Obsessions: Tahini sauce
At Umbrella we appreciate the details. So we understand when our readers are into something – really into something. In this instalment of our regular Obsessions feature, Anthony Teasdale describes his passion for a very special condiment.
It’s 1981, Liverpool.
We’re going out for a meal. Me, mum and dad.
A meal, not at the Cavalier Steak House by the Maghull roundabout, but somewhere altogether more exotic.
We’re going to the Greek.
‘The Greek’ is the Kebab House restaurant on Hardman Street in Liverpool city centre. We’ve been going there as long as I can remember.
While I do like the Cavalier’s rump steak and chips – an English Civil War-themed chain beloved of Scouse fellas called Ken who drive Austin Princesses (“I find a couple of pints improves my steering, you know, Dave, lad”) – the Kebab House is in a different league.
Dad is often there with his mates from work: a gang of luckless horse-racing junkies and bitter football theorists who all watch Everton while I tag along when we’ve been to see Liverpool. And while I’d like to go more – the waitresses, a bunch of beautiful salt-of-the-earth scouse women, endlessly indulge me – we visit enough for me to develop an addiction to this beige paste they serve with everything.
It’s called tahini sauce.
At our local Fine Fare supermarket – next to the dry-cleaners on the shopping parade, just down from Shirley’s hairdressers – you’d be hard-pressed to find tahini. In fact, the only place in the universe – well, my universe – that serves tahini is the Kebab House. And this, I later find out, is because the Kebab House, isn’t Greek but Greek-Cypriot, its spicy, saucy dishes more Istanbul than Athens.
When we arrive at the restaurant, and before we’ve even thought about mains, two small dishes of tahini and fluffy, crunchy-on-the-outside hot breads come to the table. I rip off a chunk of bread and dip it into the tahini until the sauce-to-bread ratio is about six-to-one. It looks like I’m eating plaster of Paris.
I wouldn’t have been able to describe the taste and texture then, apart from “it’s nice”, but with the benefit of age and a nearby thesaurus, it’s deeply, savoury or umami – hitting all the same taste buttons as parmesan, gravy or chippy curry sauce.
There’s a vague nuttiness that doesn’t taste of nuts, a creaminess which is nothing like cream and a lemon-garlic saltiness that is the most lemony-garlicky-salty thing I’ve ever experienced.
Because I’m a child of habit, dad orders the usual half-’afelia’ for my main. Afelia must have been designed for my carnivorous tastes: pork, slow-cooked in red wine and coriander seeds, without a trace of vegetables – thankfully. I take a fat chunk of pig and dip it into the tahini. Now we’re talking.
Fast forward 39 years. Over the passing decades I’ve spent too much time looking for tahini in the Turkish and Greek grocers of London. Not the raw stuff, which is horrible, but ‘tahinisala’ – a mix of tahini, oil, salt, garlic and lemon juice. In desperation I’ve tried to make it myself. Like curry (or political assassination), it’s one of those things better left to the professionals.
When I moved to Chiswick, a fancy suburb of west London in 1995, I located tubs of tahini sauce in the ‘upmarket-Spar’, Cullen’s, glorying in the familiar flavours of childhood. But Cullen’s went the way of all things ’90s and got bought out by the market leaders (Tesco), taking its tubs of tahini, and rotisserie chicken – another fave – with it.
And so my quest goes on. Whenever I pass a Turkish supermarket I’ll pop in looking for tahini sauce. What do always find there instead? Hummus.
Seriously, hummus. Has this stuff got a big PR agency on board? Because while tahini is like a Daft Punk remix on the tongue, hummus tastes of chick peas, second-hand futons and women called Ros. It’s seriously second best, and universally and illogically popular.
Which bring us back to Liverpool, summer 1981. As the meal comes to an end, Charles, the manager, comes over and tells us we’ll have to leave. Now. “Guys, the riots are coming down the street, we’re going to have to close.”
We leave quickly, avoiding the Toxteth riots as they spill from Park Road and Upper Parliament Street down to Hardman Street and the edge of the city centre. I don’t know it then but the uprising will be seen as one of the key events of the 1980s. And one that stops me from finishing those last, delicious wisps of tahini.