The Turk on the Lower East Side (a little-known Rossini opera)

Thursday January 10

As you may remember, this past summer we made a batch of Kuru Bakla Ezmesi, or as Holt so euphoniously called them, Turkish fart-cakes. A full batch was way too much for us to finish, so we mashed the leftovers into a tupper, like a sort of fava hummus, and froze it to see how it would keep.

Also experimentally, Holt had bought a jar of salted cod roe to see if we could make a favorite appetizer, tarama (Greek taramosalata), and it was still in the fridge. And while rootling in the freezer for the fava hummus, we found a whole container of our favorite whitefish salad, which we'd frozen for a rainy day. As there is no day rainier than the one on which the refrigerator is empty of fresh vegetables, we decided that all the forces were aligning to make us have a dinner of long-preserved appetizers.

The whitefish salad was no problem; it only needed to be defrosted overnight in the refrigerator. Olives were on hand, and pitas could be acquired from the local Mediterranean store. We stirred up the fava hummus, which was a bit watery and bland, with some olive oil, salt, and diced red onion, and it got a lot tastier.

There are a lot of recipes for tarama out there. Most of them are like THIS, which comes from an enjoyable Turkish food site (check out its recipes for "chicken balls" and "Albanian liver" - and its fava recipe, in mezes under "horse bean puree").

Tarama is basically salty dry stuff (the roe itself) calmed down with bland stuff (bread, or even boiled potatoes), livened with acid (lemon juice) and whipped into something like mayonnaise with olive oil. But there is no need to soak the bread, squish it, sieve it, or any of those things. Just grind up 4 slices of dry bread (we used white bread left over from Christmas) in the food processor; grind in 1/2 of the tarama from the jar (abaout 5 oz.) and one lemonsworth of lemon juice, which helps moisten the bread; and while the processor is going, dribble in about 3/4 of a cup of oil through the feed tube, as if you were making mayonnaise. When it's the consistency you like, it's done. What's more, it's damn good.

To serve, we heated our pitas, filled six small bowls with the three dips, and dipped and tasted as we liked, each out of our individual bowls; so no ugly fights over the last scrapings of whitefish.