Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/15/attempt-to-make-turkish-coffee-in-tiny-sauce-pot-ends-in-failure.html
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Hi,
Firstly, I’m happy to see a positive thing in the western media about my home country! Thank you for this and I’m happy to see people enjoying a good Turkish coffee. I hope you keep enjoying our cuisine.
İbrik is a container of water, with a long and narrow mouth so that there’s some water pressure when flowing and it is used to wash hands etc.
The word you’re looking for is cezve when it comes to boiling milk or making coffee or mint&lemon tea when you have stomachache.
Kind Regards
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I was praising Turkish raki in the Happy Mutants Food Topic.
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Haha! I was thinking that as well, but – not being Turkish – wasn’t exactly sure if I am correct so didn’t dare to comment without checking first. In the meantime, you bet me to it 
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I’ve been reading BB through my RSS feed for quite some time, but didn’t know that there was a forum section (I’m assuming that’s where the food topic is? or is it under certain posts? This was my first post so I’m very new to the interactive part of BB, forgive my ignorance).
Rakı is indeed worthy of praise, though at times I wonder if that is solely because it’s a fine drink, or because of all the meze plates it comes with 
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I was not sure but from another angle, sometimes when one language is borrowing words from another it takes the wrong one. So I thought maybe ibrik made its way into English to mean cezve, but my gut feeling said that wasn’t the case. So I created an account and commented anyway 
EDIT: According to wikipedia, indeed ibrik made its way into English to mean cezve.
Although the Turkish word ibrik denotes simply a pitcher or [ewer], the term is often used in English to mean a Turkish coffee pot, which is known in Turkish as a [cezve].
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From WikipediaL “An ibrik is a container with a spout used for storing and pouring liquid contents. Although the Turkish word ibrik denotes simply a pitcher or ewer, the term is often used in English to mean a Turkish coffee pot, which is known in Turkish as a cezve.” For us illiterate anglos, an ibrik search would get us to a place to order a cezve.
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I just saw that a minute ago, languages are really interesting. Some decades ago a German civil engineer saw a small horizontal opening window that’s usually found in toilets, and asked “Was ist das?” (What is this?). The Turkish people there thought it was the name for it, so to this day, that small toilet window is called a vasisdas in Turkish language.
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I wonder what the actual difference is that necessitates a special dedicated pot? Width? Does it need to be deeper than the egg pot? Heat dispersion? Structure necessitating holding in air, rather than resting on hob?
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Possibly even the fact that it’s made from copper?!
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This is the point in this conversation where I am required by cultural law to make weak arguments that “Actually it was the Greeks” but we all know that’s a lie. Sigh.
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I’d say it was too wide, so more water evaporated than it should, and the top parts of it was hotter than it should be. Normally it would brew from the bottom while the top is relatively cooler, and needs to be taken off the heat the moment boiling is about to start. Brewing coffee for 1-2 people in a pot like that is too little. Maybe for 8-10 people it would’ve worked better? Still, for example when brewing coffee for a lot of people, a cezve (ibrik) for 3-4 people is used and brewed in batches so I’d say the process isn’t very scalable for some reason.
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Coffee grows neither in Turkey nor in Greece, so we (Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Serbs and others) imported the thing from Yemen and drank it. When the empire divorced, everybody took home all the recipes so the fights over what is whose are mostly moot, but still kinda fun
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My usual source for useful information like this didn’t yield much. Only:
where the answers are not really providing much insight.
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Yeah, coffee is Yemeni, but is Turkish coffee properly “Turkish coffee” or “Greek coffee”?
(It’s almost definitely not originally Greek coffee since the Greeks call the cezve a “briki”, which is cognate to ibrik – which comes from Arabic. So maybe it’s actually “Arabic coffee”?)
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Here you go
Here you go
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thanks
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I purchased a stainless one earlier this year after using a small teflon ‘egg pot’ for a while. I think the differences are minor, but here are my observations:
- Most/all copper/bronze cevke’s you can purchase are nickel or stainless inside; I think that maybe copper will corrode or make the coffee taste bad, so it isn’t the copper (I thought this might be the case too until I bought one).
- the foam comes from the edges. The side gets hot and boils and you can see the crema move in from the outside; at least if you use a slow heat. Larger pots have more surface area as a ratio of their sides, so less crema
- The slanted edge helps in pouring a little. You can more easily leave some of the grounds in the pot when you have the slant.
- Pouring into a small cup is much easier with the turkish pot versus a normal pot, because of the lip.
- At least for me, I really doubt there is anything about retaining the air in the width;
After seeing a lot of complaints about some of the more ornate ones online, I got a modern stainless utililitarian one below and am happy with it:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082WS14MB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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Veering off topic for a sec:
I was curious about this so i looked it up and the usage of the word to describe those kinds of windows has been in use since at least the 1700’s in France. The general thought is that it does have a connection to German but there isn’t a definitive proof or link
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Wow! Mind blown!
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