A Turkish Thanksgiving

When he walked through to door, nonchalantly setting his backpack down, his roommate, Casey, frantically greeted him, "We're having it here!" His eyes widened as he responded, "What?! We're having it here?" I could see the stress level rise exponentially. His hands immediately went to work, cleaning, rearranging, and preparing for the landlady to return. "Do we have everything we need up here?" "Let's hope." Within five minutes, the landlady, Senem, had burst through our door ready to help prepare the evening's meal, mantı. Now by burst, I don't mean physically. She cordially knocked before entering, but once she had entered the apartment, her personality filled the room. With a welcoming and energetic face framed by a turquoise and purple print hijab,  she immediately went to work giving Ben directions and preparing the various parts of the meal.

After setting Ben to task mincing garlic, cutting onions, and watching for the sugared water to boil, Senem set up her dough rolling station in the only free space available in the apartment, the hallway floor. Lily, the other roommate who had just returned from the store, correcting a cheese and yogurt mixup that we realized earlier, told us that two more guests were coming, an English tutor and an English teacher from their university. Weaving between people and door frames, Casey and I moved the drying rack filled with his shirts, underwear, and socks to Ben's room to make space in the living room for guests. Apparently, including Senem's family, the guests, and all the roommates, ten of us were eating. This gathering was turning out to be more than expected on all fronts.

Senem sat in the hallway in a shirt proclaiming "You Make Me Feel Alive" rolling dough into thin crepe-like pancakes, cutting them into small parallelograms. Speaking in Turkish to Lily and motioning with her hands to me, she asked us to wash our hands and begin the process of making mantı. Sitting cross legged on the floor next to a large bowl of ground beef mixed with spices and onions, Senem demonstrated how to fold the dough around small pellets of meat and onions, pinching it shut on the ends to create something akin to a triangular ravioli. Each mantı held a thumbtack sized amount of filling, and we had a whole mixing bowl full of it. This was going to take awhile. We sat on the floor making mantı while I learned, through translation, where Senem was originally from and why she had moved to Konya. Over the next hour or so, we each took turns filling dough and throwing our creations onto a huge circular bowl covered in flour. Senem's teenage daughter soon joined us, sheepishly sitting behind, timidly smiling whenever we made eye contact.

A knock was heard on the door. The English tutor had arrived. At this point we moved our mantı making station into the living room so more people could sit around the bowl of beefy onions. Senem continued rolling mantı dough in the hallway while monitoring the syrup, sauce, and desserts in the kitchen. We discussed the cost/benefit analysis of food that requires this much repetitive preparation.
"But it is so good," offered Casey.
"But it is so tedious," Lily retorted.
"It would make a great fine motor therapy session," suggested the occupational therapist in the room.

By the time we were nearing the end of our bowl of oniony meat paste, the English teacher and her 2 year old son had arrived. The terrible twos, it seemed, was something similar between our cultures. With four people making mantı, we quickly finished the bowl and carried the small mountain of Turkish raviolis to Senem in the kitchen who dumped our work into a large pot of boiling water. The next task was setting up a make-shift, and completely unplanned, dining area. Improvising with a small kitchen table and Ben's desk, we created a large dining room table in the living room, utilizing desk chairs, patio chairs, and couches to provide seating. Senem's husband arrived, a shorter full bodied man who wore dress pants, a black vest, and a white collared shirt. He only wore socks on his feet, something true of all of us and congruent with the fairly rigid Turkish custom of leaving your shoes outside the door before entering a home. This was particularly noticeable on him, though, because of its contradiction with his formal attire.


As the dining room came together, we all gathered in the small living space of the Fulbrighters' apartment. The craziness of preparation and the in-prompt-to dinner party settled as we each took a seat around the family dinner table. The mantı, which had been covered in a white yogurt sauce and topped with the leftover dough fried into crunchy crouton-esque accoutrements, along with red tomato-like soup, baklava, Şekerpare - biscuits that had been soaked in a simple syrup, and freshly baked bread filled the table to make something that felt a bit like a Turkish Thanksgiving dinner.

With a mixture of Turkish, English, and confused looks on my part, food was passed, discussion was had, and everyone was a bit more than gently encouraged to eat an excessively filling  amount of mantı. The main course was more tangy than sweet and more earthy than creamy, a flavor that tickled Ben's taste buds the first time he tried it, but took some coaxing for mine to come around. As we slowly but diligently cleaned the platter, the desserts seemed more and more out of reach. It was only missing awkward political conversations and tense religious debates to make it feel like a true Thanksgiving dinner.


When we finally felt like we could fit a bit more into our stomachs, we each took a Şekerpare and chocolate baklava. The Şekerpare biscuits melted in your mouth like tres leches cake, and Senem's husband demonstrated how to eat the baklava correctly by inverting each bite, placing the bottom and most sugary side of the treat on the roof of the mouth.

Instead of venturing to the television to watch a football game, nap on the couch with a stomach full of turkey, or clean the kitchen after the feast, tea was served at the table. Any sort of stress, franticness, or anxiety was swept away with the warm steam of the two kettles stacked on top of each other. One kettle held a concentrated steeped tea. In the other: hot water. One of the Turkish women poured a bit of the tea into each small hour-glass shaped cup, and another followed her with hot water. Sugar was passed to sweeten the drink. As discussion continued, tea would automatically fill your cup as soon as you neared empty. As the pot of tea approached its end, so did this improvised family dinner. Once the last person had placed their spoon on top their teacup, customarily indicating they had finished, the group stood to say goodbye. Thanks were given and the apartment emptied as quickly as it had been filled.

Exhausted, we all went to bed, feeling the fullness of a Turkish Thanksgiving in our stomachs.