Mandarin season and the Aegean winter table
Bodrum mandarins from November to February, fruit picked in the garden, new-season olive oil and market stalls: what comes to the table in an Aegean winter.
In winter a scent drifts across the Bodrum Peninsula. You catch it walking past a garden gate, beside a market stall, in the kitchen as you peel the first fruit of the morning. Mandarin. It arrives in November, stays until February, and changes the whole feel of the season.
The Bodrum mandarin
The Bodrum mandarin is a regional speciality, and the peninsula is full of citrus groves. In the courtyards of old village houses, behind roadside walls, in small hillside gardens, the trees hang heavy with orange fruit all winter. The harvest runs roughly from November to February.
The fruit is small, thin-skinned and easy to peel, somewhere between sweet and sharp, with a deep fragrance. Peel one fresh from the branch and the oil stays on your fingers for hours. That is the signature of the season.
Choosing a good mandarin
At the market, look past the shiniest fruit and pick the ones that feel heavy in your hand; weight means juice. The skin should sit close to the flesh and the colour should be bright. A leaf or stalk still attached tells you it was picked recently. Don’t worry about a few marks, as fruit from village gardens is rarely flawless. Ask if you can taste. The answer is usually a peeled segment pressed into your hand.
At home, keep mandarins out of the fridge. In a basket somewhere cool they last happily for days. With a tree in the garden, though, the best plan is to pick just what you need each morning.
Picking from the garden
The garden around our homes has mandarin, orange, pomegranate, quince, pear and mulberry trees, and guests are welcome to pick fruit in season. Pomegranates and quinces in autumn, mandarins and oranges in winter; in summer the vegetable patch gives tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.
A few small things when picking: don’t pull, give the fruit a gentle twist at the stem. A ripe mandarin comes away easily. Take only what you need; fruit keeps for days on the tree, which is the best larder there is.
Olive oil and the winter table
In the Aegean, olives are harvested in late autumn, so new-season oil turns up at markets and in the villages through the winter. Freshly pressed oil has a slightly bitter, peppery bite. A slice of bread and a little salt are all it needs.
The winter table here is simple and green. Wild greens, vegetables cooked in olive oil, white beans, lentil soup, fish from the oven. Aegean cooking follows the season: whatever the market has in winter is what you eat. Dinners are long and nobody is in a hurry to get up.
- Don’t throw the peel away. Dry it for tea, or simmer it with sugar to make candied peel.
- Bake quinces with a little sugar and a few cloves, and serve with thick cream or yoghurt.
- Scatter pomegranate seeds over salads, yoghurt, even grilled fish.
- Buy olive oil in small bottles and keep it somewhere cool and dark.
Markets
The real heart of the winter kitchen is the market. The Saturday market in Turgutreis is the closest to our homes and the biggest, with crates of mandarins, village cheeses, olives, herbs and new oil. In Bodrum town, the fruit and vegetable market is held on Fridays, and Yalıkavak has its own weekly markets too.
Go early, taste things, and exchange a few words with the stallholders. Winter markets are calm and people have more time to talk. İrfan is happy to tell you which stall to buy olive oil from, and which one for cheese.
Thinking of spending the winter here? Have a look at our winter page.
November–February
Come in mandarin season
Fruit trees in the garden and a kitchen made for long stays. Talk to İrfan directly about winter and monthly stays.
