Clockwise from top left: Fatma, Sureyya, Hanife, Camellia, Melissa and Haley.
Photo credit: Justin Wee
Our Fridays together
In the kitchen I am often guided by childhood memories of the meals my grandmother made for us. For me, these memories are richest from school holidays, when the days would stretch endlessly until coal barbeques were lit and embers would fly up and disappear into crimson sunsets.
They are memories of eggplants roasting for hours on hot coals before they were turned into baba ganoush and of Lebanese bread resting over sizzling lamb shish to soak up all the char and aromas.
And they’re also memories of our busy working mums, Sue and Hanife, sending us off to school with feta and sliced tomatoes and cucumber between Turkish bread as breakfast. For a long time I was convinced that eating a cucumber like you would a banana, or a tomato like you would an apple, was common practice.
During those long summer days when I was very young, I would sneak into my grandmother’s kitchen drawer to find her recipe book: a repurposed address book where instead of friends, my grandmother would keep memories passed down from her mother and generations of cooks before her. This project is an adventure through those pages and those memories.
Meet Fatma
Affectionately known as Mum and Anneanne to us, Fatma is our matriarch.
With her husband Mehmet-Ali and three children, Fatma immigrated to Australia in 1974 from Turkey. She took the journey with a fostered vine sapling potted in a milk carton and tucked into her handbag and brought with her the unique food culture of Kayseri, where she and Mehmet-Ali grew up.
Together we are three generations of women who have found a connection to our cultural heritage in the food we eat at the Turkish sofra.
The beauty of Turkey, as with its cooking, is its yearning for modernity: always looking off towards the horizon, always suggesting evolution, always encouraging us to know our past in order to seek our future.