When the snow flies in Istanbul, which is not infrequent in the month of February, you can be sure that the busy coffee houses of Fatih and Kadiköy on either side of the Bosporus are serving more than kahve and çay, for those in-the-know Turks who really want a winter warm up will order salep. This sweet, thick, and white hot beverage is made from milk, sugar, and the dried, powdered bulbs of terrestrial- as opposed to tropical- orchids, often topped with copious amounts of cinnamon.
Children of all ages, and here are included grandparents who remember how delicious it tasted long ago in their own childhood, beam when the waiter brings them a cup. Contemporary Turkish-Armenian poet Karin Karakasli has written an ode to salep that conjures these memories…
But then a voice
with a burnt tongue,
a cinnamon-perfumed voice
from a far-off fog
asks, is anyone drinking salep.
And, even if you're not,
you too will be warmed -
hot salep
milky salep.
Not unlike vanilla-flavored Ovaltine or a thinned version of cream-of-wheat, salep has been served in far-flung former Ottoman lands since the earliest times. It was first mentioned in the Turkish language in Tabib İbn-i Şerif’s Yadigar, an early 15th C medical book. The 9th C. Persian polymath Abu Bakr Mohamed al-Razi, known in the West as Rhazes, included it in his 23 volumes as a treatment for gout- even though its high calorie count is more likely to cause than cure it. Its popularity in Arab al-Andalus, as attested by the 11th C. physician Ibn Wafid and his 13th C. counter-part Ahmad al Ghafiqi, may explain why and from where it first spread into Western Europe.
In the 17th C London, it was more popular, being much less expensive, than tea and coffee, when the hawker’s cry “Saloop, Saloop! A halfpenny a dish! Hot Saloop!” would lead customers to the Salopian Coffee House at 41 Charing Cross. The 1810 edition of the Encyclopedia Londinensis, a book about all things London, wrote that “the people of the east are extremely fond of salep; they look upon it as one of the greatest restoratives and provocatives to venery in the vegetable world”.
In the Balkans, Egypt, and Greece, where its street peddlars are called saleptsides, there are still plenty of ready customers in cold weather. The Greek rembetika song “To Salepi” recorded by Theodhoros Mytilineos in 1926 at the time of much upheaval between the Turkish and Greek communities, contains this double entendre about salep’s supposed restorative and provocative properties.
The best of salepaki [diminutive form of salep]for two francs I sell/ For two francs I sell salepaki best./I came once, I came twice, we talked, poh-poh, just a dream, forgotten all./
And salep is again set to retake the world, just as it had in Ottoman days, with the 170 year old MADO Company of Kahraman Maraş (a southeastern Turkish town known for both wild orchids and dondurma, Turkish ice cream) ready to expand its café chain of 300 franchises in 20 countries- from Europe to Australia- into North America.
The New World however is no stranger to orchid-based food products. The so-called vanilla “bean” (in botanical terms, not a bean at all but rather a seed capsule), from the New World orchid Vanilla planifolia, is perhaps only the orchid flower’s second most essential ice cream ingredient. It first came to Europe in the Columbian Exchange not as a flavoring but as a perfume. Alfeñique, the Mexican sugar candy, was originally made with the paste of the Bletia campanulata orchid, and its word origin not surprisingly comes from the Persian panid, via the Arabic al-fanid, meaning the same as it does in Spanish.
For those who want to buy salep powder in Istanbul at retail, a good place to start is at Ayfer Kaur’s stall #7 in the Egyptian Bazaar, doing spice business since 1920. Salesclerk Aziz offers pure salep from an apothecary jar for 750TL/kg and a string of dried bulbs from Kastamonou in north-central Anatolia for 800TL/ea, so its purity is not in doubt. Aziz inhales agreeably at its scent, but wrinkles his nose when reading the listed ingredients of the pre-packaged variety- corn starch, guar gum, sugar (20% by weight!), and nary a mention of salep.
At the Valide coffeehouse just outside the bazaar beside the Golden Horn, Ahmet Tuğ and his wife Vefa have come for their twice-a-week cup. Vefa is from Kazakhstan, and after her first taste two years ago she fell in love. Says Ahmet, “no, we don’t grow fat from it, because the cinnamon we sprinkle on top absorbs the calories,” - a folk belief that might permit guilty weightwatchers a second cup. If only she were familiar with other Ottoman medicinal references to salep as a fattener for the women of the harem.
Ahmet first drank salep from the Eyüp district’s street vendors at the age of ten, and thinks they still have the best, for they use unpasteurized cow’s milk or sometimes goat milk. Vefa is not used to drinking milk at all, so she mixes it with water when at home, and finds the taste still perfectly rich. She says, “I had to search the internet before I could believe that such a strong taste could come from a dainty flower.”
The ginger shaker that sits next to the cinnamon goes untouched by the Tuğs- they consider it a modern affectation by Istanbul’s newly-fashionable health food crowd. But this is also untrue, for Edward Lane’s valuable urban anthropological book Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians from 1836 described salep as “a thin jelly…with a little cinnamon or ginger sprinkled upon it.”
Salep‘s curative properties figure back in history as far as ancient Mesopotamia, whose medical lore prescribed “fox testicle” (unclear if it referred to the real thing or the orchid bulb) to increase lactation. Orchids were used as love charms in Nigeria, for divination ritual in ancient India, and for nightmare prevention in Zululand.
European witches employed both of the paired tubers of the Orchis mascula orchid- the plumper of the two to promote true love, the smaller to end misdirected love. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has Queen Gertrude speak of that same erect purple orchid species, and hint at its use as a love potion, in reference to the crazed Ophelia’s crown of flowers that she wove before killing herself…
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
Turkish salep is made mostly from Orchis mascula, while Persian salep comes mostly from Orchis latifolia and the subcontinent’s Padshah salep from an orchid with a disagreeable taste- which should not surprise, because salep in Pakistan is used as a glue and sizing material in the silk industry. World traveler Ibn Batuta was nonetheless impressed when in the year 1333 the Sultan of Delhi gave him as a hospitality gift “I cannot say how many pounds” of sugar, ghee, and salep.
Some so-called “salep” comes not from orchids at all. In Afghanistan it is made from wild onions, and in Tahiti and the West Indies from arrowroot. But leave it to French chefs to find the je ne sais quois in true Turkish salep. The 1961 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, their nation’s master culinary compendium, includes detailed recipes for salep potage and jelly, known in English as soup and jelled consumé. One might ignore the more extravagant claims of its nutritional value- that one ounce can sustain a working man for a day, for now it is known to be no more nourishing than potato flour- for the sake of its subtle flavor alone.
Do not expect to get any company secrets from Muhsin Kadem, along with his brother Cemal the owner of Istanbul’s foremost wholesaler, Kadem Salepçilik, founded in 1960 by their father Hacı Mehmet Ali. Muhsin repeats the official statistic of annual salep bulb production at 60,000kg/yr but will not say how much his company contributes to that number, which seems astounding when one considers that a typical orchid bulb weighs but ½ gram and loses up to 90% of that when dried.
Four overflowing sacks of samples represent just a fraction of the thirty different quality grades he sells. “The best salep,” says Muhsin, “leaves a taste in your mouth that you want again just two hours later. Once you have the real, you will not stand for the artificial. Bulbs from eastern Anatolia are best, but you can find orchids even in Istanbul’s Belgrade Forest just up the Bosporus.” His office’s location in the crumbling Balkapan Han, once the center for Istanbul’s honey trade, evokes the traditional concoction of honey and salep to cure bronchitis, tight bowels, and menstrual cramps.
The Turkish word salep is derived from the Arabic tha’lab, fox, a shortened version of the orchid root’s folkloric name khusyat al-tha’lab, testicle of the fox, for the fact that the bulb grows in a pair, one large and young, the other one small and old, as was said it grew in the animal. The English translator of the famed 17th C. Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s book the Seyahatname, in the passage describing Istanbul's two hundred ambulatory salep vendors whose sales cry was, "Take salep, rest for the soul, health for the body", delicately called it “fox’s cully”.
Ibn al-Baytar, chief herbalist of a 13th C. Ayyubid sultan in Damascus, called the salep orchid qatal akhihi, “killed his brother”, thinking that the younger bulb had killed its older sibling. Western botanists sometimes call these twin bulbs the “mother” and the “daughter”, perhaps imagining matricide.
Nineteenth C. salep vendors have been depicted in both photographs and paintings. James Robertson, employed as an engraver by the Ottoman mint and brother-in-law to the photographer Felice Beato, added a street seller to his 1850s series of Istanbul’s traditional professions. Austrian orientalist Ludwig Deutsch, on the first of his three visits to Cairo in 1886, painted a salep seller ladling from a basin above a burning brazier surrounded by Nubian and Egyptian children and women with cups at their lips. More recently, the second line of novelist Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book contains the narrator’s remembrance of the salep seller rattling his copper kettles on winter mornings.
There are some 200,000 species of orchids worldwide, and salep orchids come primarily from three Linnaean taxonomic genera, Orchis, meaning testicle in ancient Greek, Satyrion, and Serapias- each genus’ Greek-derived name hinting at the root’s aphrodisiacal properties. The Ancients may have been on to something, for Jordanian scientists Mohammed Allouh and Nabil Khouri et al. recently wrote a scientific paper titled “Orchis anatolica Root Ingestion Improves Sexual Motivation and Performance in Male Rats”.
Across the straits in Kadiköy, one step closer to the best Anatolian orchid hunting grounds, is the Fazil Bey coffee house, soon to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Waiter Murad Çelik has been there for almost half that time, but is soon to retire after selling how many cups of salep he cannot remember. “It’s good for a cough”, he says, suggesting that his older customers perhaps suffering from a cold might add a touch of powdered ginger for their health.
Salep is the secret ingredient in the best ice cream because of its chemical property- being high in glucomannan, a dietary emulsifier and thickener like starch and cellulose, whose molecules absorb water. And the best place to test salep’s taffy-like properties is the Ali Usta ice cream shop- Meşhur Dondurmacı , Famous Ice Cream Maker, as its sign says, since 1968- in the nearby Moda neighborhood. In mid-winter, ice cream customers are off by ninety percent, and the servers look bored. No long lines wrapped around the block outside as they do in summer. But inside the hot drink is even more popular as they run through thirty samovars of it in a day.
Ali Usta is near the office of Ekrem Sezik, emeritus professor of pharmacology at Ankara’s Gazi University whose 1967 doctoral dissertation was the first to analyze salep, and now consults to industry and government on its medicinal properties, and has recently helped the Germans test their locally-sold salep to determine if it illegally contains orchid varieties protected under EU treaties.
Dr. Sezik has accompanied traditional orchid pickers in Muğla province on their rounds in the mountains, and knows that because of severe overharvesting it might now take a picker two days to find just one kg of bulbs, while in years past it was many times that. Some orchids like pine forests, he says, while others prefer the shade of oaks. He estimates that 120 million orchids are harvested each year, an extraordinarily high number reached by working backward from his estimate of national annual salep sales. And they must work fast, for orchids bloom only during a three week season. In other times they look like weeds.
“Do not be fooled by packaged mix”, he says. “Some say ‘salep aroma’, but it is taste, not smell, that makes salep a special drink. I know that from focus group testing, and from my own tongue.” It is not just the glucomannan content, which in some orchids reach 50% by weight, and which can be more cheaply replaced by the bulbs of the konjac plant (also less appetizingly called voodoo lily, snake palm, and devil’s tongue) from East Asia. “Those who love salep want most to taste an orchid,” says Dr. Sezik.
In Berlin’s winter market at Mauerpark, located where the Wall used to slice off the East from the West, a stall owned by a native Istanbulite who preferred not to give his name nonetheless does his best to bridge that sometimes still stubborn divide. He has been selling salep there for more than 20 yrs, he says. His German-born, ethnic Turkish helper Derya explains that her countrymen back when the stall first opened were curious yet a bit reluctant to try a taste. But on the coldest days, with steam rising from the kettles, they finally began to plunk down their Deutschmarks and found it very much to their liking.
“Everyone is happy to hold a hot drink in their hands on a freezing day,” says Derya, whose name means “ocean” in Turkish- which come to think of it is a perfect metaphor for how salep has spread around the world, “even though now the price has risen to 3 euros”. And the stall’s big yellow sign says what all want to hear in any language- “Das gesündeste Winter Heiẞgetränke”- The Healthiest Hot Winter Drink.
Ludwig Deutsch, The Sahlep Vender, Cairo
Salep Seller, Istanbul, overpainted photograph, James Robertson, circa 1854, Omer M. Koc Collection
