Goby

* The general name, to which various additions are made according to the species. Thus kumurcun kayası and saz kayası . . . a dozen or more. The Turks are discriminating and enthusiastic over the goby.

The name kaya can be given, or pronounced, as gaya, and this provided an explanation for a mystery surrounding the identity of a fish to which Claudia Roden referred in her wonderful Book of Jewish Food. There she stated that the Jews of Istanbul regarded as one of their special dishes (referring to it indeed as ‘the Jewish national dish of Turkey’) something called Gaya con Avramila, rock fish cooked with small, sour, yellow-green plums. She was told that these rock fish were deemed to be kosher although they lacked scales (a puzzle). However, she had not seen or tasted gaya herself, and hoped that somebody could identify it. An expert correspondent in Istanbul, Haluk Bitek, then explained (in Petits Propos Culinaires issue no 56, Prospect Books, London, 1997) that gaya was a distortion and abbreviation of the Turkish name kaya balığı, whose literal translation is ‘rock fish’. He said that the kaya in question were gobies about 15 cm long, with a dark brown back (which does have scales) and white belly, in season only during the spring. As for the name of the sour plums, Avram is a rendering of the name Abraham, so these are Abraham’s sour plums. Mr Bitek added for good measure that a Jewish lady colleague had given him the following directions for preparing the dish:

Boil 250 g (9 oz) of avramila until they are really soft, then press them to take out the juice. Mix the juice with a little sugar, salt, pepper and oil (olive, sunflower, corn) and if the juice is too thick add a little water to thin it down. Put this in a pan, place over the fire, add the fish and cook together. Excess plum juice can be frozen.