Smoking apple and drinking licorice

I don't think anyone is going to accuse the average Turk of being a health nut.  True, Turks may not drink Big Gulps and eat giant bags of Oreos while driving their SUVs down to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Cracker Barrel (I'm looking at you, America).  But they do maintain their share of vices.  I, of course, saw no reason not to take a few of those vices out for a test run. 

The strong tea and baklava (God help me, I do love it so)  I can probably survive.  Rakı and nargile, on the other hand, could take me out in short order.

For those of you who don't know - and why would you, really? - rakı (pronounced rock-ah, not rock-ee)  is the national drink of Turkey.  The books tell me rakı is distilled from grapes, mixed with ethanol, and laced with anise.  It runs about 90 proof, i.e., 45 percent pure alcohol.  In addition to serving as a beverage, I'm guessing rakı also can be used as a paint thinner, and possibly as fuel for the internal combustion engine.

Rakı is so strong, in fact, that no one just sits in a bar drinking rakı.  That would be suicide.  Instead, the Turks insist that rakı be drunk only with food, most commonly with seafood.  If you look around the tables at any Istanbul fish restaurant, you can immediately spot the tourist by finding a wine glass on a table.  All the self-respecting Turks are drinking their rakı.

Rakı is clear like vodka (or rubbing alcohol, for that matter), and served in a tall thin glass.  The hard-core rakı drinkers will take it neat; the more timid mix it with water, which for chemical reasons beyond my understanding, turns the drink a milky white.  Ice can also be added, if that's how you like your milk-colored, anise-flavored alcoholic beverage.  The French have a version of this (pastis), as do the Greeks (ouzo and sambuca) and, oddly, the Colombians (aguardiente).  The translation of the South American version - aguardiente - is literally "fiery water."  Enough said.

The first time I tried rakı, I truly hated it.  Hated it.   I never liked the taste of anise or licorice to begin with, from the first handful of Good & Plenty candy I spat out as a child.  Mix that with 90 proof alcohol, and I felt like I was choking down red rope dissolved in kerosene. Ugh.  The national drink?  Really?

Couldn't they at least try the whiskey?

But the fact is I wanted to like rakı.  Turkey is where I live now, and this is what Turkish drinkers who drink alcohol want to drink when they're out drinking (and eating fish, at least).  Who wants to sit at dinner with a group of Turks laughing and talking and toasting each other with rakı while you ask the waiter if he can perhaps recommend a nice Cabernet, precocious yet with a hint of whimsy?   It would be like going to Oktoberfest in Munich and ordering a mojito.

So I kept giving rakı its second, third, and fourth chances. With water, and three cubes of ice, please, or as we say in Turkey, buzlu. Yes, it still tasted like red rope.  But at least it was cold red rope.

Then, on about the fourth try, I noticed that the rakı started going down much easier.  After an hour or so, as the rakı glass continued to be refilled, I stopped in mid-sentence, looked across the table at my dinner companion and said:  "You know, I am really digging this rakı!  Should we get more?" 

 Just like that, the rakı makers had sucked in another convert.  Remember, it is 45 percent alcohol.  My theory is that the brain cells charged with remembering that the drink tastes like licorice are systematically eliminated, like witnesses to a mob hit.  Eventually most of the remaining brain cells decide that, hey, this actually tastes pretty good.  The others are beaten into submission, or otherwise intimidated into silence. 

Perhaps this is something the makers of Good & Plenty should look into.

Of course drinking - even drinking fiery licorice water - is one thing.  Smoking is quite another.

I smoked my last cigarette on April Fool's Day, 1986.  I was eight years old.  

Oh, I'm joking, of course.  I was twelve years old. 

In fact I was a serious smoker back in the day, but since that time I have rarely, if ever, had any kind of craving for a cigarette or any other tobacco-related product.  If I'm honest about it, I will admit that part of the reason I quit was that smoking was no longer an acceptable social activity (in contrast to, say, the much more socially acceptable activity of binge drinking).  We've done a pretty effective job of turning smokers into social pariahs, forcing them into a back room or out in the cold if they still want to light up.  If you want to smoke in America, you have to really want to smoke.

Turkey, however, hasn't made it nearly as far down this path.  True, smoking cigarettes is officially banned in all enclosed public spaces in Istanbul.  (Bars and some restaurants will wink at this, bringing a customer a paper cup for an ashtray if they pull out a cigarette).  But that ban has not been extended to the nargile bar - a centuries-old establishment that combines the conviviality of a coffee house with the ambiance of a Chinese opium den.


If you know about nargile (nar-geel-eh) at all, you probably know it as hookah, or shisha, as it is called throughout the Middle East.  It is essentially an over sized, bong-like water pipe with a hose sticking out of it.  Attached to the hose - in Turkey, at least - is perhaps a two-foot-long, baton-like stick that looks like something a snake charmer would play.  Atop the water pipe is a bowl and a metal tray.  In the bowl is placed, um, something to smoke.  The bowl is then covered with foil, and heated with coals. 

When you walk into a nargile bar, you truly know you are not in Shreveport anymore.  The clientele usually is about 90 percent men, and often you do get to sit close to the ground on little cushions, just like the inside of Barbara Eden's bottle on "I Dream of Jeannie."  (That fact alone might explain its lasting popularity.)

While I had passed by countless nargile bars in Istanbul, this was not an activity I was likely to try on my own.  I would have no idea what I was doing, and I would hate to cause an international incident by trying to suck on the wrong end of something.  Yet when my long-time friend Mark came to visit recently, it was only a matter of time before we ended up at a bar that just happened to offer nargile.  And what were going to do when offered?  Just say no?

I had never been anywhere near a nargile pipe before coming to Turkey. Quite honestly I had no idea what it was, or at least, what was being smoked.  This particular bar offered the nargile in a variety of "flavors."  As the menu was in Turkish, the only flavor I recognized was apple (elma), so that's what I picked.  The waiter appeared to be pleased with my choice, and this seemed harmless enough to me.   It was hard to imagine falling into a bad crowd by smoking something that normally comes in a pastry.


The waiter loaded up and covered the bowl, stuck on some hot coals, and fired up the pipe.  We were given our own individual little plastic mouthpieces to fit into the smoking baton.  When I held the fabric-covered stick up to mouth for the first time I felt slightly ridiculous, realizing that this is exactly what I would look like if I played the oboe. 

But the smoke went down surprisingly smoothly, as if this wasn't really smoking at all.  This, of course, is the whole idea.   It didn't quite taste like apple, but it didn't taste like tobacco, either.   Groups at each table talked and laughed, passed their pipes back and forth, and ordered more drinks.  I gave a big thumbs up to the social part of Social Smoking.   But then again, for the first time since the Nancy Reagan Administration, I was smoking.  I mean, I was smoking something. 

Whatever I was smoking, I rationalized that it couldn't be as bad as smoking a cigarette.  If there was any tobacco at all, I figured it must be some kind of faux tobacco, like the nicotine version of Splenda, or I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.  It was apple, for God's sake.  This was probably just like smoking a piece of pie, right?

Post-nargile bar research revealed that I was right.  Smoking nargile is not as bad as smoking a cigarette.  It's actually 100 times worse than smoking a cigarette.

The substance being smoked is in fact tobacco, claims of "apple" not withstanding.  According to the Mayo Clinic, each nargile session typically lasts more than 40 minutes (yeah, I'm sure we hit that), and consists of 50 to 200 inhalations that each range from 0.15 to 0.50 liters of smoke (sounds about right). That means that in an hour-long smoking session of nargile, a user will consume about 100 to 200 times the smoke of a single cigarette; in a 45-minute smoking session a typical smoker would inhale 1.7 times the nicotine of a single cigarette.  

Oh.  I see.  So I guess what the Mayo Clinic is trying to tell me is that as much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, smoking nargile is not just like playing the oboe. 

So alright then: for the sake of my lungs I guess I'll pass on the nargile, and stick with the tea, baklava, and occasional rakı.  If only I knew where I could snag some of those I Dream of Jeannie throw pillows.