Preparing for Winter – Making Salça
An article by Celia Gaşgil
In the heady days of August, as the sun beats down mercilessly, it is as much as we can do to struggle to the beach or muster the energy to take yet another shower after a sticky day at a hot desk. However, in the spirit of the ant rather than the hedonistic grasshopper, tradition dictates that we prepare for the winter. This takes many forms, from cutting wood for the stove, to drying peppers and figs, but the activity which I am now going to describe is making salça, a thick salty tomato purée.
Turkish people are very fond of their purée. I learned early on in my marriage that stews and vegetable dishes were frowned upon, if I had not included a generous dollop of salça. Any attempt to omit it, in the name of variety, meant the offending dish was condemned as not red enough! Salça spread on bread also provides a healthy breakfast or a tasty snack for hungry children arriving home from school. Now they have access to all sorts of ready-made meals, sweets and confectionery but not so long ago salça and olive oil were the commonest savoury spreads on offer.
The business of actually acquiring a large stock of tomatoes, I have always left to more astute bargainers but like everything else, the price decreases with increased quantities. You need to wait until well into August to get the juiciest, bright red fruit you require but leaving it too late may find you struggling to finish your drying before the first rainstorms threaten your precious product. I say precious, not because the cost has been prohibitive but because of the hours of labour that go into making the stuff!
In 1998 our two children were about to fly the nest to embark on university careers in other cities. With all our needs in mind, my husband ordered 200 kilos of tomatoes. As the dreaded day of results publication approached, we elected to take some visitors to Ephesus, a spectacular site of ancient origin which we wanted to show them, also hoping to take our anxious minds off more important things.
Back then, the said results were published in a special newspaper, which appeared in the central city’s streets at the crack of dawn. Hence both our children had disappeared the night before, to stay with more centrally placed friends with whom they could celebrate or commiserate afterwards.
We set off for Ephesus bright and early in an effort to beat the heat and returned home in the early afternoon. I could immediately see a large pile of big, beautiful tomatoes. So out came the hose, plastic containers, and knives and my husband and I set to work. While my mother opted for a cup of tea and a snooze, our other guest volunteered to help. She borrowed old clothes; you can get very dirty and very red during this procedure! My husband filled large buckets with fresh water. We removed the stalks, washed the dust and earth off each fruit in turn, cut them in half and threw them into big plastic containers. As they then have to be left alone for 10 days or so, we retired to our balcony for a much- deserved cold drink. Then the phone rang! Our son had achieved the university place he wanted in Ankara. My thoughts turned to my daughter. I started trying to track her down, greatly fearing that no news meant bad news. Not so! A friend of hers told me she too had got into the University of her Choice, in İstanbul. Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, I did both in quick successions, much to our guest’s surprise. ‘Well, are you happy or not?’ she asked. ‘Both!’ came the reply, ‘happy for her but sad for us.’
When we next needed to look after our tomatoes, our friend and my mother were back in the UK. Undeterred we proceeded to stage 2: sieving with a large metal sieve, which serves to get rid of the skins and the majority of the pips. You squeeze the mush to maximıse juice extraction. The remaining pith can be discarded and in the old days made a very good meal for the free-range hens. The liquid is sieved a second time only by gently shaking the sieve (no helping hands allowed this time!) to make sure that the juice has no pips whatsoever. It was accepted wisdom that any pips left would spoil the salça and stop it from keeping, (more of this anon.) - so much so that as a newcomer to Turkey I was not allowed to do the second sieving.
Then you are ready to fill your bowls, large and small. Oven trays and plastic receptacles of all shapes and sizes are pressed into service. Then you have to find a suitable surface, off the ground and away from animals where the liquid can be left to dry in the sun. Over the years this has been done on an old kitchen table, a frame of bedsprings that had seen better days, or upstairs balconies. Add rock salt to taste, stir from time to time, watch the volume decrease as the water evaporates and sit back and wait.
The containers have to be covered at night but most mornings will still find you fishing out stray insect bodies with a spoon. Weather permitting the drying is usually completed in a fortnight or so but a passing cloud can cause a rush to cover everything so someone has to be on watch fairly constantly. It has been known for people to resort to oven drying İf they have been caught out by a late start or an early rain shower.
Finally the resulting puree is spooned into large glass jars. If you put a little olive oil in the bottom first, the oil seeps up the jar eliminating air pockets and helps to keep the salça fresh. Indeed it does just that for several years.
As we always made salça in our summer house and had to disappear for the start of the school year we often left my parents-in-law to oversee our drying arrangements. I was grateful but sometimes I found that even more salt had been added after I’d left as they firmly believed in its necessity.
These days, salça is much easier to make due to the advent of blenders. Tomatoes are skinned, sliced and blended in a matter of hours, giving the lie to the old belief that pips spoiled the product.
One summer, I offered to help a much-loved aunt with her sieving as she had been ill and was still very weak. The idea of not making any was out of the question, although it would have been easy for her to buy home-made produce from a neighbour. She was extraordinarily grateful but couldn’t resist ‘overseeing’ my handiwork. Would a stray pip get through the final straining?. We settled down to a chat while I worked, when we were suddenly interrupted by the by the arrival of my breathless daughter announcing, ‘Granny’s fallen downstairs!’ Happily I found my mother shaken but not really hurt when I rushed home. In due course my aunt arrived with a dish of her beautifully dried salça as a thank you! As with salça, the preparation of tarhana is steeped in family stories and legends. My mother-in-law would start the preparations by gathering or buying the ingredients, cook the mash and summon us all to attend the following day. We all had to drop everything and appear bright and early! The night before she had cooked a mixture of tomatoes and onions with the tarhana otu, a herb found in the fields surrounding her house. Once the mixture was cooked, yoghurt and flour were added. While still hot enough to burn your fingers, the whole mixture was kneaded manually, while still in a huge cooking pot: not for the faint-hearted. True to form she was happy to complete this part of the task, not really trusting anyone else to mix it thoroughly.
The situation was quite different the following morning when we were all summoned to help. The task now was to spread out the paste into smaller and smaller lumps on a sheet spread out on the ground for the purpose. Great care had to be taken to protect it from ants and it was never to be left unattended as passing cats would take a bite and ants were a constant threat.
So the day passed with the whole family sitting around the sheet and rubbing the clods of tarhana with the palms of our hands, watching the paste gradually forming granules, which could be sieved to make a powder. No prizes for guessing who was queen of the sieve! Once all the mixture had been pulverised the sheet was spread out to allow it to dry. Again care had to be taken to protect it from dust, animals and insects. Once dried it was stored in jars to be used as instant soup in the winter months. Just add water and bring to the boil! We helpers were deemed to have earned our share. The backbreaking nature of the work was offset by the camaraderie of the family with old and young all doing their part.
These days, both salça and tarhana making are much eased by the advent of blenders. The soup powder can be produced at the flick of a switch. Tomatoes are skinned, sliced and blended in a matter of hours, giving the lie to the old belief that pips spoiled the product.