The flower of frozen desserts

Natural History, April, 1997 by Eric Hansen

My earliest memory of an orchid is a corsage. Big, fat, full, and fabulous, the flowers of those exotic cattleya hybrids were bred by the millions for a single night of splendor at charity balls and high-school dances across the United States. But the ravishing floral displays of these plants represent only one small part of the orchid story.

Looking into the ethnobotany of the family Orchidaceae, I discovered that the plants are also used as medicines, religious charms, cosmetics, and musical instruments, as well as perfumes, food flavorings, and aphrodisiacs. Pursuing the food aspect of orchids, I happened upon a strange tale about the terrestrial orchids of Turkey. The story described a dessert made from wild orchid tubers, milk, and sugar. The frozen mixture was beaten with metal rods, eaten with a knife and fork, and capable of being used as a jump rope.

Orchid ice cream jump rope? I have spent the last twenty years chasing down story leads like this. It is the sort of material that can keep me awake at night, and so on a recent morning, I found myself standing at the rail of an aging ferryboat as it crossed the Bosporus, headed for the Asian shore of Istanbul. With the domed silhouette of Hagia Sophia receding in our wake, I contemplated a dessert that, according to experts, could heal the spleen, prevent cholera and tuberculosis, facilitate childbirth, stop hands and feet from shaking, and improve one's sex life. These product claims seemed doubtful even by Western marketing standards, and to investigate the tantalizing rumors, I was on my way to visit Ali Kumbasar, a man who has been making orchid ice cream in Istanbul for nearly thirty years.

Ali and his four brothers run Ali Usta, an ice-cream shop located in the fashionable neighborhood of Moda, and it was there that I took my first bite of salepli dondurma, the orchid ice cream of Turkey. Although Ali Usta offers thirty-two flavors, I was interested in the original flavor, which looked and tasted somewhat like vanilla. It was creamy, like gelato, and had a smoothness and elasticity that was surprisingly chewy and entirely new to me.

Ali explained that dondurma is the Turkish word for ice cream and that the essential ingredient of orchid ice cream is salep, a whitish flour milled from the dried tubers of certain wild, terrestrial orchids. Such orchids grow throughout Europe and the Middle East, but the orchid tubers used for this uniquely Turkish delicacy come from the mountainous edges of the country's Anatolian plateau. Species of the genus Orchis are said to be the best sources of orchid flour, and villagers commonly collect the paired tubers during spring and summer.

Salep dealers say that the most valuable tubers for ice cream are the ones that dry to the translucent yellow color of alabaster. This translucence indicates a more complex flavor and a higher percentage of mucilage, a gluelike substance similar to cellulose, which can make up 40 to 50 percent of the salep flour. Mucilage gives orchid ice cream a distinctive firmness; thus it is often eaten with a knife and fork. In the living plant, mucilage helps the tubers retain water and lowers the freezing point of the plant tissue, making it less susceptible to drought and frost.

The word salep comes from the Arabic sahlab, which means "testicles of the fox." Ali showed me a handful of the dried tubers, and although I have never had the opportunity to examine a fox that closely, the paired, ovoid spheres did bear a striking resemblance to that part of the male anatomy. Ancient accounts referred to this similarity, and the first-century Greek physician Dioscorides recommended the use of orchid tubers as an aphrodisiac. The word orchis in Greek means "testicle," and so it seems that human interest in orchids was focused on the erotic aftereffects of eating the tubers, rather than on the cultivation of plants for their showy floral displays.

"Fox testicle ice cream"--the literal translation of salepli dondurma--didn't seem like an appropriate name for the dessert dish filled with colorful scoops of ice cream placed on the table in front of me. The cold, silky orbs held the familiar flavors of apricot, pistachio, red currant, peach, and vanilla, but there was a subtle aftertaste that was entirely newslightly sweet with a subtle, nutty flavor similar to dried milk powder. It also had a hint of mushrooms, yak butter, or goats on a rainy day. Not unpleasant, but an earthy, lanolin fragrance that added an intriguing dimension to the ice cream as it slowly melted in my mouth.

Ali told me that salepli dondurma had been made in eastern Anatolia since the fifteenth century. In 1553, a European account of Turkish fruit sorbets appeared in Les Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez et Choses Memorables. Written by Pierre Belon, a French naturalist and traveler, the book confirms that iced desserts were in common use in Turkey at the time.

Western food scholars continue to debate the precise dates, locations, and origins of frozen desserts, but most Turkish ice-cream enthusiasts agree that salepli dondurma probably came from Maras, a city in south-central Turkey on the edge of the Anatolian plateau. Several species of orchids grow nearby, milk is available from cows, sheep, and goats, and snow is abundant for the freezing process. Similar orchid habitats exist elsewhere in Turkey, especially near Mount Ararat and Lake Van to the northeast, but for the Turkish people, Maras is the home of orchid ice cream.