In 2005, on the black-sand beach of Kamari on the Greek island of Santorini, my hungover friend ordered a gyros for breakfast. I scoffed, turned my nose up at her vulgarity and then asked, “May I have a bite,” as the delightful smell wafted across my sunlounger. With juices still dripping down my chin, I raced off to the Souvlaki Stop to order my own. That mouthful of lightly marinated chicken, topped with voluptuous red tomatoes and creamy tzatziki, wrapped in warm Greek pita and garnished with a few crunchy chips sticking out the top, changed my life.
I ate so many gyros on that holiday that it got me thinking: Why don’t I eat kebabs at home while sober? During daylight hours? Obviously, I ate them around midnight, on the way home after a night out, but rarely at any other time. I was living in London then and almost everybody I knew had the same kind of relationship with kebabs. Suddenly, this attitude seemed unfair and elitist.
So I quit my job, shipped all my belongings back to Sydney and spent eight months eating kebabs with the idea of writing a book about them. I travelled from Europe to India via the Middle East, talked to strangers, was greeted in restaurants and on the streets, and welcomed on buses and in mosques in my quest for good kebabs. I discovered that a kebab shared with strangers can open doors (and eyes) and form friendships.
I’ve learned that kebabs aren’t really Turkish. Aylin Öney Tan, the renowned Turkish food historian, says it’s impossible for any country to lay claim to the invention of the kebab. She told me: “Many of Turkey’s neighbours have been previous Ottoman lands, and there has been a great deal of cultural interaction with Persia. So claiming a certain national identity to kebabs is almost impossible.”
I came to see kebabs as a great leveller, the fish and chips or pot au feu of the Middle East. It’s a meal families go out for. “When you go on a date, you go to a kebab place – it’s not so romantic, but we like to eat it,” said my friend Ezgi from Adana in the south of Turkey.
Adana kebab is hand-minced local lamb (that has feasted on the surrounding thyme-covered hills) with hot spices added and rolled on to an iron skewer half a centimetre thick, 3cm wide and anywhere from 90cm to 120cm long, or even longer. At Ezgi’s school reunion, the chef makes the kebab as long as the table.
In Nazareth, Israel, I went to a restaurant called Diana that has been serving kebabs since the 1960s. And while Chef Duhul today serves delicate minced lamb kebabs on cinnamon sticks with just a hint of onion, parsley and pine nuts, he will tell you that his dad, Abu Duhul, began serving skewered lamb meat inside some pita, topped with tahini sauce and wrapped in newspaper, to cinemagoers at least a decade before the supposed “invention” of the takeaway doner by a Turkish immigrant in Germany.
In Beirut, the closest thing to a high-street doner joint is a snack bar called Barbar, where locals queue for cheap but exquisite kebabs in all varieties. The chicken shawarma is spiced with cinnamon and cardamom and sliced off the side of the rotating spit with a long sharp knife (never an electric knife), and laid into a pita with a spread of garlic paste and a few pickles.
In Georgia, on a freezing cold day, we stopped at a place I’ll never know the name of and warmed our hands over hot coals as a chef expertly turned long skewers of pork shashlik made of back meat, called chalahaji. The rich salty pork was so unctuous and flavoursome that it barely needed the addition of the sour cherry sauce it was served with, and a Finnish tourist had to have the pig acted out to her by three separate Georgians before she would believe she was eating pork.
These kebabs weren’t just snacks and certainly were not to be scoffed at. They were meals, carved from curiosity, that made me friends and memories. And there’s a lot to love about that.
• Do you have a story about the moment of discovery when a pastime became a passion? Send your essay of no more than 800 words to cif.australia@theguardian.com
