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05/28/2001 Archived Entry: "Poached Apricots Filled with Cream"

Arzu Yilmaz is a native of Izmir, Turkey, who lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, where, with her Turkish husband, she is raising two, now-teenage children, cooking Turkish food most nights, teaching Turkish cuisine at local cooking schools, writing for the Turkish magazine Sofra and the Turkish edition of Harper’s Bazaar, and, as if that wasn’t enough, doing a little catering on the side. I met Arzu through the New York Association of Cooking Teachers (NYACT) and it was love at first sight. She proves my premise that the best home cooks -- I should say women home cooks – are, once they take their aprons off, among the most beautiful and glamorously groomed women around. My maternal grandmother, Elsie Sonkin, was a woman like that and I can’t count how many others I’ve met in my long career in and out of the kitchen.

Anyway, Arzu (pronounced exactly as it is spelled, as Turkish is a phonetic language) not only knows how to cook Turkish food, she is very knowledgeable about its history. It is a fascinating subject that I can barely touch on here: The original influences are Chinese, Persian, and Central Asian, but the Turkish Ottomans, who also developed a highly sophisticated court cuisine, in turn influenced the cooking of all of Europe, particularly Eastern and Central Europe, when many of those lands were part of the Ottoman Empire, which reigned from roughly the early 15th century until the early 20th century.

There are many misconceptions about Turkish cooking: that it is hot and spicy, that it is too foreign for conservative eaters, that it is too difficult and time-consuming to prepare for American home cooks in a hurry (thoughts of the harem and its hundreds of helping hands), and that the ingredients are too difficult to obtain. I hope that Arzu and I changed those attitudes when she was on my program. Turkish food is a Mediterranean cuisine, sharing many ingredients with Italian cuisine and quite similar to Greek cuisine (you could start a war by arguing which influenced which more), but with more Arab influences, especially on the Eastern side of the country, near Syria. Arzu points out that Turkish is a very regional cuisine (the country is the size of Texas), with each part of the country having its own typical dishes and preparing the more national dishes in slightly different ways.

As proof of the cuisine’s frequent simplicity, she urged me to share this dessert with you: Poached Apricots Filled with Cream. The cream should be kymack, which is a slightly fermented, clotted cream, so thick it can almost be sliced. I just read a recipe for a kymack substitute where you blend together equal parts of sweet butter and heavy cream, but Arzu and I think a better substitute would be Devonshire clotted cream that you can buy (at great cost!) in a jar in a specialty store (actually, my neighborhood grocer carries it), or French-style creme fraiche, also available in specialty stores, or simply use stiffly beaten whipped cream.

There’s another wonderful Turkish recipe in the Maven’s Diary. It’s for Braised Lamb with Smoked Eggplant Cream, which is called Sultan’s Delight. You might want to serve the apricots as dessert after the lamb and eggplant. With the lamb dish, serve rice – pilaf is a Turkish dish, through the Persians – and a green vegetable. Sautéed spinach would be excellent.

Poached Apricots Filled with Cream
(Kamakli Kayisi Tatlisi)

Serves 4

1 cup dried apricots
3 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 cups sweetened creme fraiche or thickly whipped cream
1/2 cup finely chopped unsalted pisatchios

Combine the apricots and water in a small saucepan and let the apricots soak for at least 2 hours or overnight.

Add the sugar and lemon juice, stir well, cover, and bring to a boil over high heat. Once the water begins to boil, lower heat so it just simmers with the cover on and let the apricots simmer for about 20 minutes, until tender but not soft.

With a slotted spoon, remove the apricots and set aside to cool. Meanwhile, put the apricot syrup over high heat and boil for about 5 minutes to thicken it further. Remove from heat and let it cool. (The apricots can be prepared days ahead, in which case store them in their syrup.)

There is a slit in each apricot from where the pit was removed. Open the apricots and fill them with the cream of choice. Arrange them on a serving plate. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for an hour. (Do not fill the apricots more than an hour ahead of serving.)

To serve, sprinkle the apricots with chopped pistachios and serve with the syrup, place each serving on an individual plate, drizzle with syrup, then sprinkle with pistachios.