Waiting for Ma'toul

"Fancy me at it again."  How many times did I think that  as the Sudanese sun slowly ticked across the white hot sky.    Less than halfway through a forty day journey, and already I'd come down with saddle sores- camel saddle sores, the deep, hide-in-the-dark kind that never seem to heal.

I suppose I should have considered myself lucky.    I had been given a white camel to ride, a sign of authority and dignity I was oft told- the breed that the Prophet Muhammad rode, but I was going out of my mind with open oozings on my tendermost.

All for a good cause. But I was not reassured. Shooting a documentary film about the camel trade from Kordofan to Cairo can't really be done from the back of a jeep, especially when everyone else- including my soundman- was in the saddle.

I had made this 800 mile trip along the darb al-arba'in, or the Way of the Forty (named for the route's average number of days) once before, as a younger man with a tougher tail. The trail boss on the second trip was the same as the first- KhairAllah, a respected elder of the Kababish tribe.    But all he could recommend at the moment was another smear of vaseline from the fast failing pot I'd bought in our trail head village.

"Nothing doing," I shouted to him in my broken Arabic over the ceaseless north wind.     "I'll wait for Ma'toul and there, if God wills, we'll take our rest."

Ah, Ma'toul, what a sweet sounding place.    Nothing- I knew from my last trip-­ but a desert well serving a brackish beverage, hidden in a nearly shade-less stand of stunted siyaal trees.    But still, rest and refreshment.

"How far did you say it was to Ma'toul?"

"Four days, three days or four," answered KhairAllah with a merry flick of his whip hand.

A few things I had yet to learn about desert travel.  You don't measure distance by miles or days or dots on a map come and gone. You scan the front horizon for a landmark, a barely visible mountain, say, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait to pass beside it, and then you wait you wait you wait and you wait for it to disappear behind you. You know thus how you stand in comparison to what you can see, but you have no idea where things are that you cannot.

Something else about the Sahara- saddle sores get worse before they get better. Shifting my seat only made them worse, widening the separate wounds until they linked up into one big raw spot. Pus made it tacky. The dry heat made it scab over. As Van Morrison might have sung, "When you got a stomach ache, a little rubbin' will see you through.   When you got a buttock ache, there ain't nothin' you can do."

Next day, KhairAllah proved himself a man of false promise.   I'd kept my tongue out of sight til late afternoon, singing only an occasional chorus of "My bonnie lies over the ocean", when I again popped the question.   "How long to Ma'toul?"     "One more day, one more day if God wills."  Thank you KhairAllah, thank you.

I was not the first green horn to run the risk of saddle galls on the darb al­ arba'in and I have not been the last. The ancient Egyptian Harkouf rode this way during the Old Kingdom in the service of his boy Pharoah Pepi II, returning from a reconnaissance of tropical Africa with ostriches, gold, and, much to the delight of his master, a dancing pygmy.

The Englishman William G. Browne rode round trip on camel back along this route at the end of the 18th C. His stiff upper lip account- with nary a word of backside emollients!- makes an engaging read in this age of manned flight.   If only dromedaries had wings... and first class seating.

In the meantime, a couple of masochistic honeymooners and a pair of perilous Paulines have humped up the trail- each leaving behind their own versions ( Impossible Journey: Two Against the Sahara, by Michael Asher and Mariantonietta Peru, and Shadows in the Sand by Lorraine Chittock) of fighting blisters, sand storms, and fifteen hour stirrup-less days astride.

"O KhairAllah, I do not yet see Ma'toul."  Today we came upon and passed mountain landmarks whose names I had learned before- Abu Fas, Father of the Axe, and Bint Um Bahr, Mother of the Daughter of the Sea.    From dawn the sun had spun its color wheel from yellow to white to yellow to gold to finally... burnt umber. Dark falls and Ma'toul must be near, but still no sign.    What is that, two more days? Cutting it close to the bone, say I.

Nights on the drive were every drover's pleasure.    Even if only a few hours sleep were its end, camp making was always a joyfully anticipated task.     Half reclining, lying back, rolling over- a saddle could accommodate none of this. Spread a camel blanket upon the ground and I will show you a royal's bed. The bedouin have a saying I'll never tire of- Al-na'im huwa al-sultan, He who sleeps is king.

At daybreak I thought I sniffed Ma'toul.    Camels coming in off a drive can smell Nile water from miles out, so why not I? God knows they were no thirstier. The north star was right- on my left cheek. The wind was right- in my face. The sun was right- rising in my eyes.    Even KhairAllah's gait seemed right- urging his mount with more spur than his norm.     He too yearned for a fresh drink.

Breaking a camel camp requires more effort than it deserves. Clint Eastwood simply stands up from his slumber, rearranges his poncho, and sets to. For the bedouin, each camel had to be unhobbled, checked for lameness, and gathered for the morning count.  It never ceased to amaze how three illiterate drovers always agreed on the same total.  One hundred and eighty head are a lot to sum on fingers alone.

The following day our ride was tough.  Water was so low that at the noontime stop only one teapot made the rounds. The drovers grumbled among themselves about the trail boss and the couched\camels extended their necks like exhausted hounds. Our sunshade made from a strung tarp was too flimsy to give us the spell we needed.   When and if we did make Ma'toul, we all knew it would be by the skin of our teeth.

"Morning of Cream, 0 Professor!" was KhairAllah's idea of a jibe in my direction at the breakfast bowl. Professors, as far as he knew, did not ride camels.  "Morning of Milk, O Son of a Bookkeeper!”, came back my answer, noting his unfailing accuracy with the head count.  ”Today we reach Ma'toul ?”   "In three days, God willing."   “Smile when you say that," I spit through gritted teeth, reading another page from Clint Eastwood's book.

The Arabic for trail boss is khabir,  literally meaning expert,   a rank not given lightly by the export traders who employ the men to whom they entrust a movable Fort Knox.  A trail herd is worth upwards of $400,000 US, and during the forty day desert crossing they seem to move quite literally off the face of the earth.  No one alive can track a hijacked herd through the eastern Sahara.

KhairAllah had made the Cairo run as a drover some twenty five times before earning his khabir's stripe.   He could navigate the wastes by night as well as by day. He knew when to push his herd and when to lay off.    He kept the peace among his fractious men and knew when to tell a bawdy joke.  And he hated to lose a camel either to the vultures (I loved their name, Abu Jumjuma , Father of the Skull) or a thief.

But more he hated to lose a herd as he did that day.     Blame it on the flaming grimace. When a male camel entered his rut, he let us know by prolapsing a bright pink throat sac out his mouth and inflating it to the size of a child's birthday balloon. The play became infectious and, boys being boys, soon the camels were scattered for miles about, fighting and dueling across open sands.

It took a long while to pick up the strays, recount, and again get underway, and with such delay I was not surprised by the revised estimate of reaching our watering hole.   Four days to Ma'toul.   KhairAllah, are we going nowhere?   Time moves forward and we go back.  How can this be?

The head does strange things when the bottom gives out.  It begins to mime every downstairs jolt and jar.  I took personally the indignities of being rubbed the wrong way by a dumb animal. I could not exactly fight fire with fire but I did want my mount to know where it hurt.   But humps are not rumps, and he took no notice of my misery.  We rode on late in the night, no one but I knowing the depth of my pain.

What I thought to be our final campfire before Ma'toul was a miserable affair. I had stanched the bleeding but I continued to lose fluids.    Our water ration was a cup apiece. I fell asleep with a new appreciation for the taste of trail dust-blackened saliva.  Tomorrow I would wash it down with clear well water.

"0 Son of a Bookkeeper, Morning of Jasmine.  Today by God we will settle our accounts.  Ma'toul before lunch?”  My smile was not returned and my heart began to sink. "Ma'toul you ask? By God, you are as poor at riding a camel as you are at seeing what lies before your eyes. Did you not see Ma'toul pass on our right hand as we rode. It is five hours behind us and we'll have no turning.”

I left it like that. Ma'toul no longer mattered. concern, and licking yesterday's wounds was not a way to seek solace in a raw world. If I wanted to take a stool at the Lucky Strike, my favorite watering hole back home, I should have stayed at home. Rest now was of no cure for what ailed me most. The desert held no drink for me that day, where tomorrow never comes.

The Luck of Edenhall

The Luck of Edenhall
A Mamluk Syrian glass beaker and “Masterpiece” of the V&A

This polychrome enameled and gilded drinking glass, among the earliest and most fragile objects of the Arab decorative arts to arrive in Northern Europe from the Middle East, got its name from a legend descended from its first known owner, the baronial Musgrave family of Cumberland in far northwest England, which received its Coat of Arms from King Edward III roughly at the same time that the glass was made sometime in the middle of the 14th Century.

Glyn Davies, curator of glass at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has called it “one of the most famous medieval objects in England” and “a testament to the fascination that can be exerted by skillful craftsmanship and technical mastery…its perfect state of preservation is almost miraculous”.

The Musgrave legend described the beaker’s story of origin, that during a banquet the family butler was sent to draw water from the well of St. Cuthberts Church near their castle in the village of Edenhall, and there he came upon a group of fairies who in their haste to run away left the glass behind. When the butler refused to return it to the fairies, they set upon it a hex later recorded in the poem “Luck of Edenhall”, written in German in 1834 by Johan Ludwig Uhland but known better in a translation by the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow- “…If this glass doth fall/Then farewell, O Luck of Edenhall.”

A darker interpretation of the legend might be that the family had in fact stolen the glass from the church where it was in use as a chalice, and then they covered up the theft with a back-dated, whimsical tale of how it had fallen into their hands through providence, but with the added twist of a punishment foretold- the fall of the family fortune- as a veiled admission of their guilt.

The fact that fine Mamluk glassware of similar age, often set on rounded feet of chased gold, was used in Christian ritual is known from similar pieces in France, one called the Goblet of Charlemagne that was transferred during the French Revolution from a church in the town of Châteaudun to the Chartres museum, and another bequeathed by its original owner Margaret Mallet in 1329 to the cathedral in the town of Douai.

The Luck of Edenhall probably was made either in the Mamluk cities of Cairo, Damascus or most likely Aleppo. As the 13th C. geographer Al Qazwini reported about Aleppo’s glass industry, “Among the most notable things of this city is the glass bazaar. He who enters will be reluctant to leave, on account of the astonishing multitude of notable and exquisite objects which he sees there and which are exported to every other country.” Although it is possible that the glass may have been carried to Europe by a returning Crusader, the Egyptian historian Al Maqrizi (1364-1442) wrote of many Italian merchants in Mamluk lands engaged in the luxury trade connecting Egypt and Syria to Europe.

We know that the glass arrived in Europe no more than one hundred years after its creation because it still has a custom-fitted leather case of French manufacture dated to the 15th Century. When precisely it entered the Musgrave household is unknown, but it was first mentioned in the 1677 will of Sir Philip Musgrave and later in a 1729 ballad attributed to a family relative which begins, “God prosper long from being broke/The Luck of Edenhall”.

An article in a 1791 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine first recorded its origin legend from the fairies, and an 1844 diary entry of a guest at a Musgrave family party described a shattered glass-defying game once played with the cup, of throwing it into the air and making the butler catch it before it fell to the floor. The glass was lent to the V&A in 1926 and donated outright in 1959, when it was named a museum “Masterpiece”, a rare designation only given to the collection’s most valuable objects like the Ardabil carpet from Iran and statues by Renaissance sculptors Bernini and Donatello.

So-called fairy cups were common in the inventories of English country homes to elaborate on the old aristocratic families’ mythologies, but none has a story as well established as the Edenhall’s. As for the family’s fate after the loss of their cup- as Longfellow put it, “Then farewell, O Luck…”- their mansion was demolished not long after due to “insufficient wealth”, according to an historical accounting of lost baronial mansions, which stated further that several deaths in the family in short succession meant that heavy estate taxes had financially crippled them. The Hall was sold and the family moved to London. Nothing more is known for certain about the house until its demolition in 1934.

Another variation on the theme of the cup’s curse can be read in an 1893 Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”, when Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of the disappearance of the Musgrave family butler by answering a riddle written in the form of a poem, which leads him to both a dead body and a bag of broken bits of colored glass…which, sorry to disappoint anyone looking for a neat plot ending, are not the shards of the Luck of Edenhall at all, but rather something else entirely.

Salep, Turkey's Winter Drink

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