and tinged rust red at the edges—apparently a Keralan varietal. Some minutes later, a mustard-coloured dhal, mild up front with a tickle of chilli at the back, was ladled out onto the banana leaf. A warm salad of green cabbage and shreds of toasted coconut followed, along with pakora-like clusters of what I later learned was karela, or bitter melon.  This assemblage, elements of which were refilled several times over, would already have been enough for a sizeable, and very good, meal, but more followed: a dry curry of a vegetable resembling okra (sahjan or drumsticks), with a slightly stringy texture, and several wet, yogurt-based ones, possibly including green bananas. There were poppadums as well, and a sharp, sour chutney. A tiny banana arrived, which seemed to signal the end of the meal, even though the fish curry had not yet arrived. The latter did eventually make an appearance, though, and it was splendid—hot, sour, creamy with coconut and full of meaty flavours from the oily, tuna-like fish.

I left perplexed but happily full, having spent just over £5 (fish thali and chai) . A  follow-up visit seems in order soon. On my list to try: netholi, an anchovy-like fish deep fried and served with onions and curry leaves and spice paste-rubbed fish roasted in banana leaf.

Thattukada now has two restaurants on High Street North. The menus are the same, but the one at 229 is intended to be more family-friendly and does not serve or allow alcohol, while the original at number 241b is licensed. Both branches are open daily for lunch and dinner. Their number is 0203 6024 303.

Turkish flatbreads and a trip to Green Lanes

Much as marathoners carbo-load before the big race, I like to ensure that the meals before Passover contain enough bread products to see me through the next 8 days. Wednesday night there was homemade pizza, slathered with ricotta and wild garlic. Thursday, with a day off work, I made a much-anticipated trip to Green Lanes, a neighbourhood in Northeast London which is home to a large Turkish and Kurdish population, knowing that I’d find lots of things there that would soon be off-limits.

I began with a lahmacun, a thin, lamb-topped flatbread. One of the most popular restaurants on the strip, Antepliler, has expanded its operations to several other storefronts, one featuring casseroles and breads from an enormous open oven. Here, the young usta, or oven-master, rolled out a round of dough slightly thicker than a pita, then smeared it with a few tablespoons of a highly-seasoned minced lamb and garlic mixture. This was pushed into the oven on a long pole, from which it emerged several minutes later blistered but still pliable, to be topped with a salad of rocket, grated carrots and herbs and rolled up in a piece of paper. Not a bad (light) lunch for £1.50.

I ate it while inspecting the window display at a baklava shop, then headed several blocks north to Yasar Halim, a large, long-established bakery with well upwards of 100 varieties of cakes, cookies, breads and filled and topped sweet and savoury pastries. Amongst those I could recognise were tahinli, coils of sweet , yeasted dough layered with sesame paste, something I last had on a Golden Horn ferry ride and pide, canoe-shaped flatbreads topped with cheese and slices of beef sausage (sujuk). (The photo here is of a particularly good egg and lamb version which I had in Istanbul.) I came away with a spicy spinach pastry and a sweet one filled with pistachios and clotted cream—snacks for the late afternoon train ride up to Liverpool.

And to finish off, back to the Antepilier franchise for a bowl of spicy lamb and rice broth, served with a basket of warm, dimpled bread, crispy at the corners from a flash under the charcoal grill. I’ll be back soon for more breads, and photos, hopefully including the women who sit at the front of many of the restaurants making gözleme, almost like savoury crepes cooked on a concave griddle, with fillings of spinach, cheese, eggs and grated potatoes.

For now, though, it’s matzah time.

Antepliler

46 Green Lanes London N4

(020) 8802 5588

Tube: Manor House

Yasar Halim

495 Green Lanes

London N4 1AL

Tube: Manor House

Wine shop comes to Brixton

For as long as I can remember, the only places to buy wine in Brixton have been the supermarkets and off-licenses more accustomed to selling cheap vodka and malt liquor. The House of Bottles has historically been better than some, particularly when it had for a few months some merchandise that bore a striking resemblance to the stock sold by Virgin Wines. But its staff was still not sure to do with well-dressed friends of ours who, on the way to supper at our apartment, stopped in and asked the bemused sales clerk if he could recommend a nice chardonnay.

But now, after many years, a wine shop is coming to Brixton. The storefront is inside the main Brixton market (the one with Franco Manca and Wild Caper), further down that aisle in the direction of the Atlantic Road entrance. There’s not much inside yet except a few (fancy) wine crates and a sign proclaiming the imminent arrival of an independent wine merchant selling interesting parcels. The window sports an alcohol license application, with objections due in by early April.

After my little jig of delight, I’ve started to wonder whether local custom can sustain a (hopefully) gently-priced, but not completely mainstream, offering. There’s also the all-important question of whether our neighbours—and indeed the owner—like the same sort of wine that we do. Here’s hoping for lots of stinky reds, with southern France well represented, and whites with a passing familiarity at most with the inside of an oak barrel.

Any wariness aside, this could be a very good thing.

March odds and ends

Today’s lunch was spaetzle with wild garlic pesto. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few garlic leaves find their way into tomorrow morning’s scrambled eggs, while on Monday they’ll be the finishing touch to a soup/stew made with some leftovers from tonight’s roast chicken. I’m hoping that over the next few weeks they’ll also be a play on a watercress-potato soup and lots of leaves to be mixed with soft, spreadable goats cheese. And if the spring lamb prices don’t get too silly, that pesto would be great alongside some chops.

Planning for this summer’s vegetable and herb garden has resulted in a (too) long list of things I’d like to grow—tomatoes again, more of all the usual herbs, plus maybe chervil, lettuces, peas, broad beans and courgettes. I’m toying with the idea of a cold frame or mini greenhouse (really more of an outside bookcase with a heavy plastic cover) that would allow me to start seedlings somewhere other than the bedroom floor and perhaps concentrate light and speed up growth enough to make it worth attempting some larger tomato varieties.

I’ve been rereading Julian Barnes’ Pedant in the Kitchen this week. It’s probably an unusual way into the work of a Booker Prize-winning author, but I’ve again enjoyed the wit and lightness of touch with both literary references and anecdotes. Plus it’s reminded me that I really should try to cook from Elizabeth David.

It seems that Franco Manca is offering pizza master classes on the first Thursday of every month. I assume this doesn’t include lessons on how to build a pizza oven.

Also in Brixton, the Heritage Deli has opened in Granville Arcade. The Canadian, Italian and Greek and Maltese by way of the Antipodes crew are serving up artisanal salume and all sorts of savoury pies. I’m partial to the feta and pumpkin combination, as well as any of the spicy ones, as they use some of the excellent red pepper flakes I brought back from Turkey last month (exchanged for some very tasty filled pizza with mushroom and truffle oil and a little crimped pie of rabbit and peas).

We cooked goat, which was nothing like mutton (far leaner and gentler in flavour) and absolutely delicious. (The Ginger Pig is occasionally bringing it over from France along with some poulet noir and other birds. It’s claimed that lots of what’s sold in this country as goat is actually hogget or mutton.) Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy yielded up a dish of Pakistani origin which was rich with (homemade) garam masala, cinnamon and cardamom and fantastically succulent after 3-4 hours of gentle cooking.

Turkish beans + a recipe

Like the English caff, the Turkish esnaf lokantasi (tradesmens’ restaurant) is usually a daytime-only operation where lots of tea is served. For both, the core custom is local, male and looking to get some hot food without spending a bundle. But where the former might top out at a decent plate of egg and chips, many esnaf lokantasi feature up to a dozen or more home-cooked dishes: meat stews, stuffed vegetables, slow-cooked beans and homely desserts like rice pudding. This is meant to be cooking like Turkish mothers do, some recompense for spending the day in a shop or office

Ali Baba Kanaat Lokantasi’s location directly across from the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul’s Fatih district attracts some tourists, though most don’t make it past the large terrace. Inside, it’s all late ‘30s vintage (bar the steam table and the fountain serving aryan, salty drinking yogurt) with pride of place given over to the fasulye (bean pot). The beans, small and white, are cooked to a recipe from Erzican in the south—distinctively spicier, with more tomato and less meaty, buttery overtones (though some butter and lamb fat or stock definitely make their way into the pot) than those popular further north, along the Black Sea. It was recommended that I order the beans with pilau and cacik, the yogurt-cucumber mixture that can range from pourable to clotted cream-like. The pilau, dotted with pine nuts, was gently savoury, and the cacik was super-thick, a soft, sour counterpoint to the heat and richness of the beans.

Though I tend to cook from recipes rather than taste memories, my first try at recreating the beans I had at Ali Baba Kanaat Lokantasi was nonetheless a success. I made the sauce thicker, as they were intended to sit alongside lamb chops rather than on rice. And while the exclusion of lamb fat and butter was not authentic, the resulting beans were hardly abstemious.

Fasulye in the style of Ali Baba Kanaat Lokantasi

I happened to have two ingredients for this dish which might not be readily available: semi-dried white beans, podded last summer and stored in the freezer, and an open jar of a Spanish/Portuguese sofrito-like sauce called tomate frito. For the former, the best substitute would be small, dried white beans, pre-soaked overnight and, depending on age and variety, cooked for a bit longer. Any good-quality brand of chopped, tinned tomato can be substituted for the tomate frito.

Like any chilli products, Turkish red pepper flakes vary in flavour profile and heat. I think this dish should have a good prickle of chilli, but not more. I’m not sure the bay leaves are authentic, but they marry very well with most bean and tomato dishes.

The beans are initially cooked separately in order to ensure they soften properly, something which can be retarded by the acid in tomatoes.

Serves 2
Total time (excluding soaking): 90 minutes; Active time: 15 minutes

1 ½ cups semi-dried OR 1 cup dried white beans, pre-soaked if required
Olive oil
1 medium onion
Tomato paste
150 ml tomato frito OR ½ can tinned tomatoes
Turkish red pepper flakes (aci biber)
2-3 fresh bay leaves (ideally fresh)
1-2 cloves garlic
Small bunch parsley
Salt and pepper

Put the beans in a saucepan, cover amply with water and bring to a boil.

In another saucepan of a similar size, heat a thin film of oil on a medium heat. Chop the onion finely and add. Season with salt and pepper. Lower heat and sauté gently, until onion is fully soft and beginning to taste sweet. Squeeze in a few inches of tomato paste and cook for 3-4 more minutes.

When the beans reach a boil, turn down to a simmer and cover. Cook until soft but not falling apart. (In the case of semi-dried cannellini or lingot beans, this should be about 45 minutes.

Add the tomato to the onion. Refill the tomato jar/can to the same level with water and add to the pot, along with a good pinch of the red pepper flakes and the bay leaves. Chop the garlic and half the parsley and add. Season to taste with salt and pepper and cook on a gentle heat until thick and integrated, 30-45 minutes.

When the beans are ready, drain, reserving some of the cooking water, and add to the sauce. Adjust seasoning and add a bit of the reserved water if the sauce is too claggy. Cook for a further 15-20 minutes to allow the flavours to fully combine.

Just before serving, chop the remaining parsley and add. Finish with another pinch of pepper flakes.

Simit

Simit are to Istanbul what bagels are to New York City—the individually-portioned, ring-shaped breads not just an anytime staple, but an iconic part of what it means to be an inhabitant of that city, the object of habit, preference and memory.

Simit are made with a yeasted dough which is allowed to rise, then shaped into narrow rings. Following the second rise, the breads are dipped into water mixed with a bit of molasses (pekmez), then fully coated with sesame breads before being baked in a hot oven. The resultant breads tend to have a well-browned crust with a bit of resistance, giving way to a slightly sweet, soft yet chewy dough.

Just as with bagels, simit are not really made by home bakers. They are sold by bakeries and at a few new simit-specific chains. Most people, however, tend to buy them from one of the hundreds of carts located across the city. While the cart operators obtain a license to operate in a fixed location, there are also still some itinerant vendors, mostly in markets and some older neighbourhoods, who sell the breads from a tray balanced on their heads. Prices, while no longer government-subsidized, are fixed for both wholesale and retail; the maximum price which can be charged to a customer is 1 TL, or about 35p.

Like most breads, simit are at their best when fresh. While the carts have unmistakable charm and convenience, bakeries present the obvious advantage of happening upon a just-baked batch. Beyond that, some prefer their simit a bit sweeter (likely a product of more molasses in the dipping water), with a harder crust, or with slightly saltier dough.

Simit vendors keep a box of processed cheese triangles (like Laughing Cow) for those customers who believe that the first meal of the day must contain a bit of cheese. The new chains use them, much like bagels, as the basis for filled sandwiches, while cafes serving breakfast platters of cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, olives and cucumbers often throw a few segments into the bread basket.

It was snowing on my last morning in Istanbul. The local simit vendor was standing inside the vestibule of a nearby bank to keep warm, but dashed out when he saw me. That simit may not have reached the acme of ideal texture or flavour, but it’s the one I remember best.

Morito

A brief respite in the Istanbul-induced reveries to report on a fantastic meal much closer to home.

Tickets to see the flamenco virtuoso Carmen Cortes at Sadlers Wells put us just a few blocks away from Morito, the tapas bar opened by Sam and Sam Clarke of Moro fame. By barrelling down the stairs at the end of the performance, we managed to arrive just in time to secure two seats at the bar.

Located on the ever-gentrifying Exmouth Market (where I noted, however, that the tattoo parlour and pie and eel shop seem to be just hanging on), Morito is carved out of what was once a Spanish deli, Brindisa. It’s a tight squeeze, maybe 35 covers, with a fair amount of jostling and rearranging required for servers to get through. The benefit to this, though, is that it’s very easy to see dishes as they come out of the open kitchen. Those sitting at the bar can practically reach over and help themselves.

The menu mixes tapas standards—pimientos de padron, tortilla, salt cod croquetas—with an unusually wide selection of vegetable-driven options and some North African and Eastern Mediterranean selections. This more or less mirrored my expectations, the mother-ship having widened its reach in recent years to take in ingredients like pomegranate molasses, freekah and harissa, while retaining a focus on Spanish flavours and seasonal produce.

Our order came quickly, and we consumed it nearly as fast. The tortilla was textbook standard, creamily-textured, with yielding bits of potatoes and some slippery peppers. Salt cod croquetas with aioli also contained no surprises, but were completely without fault. Fried artichokes gave another chance to eat more delicious aioli, while the combination of smoked paprika and perfect frying made the vegetables utterly moreish.

Cauliflower was sautéed with pine nuts, raisins and a good pinch of saffron, melting on the interior and crispy-crunchy outside. A Turkish salad combined super-fresh tomato, cucumber and herbs with a slick of excellent yogurt. But the best dish—the one that has you asking the waiter how on earth they made it, and vowing to return post-haste—was simply described on the menu as “spiced lamb, aubergine, yogurt and pine nuts.” What it turned out to be was a sublimely rich and smoky baba ganoush-type dip, made creamy with yogurt, topped with shreds of lamb shank that had been slowly braised, then stripped off the bone and sizzled with warm spices and what the waiter described as “lots of butter.”

We scraped the plate with two types of bread, chunks of the excellent sourdough from Moro’s wood-fired oven, and char-edged flatbreads with the slightest bits of orange flower water. To wash it all down we had a very drinkable, crisp white, at £16 one of the best-priced bottles of restaurant wine I’ve seen in London for a long time.

Service follows the Moro model, informal but switched-on, and both knowledgeable and passionate about what’s coming out of the kitchen.

This may not be a place to linger, but it was warm and welcoming, with uniformly delicious and interesting food and very fair prices. It’s hard to think of many places which can match, much less improve, on that combination. And even with far fewer virtues, it would be worth going just for that lamb dish.

32 Exmouth Market

London EC1R 4QE

Tube: Angel or Farringdon

Open noon-11 pm Monday-Saturday; noon-4 pm Sundays

Bookings for lunch only.