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The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries

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Aysha Taryam

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“In Turkey, better cooks than me do not waste the rind, instead soaking the strips in water laced with pickling lime, then boiling it in sugar syrup for melon-rind jam. Sometimes, confectioners candy the rind into glacé sweets. So intense is the sugariness of certain Turkish melons that vendors pitch them to customers by calling out, 'Sherbet, sherbet!' Some of Turkey's finest, most-prized, and largest, melons are found in Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of the country's Kurds, in the south-east. Dovecotes there, especially by the banks of the Tigris River, where vine fruits thrive in the alluvial soil, hint at the location of melon fields. Nitrate-rich guano (manure) from pigeons and doves is said to heat and enrich the ground, thus adding to the uncommon sweetness of the often tiger-striped melons. Camels once brought these weighty fruits from the field to the city. There is much to learn about Turkish melons.”

“The scent, though, is its own feast. In the cutting and cubing of it, more of its hard-to-pin-down ambrosial smell is dispensed, rising up like fresh-cut grass melding with cool iris. Batting away the temptation to eat a few coral-red wedges over the sink, I indulge, instead, in the anticipation of pleasure, imagining how, when I finally get to it, the melon's singular watery crunchiness-- it is a cousin of the cucumber-- and its copious juiciness will be sorbet-like on the tongue, as fresh and awakening as a glass of soda.”