Sevgul Uludag
caramel_cy@yahoo.com
Tel: 00 357 99 966518
00 90 542 853 8436
The house is nice and warm, I boil chicken to make stock, to make soup, to make macaroni, to make rice… In the refrigerator, different jams are ready and waiting to be used… The cats sleep curled up like a ball around us, close to the fire… All, except the little blond cat who sleeps with all his claws up in the air… Candles burn, candles that sooth us, that show us that there is light somewhere, that it is not all dark, it is not all gloomy, that there is still hope for the future as long as we are alive and can dream on…
My friends make Christmas cakes for me, kourabiye for my son – soon he will be here for the New Year and all my friends will rush to cook for him… Ferah will wrap vine leaves to make dolma, Okan will cook a yogurt soup with tiny meat balls in it, all the restaurant owners who have been asking about when he will get back will start cooking liver on the charcoal for him or fish soup or wild mushrooms and agrelli with eggs… Everyone is expecting him home so they can cook for him…
Recently one of my dear friends, an archaeologist who has been `digging` for the `missing persons` have had an operation… I visited her and a few days later called her to see what she can eat so I could cook for her…
`Nooo!` she said, `The refrigerator is sooo full of food, you cannot believe… My mother, my sisters all brought something so I don't need any food… You know what? I think in Cyprus, we express ourselves through food… When we feel sad, we eat… When we feel happy, we eat… When someone is sick, we believe that if we cook for that person, he or she will heal immediately…So food is so central in our lives…`
She too has cooked for me, soups when I get sick and indeed when I drink her soup, I believe I heal more quickly: She puts some chicken, some fresh ginger cut in chunks, a carrot and a potato and some rice and some pepper… It's like a mother's soup to heal the soul, comfort food cooked with love…
Perhaps our obsession with cooking is based on the island we live in: For at least those of us who are alive on this earth, the past half century has been full of trouble, conflict and war, full of uncertainty, full of memories of becoming a refugee, seeing our island being divided, cut into two parts forcefully… Even as a child, my first memories are the shrieking sound of a horn when we had to run into shelters at our neighbourhood and wait there for some hours, sitting stifled in the basement of a restaurant or a basement close the restaurant… Then we had to leave home one night when some soldiers knocked at our door and told us to just go! Go, go, go! Don't look back! Don't try to take anything! So off we went, in the middle of the night, end of December 1963, passing through the children's garden of our neighbourhood in Nicosia with my brother, my mother, my grandmother and grandfather who could not walk fast – I was in my mother's
arms, a five year old kid, sleepy, cold, not knowing and understanding what was happening, my grandfather blind so he could not see and my brother had to help him to walk, my grandmother almost deaf so she could not hear what was being said, confused and frightened… Our street was divided and we had seen how they had put sandbags to divide the street, barrels and a military post to guard it… My brother, young as he was, a student in the lyceum one night while on `guard` there, had been punished: He could not bring himself to stop someone who did not know the `parola`, the `password` for that night…
We had gone to inside the walled city to seek refuge in a relative's house where we slept 25 in a room and there was no food, absolutely no food: You had to fight for food… No toys, no going out, no getting back home… We spent about a month like that and managed to go home, to our own house, to our own garden, to our own kitchen and to our own food…
We experienced 1974 at home – my mother refused to leave the house since we had the bad experience of 1964 becoming refugees even for a short time so she decided to stay… `At least we can cook our own food` she would say… She would dig the garden to find potatoes she had planted and had forgotten about and would be happy: She would cook potatoes, she would cook macaroni – there was no bread, this was war – our house was being shelled and we could not go out. So she would cook pitta for us from flour and we would eat pitta bread…
All her life, my mother made stock of food: We would always have at least three-four packages of rice, lots of macaroni, flour, sugar, canned milk, anything you can think of that she could stock, she would stock… `You never know in Cyprus what might happen` she would say…
`But mom, all the markets are full of food! Why do you buy two okkas of halloumi? We can always buy them…`
`No, no` she would say, `you never know what might happen in Cyprus…`
This uncertainty determined our lives and still determines our lives: We are NOT in control of our own lives in Cyprus as a whole – you never know what might come up next: One day the checkpoints are opened but who knows when some big shot might decide to close them? Who knows when they decide to kick off for tension? Or even `peace`… Nothing is certain except one thing for sure: Cypriots on both sides of the dividing line are in FULL CONTROL of their kitchen and perhaps that is why we are so much obsessed with food and we express our love and care with food… Nothing can stop us from eating and cooking and serving – at least we can control this small but very vital area of our lives: We cook for the ones we love…
For the New Year dinner I will cook a recipe I have created with love for my son and for the whole family: I will cook chicken with sweet oranges and clementine tangerines adding olive oil from Karpaz… The sweetness of the oranges and the tangerines will caramelize the skin of the chicken and we will serve it with love and hope that one day the Cypriots will finally be able to get the wheel of their lives and live in a country not with the uncertainty of partition but with the certainty of peace…
19.12.2014
(*) Article published in POLITIS newspaper on the 28th of December 2014, Sunday.
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