Şükran’s Lemon Cake

On a grey February afternoon we sat on a sofa in Şükran’s kitchen, calf deep in bay. As rain lashed at the picture window framing fruit trees, pasture and the roiling Black Sea beyond, a wood-fired stove in a corner gave off heat in waves. The room smelled like potpourri.

Six of us – Şükran and Dave and I, Şükran’s 19 year-old daughter, her sister-in-law her mother-in-law – sipped tea and chatted as we stripped leaves from the branches the women had cut that morning, from a bay tree in front of their house. When Dave and I stopped by mid-afternoon on a whim after a morning at an old water mill they had ushered us into the formal sitting room at the front of the house before disappearing into the kitchen to make tea. As we sat in silence I heard laughter from the kitchen. I got up, walked to the door and pushed it open into a sea of leaves and branches.

“Oh no, please wait in the other room,” Şükran said, obviously embarrassed by the state of her kitchen. Though we’d met eighteen months earlier we weren’t well enough acquainted for her to know that Dave and I couldn’t care less about formalities. We sat down, picked up some branches and got to work. Two hours later the six of us were sweeping leaves from the kilim covering the floor into big plastic sacks, which Şükran and her sister-in-law would carry to a nearby soap workshop. They would be paid one Turkish lira a pound for the leaves.