Feeding Family and Friends

Whether or not food is being paired with whisky, it needs to be made with love to ooze flavour and hit all the right spots.

It’s that little ounce of je ne sais quoi that turns a good recipe into one that gives you a big warm hug. It’s all about nurturing, sharing, giving and loving the taste, the excitement and the satisfaction! Many mums put love into their food every day and for some cultures that love is expressed through culinary rituals of hospitality and offerings of edible gifts. Of all the countries that I have lived and travelled in, the hospitality in Turkey has been unparalleled – even the bank clerk offers you a glass of tea. Coffee, tea, nuts, apricots, baklava, Turkish delight, fresh cherries – all are offered to you while you rent a car, buy a carpet, wait for an appointment. On Friday evenings in Istanbul when I finished work and collected my car, the parking attendant, who was also the street florist, would give me a glass of tea and a bunch of flowers to wish me a good weekend. I would travel the length and breadth of the country and be invited into modest apartments, cave dwellings and wooden shacks to share a meal, or maybe fresh bread, olives and cheese, or some fresh purple figs plucked off the tree. The most unusual invitation I ever received was to a picnic in the hamam, a traditional Turkish bath. This was in the days before mass tourism and the emergence of the unisex hamam, so there were separate entrances for men and women. In the women’s bathing area, we all stripped off in a side chamber where towelling robes and hamam clogs were provided but, first, we had hot marble slabs to lie on, cool water to splash over each other, and our bodies and clothes to scrub. Hamam day was washing day for everything and the women made the most of it by singing and dancing, breasts and buttocks wobbling and swinging in all directions, while they unpacked baskets filled with olives and pickles, savoury pastries, stuffed vine leaves, little meatballs, bread and salty cheese, fresh figs, and dry baklava. It was both extraordinary and illuminating to be part of this merry group of naked women, young and old, unabashedly tucking into food whilst washing and talking animatedly through the steam.