On breaking fast and melancholy

I have been feeling rather melancholicly recently. May be because I have just come back from sparkly Morocco into the winds and rains of London; or the realisation that the summer, with all its promise of excitement and adventure, is almost over, never quite delivering; or some quasi-existential, not-quite-middle-life crises feelings all rolled into one. Getting out of bed and putting feet onto cold floor is a chore...

Breakfast is the only thing that has been rescuing me. The second thought after 'oh, God, it's morning again' is that of food. No matter how sad I feel, my appetite never leaves me. The enjoyment comes not just from the physical pleasure of tasting and waking up to flavours, but also from the process of thinking up your morning meal. The mental voyage through your fridge, slowly assessing what your tongue and belly feels like, what would comfort you most, adds just a touch of zing to your day. I love breakfasts and don't need to be told that it is healthy to eat them or that one shouldn't rush them. I wouldn't dare.

So here are a few examples of my morning little feasts. Some happened months ago and I have never quite found a reason to write about them. My humble, mostly solitary (J loves his oats with milk and ooof to work) morning meals are my favourite past time, so in the future I will be posting more, perhaps a collage of breakfasts, changing from season to season, mood to mood...But for now:

Soft-boiled egg, Lithuanian rye bread, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers.

This is quite recent, on another melancholic day, crouching on the decking of my garden.

Organic herby sausage, mushrooms fried with garlic and onion, lettuce leaves, with organic tomato ketchup.

Sometime in the spring: I had bought that bottle of ponsy organic ketchup and so made a fry-up to go with it.

Turkish coffee

Some of you, my dear readers, will remember my 'Hot, dark, tempting' post about the making of proper Turkish coffee, in a dzezva. This photo is some 6 months old, but this coffee is a frequent occurrence on my breakfast table (often in this charming butterfly cup).

Smoked mackerel, black bread, cherry tomatoes and salted Polish cucumbers.

Possible one of my most favourite meals any time of the day. You are probably wondering by now about the prevalence of protein and salt in my breakfasts, and lack of dairy and sugar. Yes, my Russo-Ukrainian genes (or habits really) talk here. A bowl of cornflakes (or even good musli) just never has the same soothing or exhilarating effect.

And lastly, but so not listly:

Moroccan breakfast: Ksra (flat bread), beghrir (pancakes), apricot and strawberry jam, watermelon.

From our recent trip to Fez, whilst staying in a beautiful riad, where we were having our breakfast in a courtyard with blue blue skies above us and a melancholy of fading mosaics around us..

Hot, dark, tempting

The realisation that the hedonistic winter celebrations of gluttony and cheap champagne is over feels bleak and calls for strong measures. Coffee. Black, scorchingly hot and giddily strong, Turkish Coffee, with its swooning body and enveloping aroma, can pull you out of the most wondrous melancholy. What differentiates it from its European cousin, Espresso, is the long, measured process of making it. To achieve a sufficiently languid result one ought to rely on a tremble of one's hand and a sharpness of one's eye, more than on a beautifully gleaming machinery. Cezve (pronounced [jezva], a Turkish coffee pot, is the key to the creation that is syropy, full-bodied, electrifying.

'Cezve'-Turkish coffee pot

Cezve is a curved, high-necked pot, normally no taller than the size of your palm; it is often made out of copper. They call it a briki in many English-speaking countries, but the original word for cezve comes from Arabic, meaning coal - presumably from the method of making coffee on burning coal. An only slightly modified word dzezva is known to most Russians too, as making coffee on a stove using this pot was fairly common - at least for the bohemian Soviet hippies (there were a number of those behind the Iron Curtain), as my parents were.

Breakfast of naked coffee and cigarettes

For years my mother's morning ritual was to have nothing else but a cup of very strong Turkish coffee - with a sugar lump, but no milk - and a cigarette, or two. My Madeleine memory is perhaps this curious combination of warm dark roasted coffee and a slightly tart, but strangely comforting smell of burning tobacco. Of course mother would always try to shoo me away from the kitchen with its translucent clouds of cigarette smoke, but it often didn't work, and so I would stay, perching on a stool, always hungry in the morning, waiting for breakfast, which would inevitably for a Russ include buterbrody - open sandwiches - with ham, cheese and whatnot - and, from a fairly early age, also be a cup of coffee, perhaps a little lighter than mother's and always with a thick layer of cream. I still remember the chocolate-cake like appearance of my coffee top, a toffee coloured mixture of coffee grains (grains would always settle down after a moment) mixed in with warm, fatty milk. These days Russians and Ukrainians call any basic recipe of coffee topped with boiling water in a cup Turkish coffee, but this uncooked method is an unsatisfying and grainy drink. Cezve is what makes all the difference...


Turkish coffee in Turkey

Many years after my childhood coffee-tobacco memories, I learnt how to make Turkish coffee proper whilst travelling through central and south-eastern Turkey. During my journey, which coincided with Bayram - the end of Ramadan - I was fortunate enough to spend three days with a Turkish family, in a prosperous and modern (and hence rarely visited by Westerns) city of Kaiseri. We visited many houses, kissed many cheeks, ate a lot of honey-dripping baklava with endless cups of tea - and coffee, of course.

Celebration of the end of Ramadan with sweets and tea

The mother of Adnan, our host, beckoned me to a small but spotlessly clean kitchen, to show me the process of making kahva, Turkish coffee, and here I am sharing with you the recipe learnt there, in the city floating between Asia and Europe, a lullaby of modern and the old...

Master and its servants: cezve and the ingredients

Turkish coffee

You will need:
1 tbsp very finely grounded coffee (I find the zingy Columbian Grupo Asociativo Quebradon from Monmouth a fitting match here)
1 tsp soft brown sugar
a small cup of water (mineral is best)
1 cezve

Pour cold water into your pot, add coffee and sugar and stir gently. The liquid will feel heavy, like a lava.

Put on a stove, on a lowest heat possible and wait...


After some 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the caress of the heat, the volcano will very slowly start building up, the foam shaping up, moving up, speeding up. Do not move away at this stage - you'll be transfixed by the champagne of caramel-coloured bubbles expanding, desperate to burst.

At the point when the vessel cannot longer contain the liquid, take it off the heat, pour the foam - and only the form, which is about 1/3 of the whole content - into a cup, and put the cezva back on the stove.

Let the coffee have another go, going all the way to the bream of the pot......when almost over the edge, take it off and pour the remainder into the cup, patiently waiting.


Drink slowly but edgily, there and then.

A puff of blue smoke will make the taste all the more intense... or, for those less sinfully inclined, a bite of honey-drenched baklava.

Remember, Turks predict future by what's left behind. Once the coffee grains are poured out of a cup, let the thin layer of mud dry up a bit - what does my say?..