The Bellini Card

81

Yashim sliced three onions, fine; they were red and crisp and he spread the rings onto a large white plate.

He took a big lamb’s liver and prepared it carefully, removing the arteries and the tough membrane. He sliced it into strips and tossed it in the flour and kirmizi biber.

In the frying pan he sauteed garlic and cumin seeds. The oil was hot; before the garlic could catch he dropped in the sliced liver and turned it quickly with a wooden spoon. The meat tightened and browned; he spooned the slices out and laid them on the onion rings. He chopped some dill and parsley and sprinkled them over the dish, and then, hungry, he took a piece of liver with an onion ring and popped them into his mouth.

Venetians would have cooked the onion until it was very soft. Delicious, in its way, and sweet, but lacking the boldness of the Ottoman original, Yashim thought, as the textures and flavors burst in his mouth. His arnavut cigeri looked better, too.

A shame that he had found no yogurt. He sliced a lemon and laid the wedges around the plate.

He drained the chickpeas. He would cook them with onion, rice, and the remainder of the signora’s delicious stock.

He made a marinade with the nigella seeds he had found at the e picier. They had been labeled black cumin, but Yashim knew better. He mixed them with lemon juice, crushed garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. Into a bowl, weeping, he grated two onions. He mixed the pulp with a spoonful of salt.

He cleaned his knife and used it to slice three swordfish steaks into chunks, which he turned into the marinade. He took out a stack of vine leaves he had stripped, without much guilt, from a tendril blown over a high garden wall on his way home that morning. He washed them, softened them in the chickpea water in bunches of two or three, and dropped them into a bowl of cold water.

He squeezed the onion pulp between his hands and trickled the juice over the fish.

The signora used a long flat knife with a rounded end to smooth her polenta. Wondering if it were sacrilege he decided to use it as a skewer for the fish.

When he had wrapped each piece of fish in its vine-leaf coat, he found that the polenta knife was too blunt-ended to get through the leaves. Patiently he stuck each packet with Malakian’s little knife, widened the hole, and slipped it onto the broad blade.

He drizzled what was left of the marinade over the fish and set the skewer over the embers of the fire.

He prepared the rice. When it was covered with a cloth, and steaming gently, he went outside to the well and carefully washed his hands, his face, his ears, and nose.

“When you are ready, we can eat,” he announced.