At anchor in a Gökova cove in the late afternoon, the sound reaches you first from one of the small restaurants ashore: a sizzle over the pan, then the knife coming down on the board, then the setting-down of a plate. The smell spreads across the water right after — fried potato, garlic, a little tomato. That smell tells you the name of a dish, but the name is really the name of a place: Çökertme.
Çökertme is a cove and a village in the south of Gökova, over towards Ören. The dish now known as "Çökertme kebabı" takes its name from here. By most accounts the dish came out of this village and spread to the tables of Bodrum and Muğla. Its exact origin is debated; but no one doubts that the name came from the cove.
What's on the Plate
Çökertme kebabı looks plain but comes in layers. At the bottom are potatoes cut fine and fried crisp — sliced like matchsticks, held in hot oil. Over them go thin slices of meat turned in butter; beef, sometimes lamb. On top of that, strained yoghurt with garlic, and at the very top a tomato sauce cooked in butter. Hot against cold, crisp against soft, garlic against butter — all of it stacked on a single plate. Done well, the potato keeps its crunch underneath, and the yoghurt loosens where it meets the warm meat.
It seems simple, but the timing takes skill. Fry the potatoes too early and they go limp; let the yoghurt sit too long and it weeps. So a good Çökertme is made when it's ordered; by the time it reaches the table there is still some movement on the plate.
The Song That Carries the Same Name
The same cove also has a song. "I set out from Çökertme, my head safe," it begins — an old Aegean zeybek that tells of smuggling, a chase, and a boat. There may be no direct link between the dish and the song; but their sharing a name is no accident, and both come from the memory of that shore. When a place's name settles into both a zeybek and a plate, there is a life that has been lived there.
For a charter guest the meaning is this: in Gökova, taking dinner ashore now and then, at a restaurant on the shore rather than aboard, leaves a different taste. If Çökertme kebabı appears on the menu, that is where you'll find it closest to the place it came from. Ordering a plate before you set off, and looking again at the cove that carries its name, lengthens the evening.
Even once the plate is cleared, the smell stays at the table a while. Across the water the cove withdraws into the dark; its name has passed twice in one evening — once at the table, once in an old song.
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