Lentil soup comes to the rescue in earthquake-ravaged Turkey

Amid the humanitarian crisis that followed the February 6 earthquake in Turkey and Syria, one relief supply has been ubiquitous: lentil soup.

“It’s cold here,” says 28-year-old Aylin Kilinçli at a tent camp in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi. “When we eat the soup, it warms us,” she says.

Kilinçli and her mother have just collected two steaming cups of lentil soup from volunteer cooks. They cook the soup in 70-litre metal kettles. Because gas and electric service have been knocked out throughout the area, the lentil soup bubbles into pots sitting on cinder blocks over open wood fires.

/ Jason Beaubien/NPR

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Jason Beaubien/NPR

Other food is also being distributed to the hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by the devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake. But throughout the earthquake-stricken zone, lentil soup is a staple.

It is a famous dish – one of the traditional soups in the area around the city of Gaziantep, home to around 2 million inhabitants. But that is not the only reason for its popularity.

“It’s very quick to prepare the lentil soup even in an emergency. It’s also easy to serve,” says Gülay Bozkurt, a nutritionist and food engineer at a municipal kitchen that used to prepare free hot meals to distribute to 21 locations across the city . Now the kitchen is serving meals to shivering survivors and aid workers.

People can eat it without utensils, straight out of a bowl, she says. “You can eat it standing up. It’s very convenient.”

“It’s very nutritious,” she adds, rattling off statistics about calories, grams of protein, carbohydrates and vitamins per serving.

“It’s also loaded with onions and garlic,” which, she says, help ward off infections and colds.

In short, it’s a super soup, especially during a humanitarian disaster. It warms the displaced, nourishes rescuers and serves as a comfort food for residents traumatized by the disaster, even those whose homes survived. Many of them cannot cook at home because the quakes destroyed gas and electrical lines.

Faruk Izi is the director of the kitchen where Bozkurt oversees the lentil soup. He says that in the early days of this crisis, when so many people had lost their homes or were afraid to return to them, two things were crucial.

“First there was water and then there was soup,” he says. The first meal his facility prepared after the earthquake was lentil soup, huge vats of lentil soup. Normally, Izi’s municipal kitchen provides 13,000 meals a day. On the first day after the earthquake, he says they distributed soup to more than 200,000 people.

“The most important thing people need is something hot. That’s why we started making soup,” he says. “We offered lentil soup and tea. In this cold weather, it’s very important to have something warm, and soup is very important.”

Their soup kitchen sustained no damage, he notes—it’s a government structure built to strict construction standards. The worst thing that happened was that some of the soup leaked.

Mikail Dağtekin, the head chef at the kitchen, says part of the beauty of lentil soup is its simplicity.

“First we boil the water,” he says. “We add a little olive oil and salt to the water.” Then he adds 45 grams of lentils—or about a quarter cup—for each person they plan to feed. For Dağtekin, that means dumping 55-kilogram sacks of pink lentils into the pot. Then he adds onion and garlic.

“Onions and garlic are the most important part of it. You can’t do without it,” he says.

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Jason Beaubien/NPR

Dağtekin, a chef for 30 years, says it is not necessary for him to set a timer. “Cook it for a while,” he says. When the lenses are soft, they are ready. Then he mash them with a long hand blender that looks more like a drill than a cooking pot.

If he has meat broth, he adds broth. If he doesn’t have broth, he skips it.

Then he adds enough flour to thicken the soup.

Meanwhile, in another pot, he heats up cold-extracted olive oil—a process that supposedly retains more nutrients. (Some other cooks say they use gallons of melted butter for this step.) To the oil, he adds cumin, bay leaves and ground black and red pepper. Let the spices seep into the oil, but don’t let it get too hot, he says. Then he adds some tomato puree to the oil and spices.

The last step in his recipe: Stir the oil mixture into the mashed lentils. Serve warm.

When Dağtekin is asked about the secret behind making a really good lentil soup, he doesn’t miss a beat. “We add our love,” he says with a warm, wide smile.

At a time when so many people affected by the earthquake are facing so many difficulties, the warmth of a traditional soup is about more than just the temperature of the bowl.

Samantha Balaban and Tuğba Öcek contributed to this story

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