True saleb leaves a taste in your mouth that you want again in less than two hours.
-Muhsin Kadem, Salep wholesaler in Balkapan Han, Istanbul
I have spent many hours in coffee houses waiting for day’s end, starting in the morning reading that day’s newspaper and ending with the evening edition. I tried to ration my cups, not that it ever mattered to waiters- they never cared how long you sat and read or watched the street- but I always thought it unseemly to drink so much as to be seen as a nervous type.
Sometimes I’d arrived too early to announce myself at someone’s door, so I had to wait, sometimes I had the whole day before the next day’s flight out and had to wait even longer, and sometimes I had finished whatever had brought me to that place, to put down on paper information for later, so I could put away my pen. That was the best feeling of all- to need make note of nothing more.
I felt that way in Istanbul writing about salep. I’d interviewed Turkey’s leading orchid wholesaler and in tea houses waiters and a couple who I’d seen drinking it. I’d spoken with a professor of orchid biology, and I’d gone to Ali Usta to taste dondurma, the taffy-like Turkish ice cream made with salep powder from Kahramanmaras.
So I spent my last day in Kadikoy seated outside the Fazil Bey coffee house with Murad Celik, a waiter about to retire after forty years on the job. He didn’t speak much English and I wasn’t in too talkative a mood- it was raining, cold and miserable under the awning- and all I wrote in my notebook was that according to him, hot salep was good for suppressing a cough. But Murad must have smoked an entire pack of cigarettes that afternoon, so I didn’t believe him. What did he know about causing or curing a cough.