Vox Meditantis

What’s the best local dish you’ve ever eaten while traveling?

The inner courtyard of a caravanserai on the outskirts of Trebizond (Trabzon), in the Ottoman Empire, on the afternoon of Tuesday 10th August 1479. Late-summer heat presses down on the flagstones. A stone fountain mutters in the centre of the yard; bales of raw silk and sacks of Pontic hazelnuts are stacked against the arcade. A handful of mules stand tethered and swishing, still steaming faintly from the mountain road. The courtyard is neither fully public nor private – a liminal, dusty threshold between the trade routes over the Pontic Mountains and the walled city beyond.

The mules were still steaming faintly when the girl crossed the courtyard at something between a walk and a skip, her satchel swinging wide enough to catch the late light. She stopped two paces from the woman and looked up.

“What is the best dish you have eaten?” she said. “While travelling. The best one.”

The muleteer did not look up from the cinch-strap she was working loose. One hand kept its pressure on the buckle.

“Dish,” she said.

“Yes. Food. The best. Because my father says the Zigana road goes through seven villages and each has something different and he says the valley past the second pass has a lamb stew that is –” The girl stopped. “But you have come that way. Have you not? I saw your mules. They smell of the mountain.”

The woman pulled the strap free. The mule shifted, sighed. She moved to the next buckle.

“I have come that way.”

“So.” The girl stepped closer. “What did you eat there? Was it the stew? My father says the stew. With saffron, he says. Though I do not know if saffron is true or if he says it to make the story better.” She tilted her head. Her ink-stained fingers worked at the hem of her satchel strap. “Davvero? Was there saffron?”

“I don’t know saffron.”

“It is yellow. From a flower. It costs –” She made a gesture, something her father must have made, spreading her fingers to indicate expense. “Never mind. Was it lamb? Was it a soup? Was it eaten hot?”

The woman set the pack down against the wall of the arcade. She straightened, hands at her lower back for a moment, looking at nothing.

“I don’t remember lamb,” she said.

The girl opened her mouth, then closed it. This was not the answer she had been constructing a response to. She swung her satchel, once, the other direction.

“But then what? Something else? There must have been something. Bread? Lentils? My nurse makes lentils and they are not interesting, but perhaps on the road –”

“On the road, lentils are lentils.”

“Madonna,” the girl said, under her breath, not quite to the woman. She shifted her weight to the other foot. “But you have gone many ways. Not only the Zigana. Have you not? You have gone other ways. Further.”

The woman did not answer immediately. She reached for the water-skin hanging at the mule’s neck, unstoppered it, drank without pleasure or haste, stopped it again.

“Further,” she said.

“So.” The girl’s face rearranged itself around a new question. “Further. So: the best thing, from all the roads. Not only this road. All roads. Everything you have eaten. The very best. What was it?” She brought her hands together in a brief, involuntary clap, as if the question were a gift she was presenting. “I want to know.”

The woman looked at her then, properly, for the first time. The girl looked back.

“Why,” the woman said. It was not quite a question.

“Because –” The girl considered. “Because my lessons are done and I am not yet home and you have been to the places I have not been to.” She said this as if it were entirely reasonable, which, to her, it was.

The muleteer set the water-skin down. She looked at the fountain in the centre of the courtyard, which muttered to itself, indifferent to both of them. The light had turned. It came now at a lower angle under the arcade, catching the dust still rising from the packs.

“There was a place,” the woman said. Then she stopped.

The girl waited. This was difficult for her; she pressed her lips together and kept the satchel still.

“Past the second pass. East.” The woman’s hands had gone quiet at her sides. “There was bread. And something – onion, I think. Fried in fat. There was a step to sit on.”

The girl waited another moment. Then: “A step?”

“Outside a house.”

“And that was all? Only bread and onion?”

“The bread was warm.”

“But –” The girl looked at her with an expression close to pity. “That is not – I mean, bread and onion is not – is that truly the best?” She wrinkled her nose. “My mother gives bread and onion to the servants.”

The woman said nothing.

“Was there at least a sauce? A little?” The girl held her thumb and forefinger almost touching, measuring out the smallest possible concession. “Something on the bread? Oil? Anything?”

“Oil, maybe.”

“Maybe.” The girl repeated the word flatly. The wonder had gone out of her face. She had expected the Pontic mountains to yield something more extraordinary than bread, perhaps oil, and an onion. She scuffed her foot against the flagstone. “And truly that is the best. Of all the roads.”

“The light was going,” the woman said. Her voice was the same as it had been throughout, levelled by use, stripped of excess. “Behind the ridge. Orange, like that.” She did not gesture, did not perform it, only said the word as she might say any other word, flat and complete. “I was younger. There was someone with me.” A pause. “The bread was warm.”

The girl looked at her. Something in the girl’s face changed, though she would not have been able to say what had changed, only that the woman’s voice had gone somewhere for a moment and come back different.

“Who was it?” she said. “The person.”

The woman reached for the halter. “Doesn’t matter.”

“But – no, wait –” The girl took a step forward. “Was it your mother? Your husband? A friend? Did you eat it with hands or a spoon? Was the bread round or flat? Was it –”

“Girl.”

She stopped.

“It was bread,” the woman said. “I ate it. I walked on.”

From beyond the caravanserai walls, still far, the muezzin’s call came winding through the afternoon air, thin and searching. The mule by the fountain turned its head toward the sound and then turned away again. The light had moved further along the flagstones, eating into the shade beneath the arcade.

The girl stood with her satchel hanging. She looked at the flagstones. She thought about the onion. She thought there must be something more. She thought she would ask one more time.

“But truly,” she said. “If you could eat it again. Would you eat it again?”

The woman ran a hand along the mule’s neck. The mule’s tail moved.

“Yes,” she said. After a moment: “No.” After another: “I don’t know.”

The girl opened her mouth. And then, from somewhere near the gate, a woman’s voice called out – a name, two sharp syllables, the voice of someone who had been patient long enough. The girl’s head turned.

She looked back at the muleteer.

“I have to –” she said.

The woman did not look up.

The girl went, at something between a walk and a run, her satchel bumping at her hip, her feet finding the gaps between the flagstones without looking. In a moment the gate had taken her.

The muleteer stood in the courtyard. The fountain muttered. The light moved across the stone. She put her hand out toward the halter and held it there a moment, not quite touching it, looking at something that was not the wall or the arcade or the bales of silk going amber in the declining light.

Then she took up the halter, and led the mule toward the trough.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.