Once I got stuck in Atyrau, on the Caspian Sea. I've been stuck there a few times in fact, but here I want to talk in particular about the time I discovered this recipe. A bit of background about the town first. Five years ago when I first went to Atyrau, it was a small old town on the Ural River, surrounded by marshy salt desert. Most of the buildings were tatty five storey apartment blocks or ramshackle old wooden houses. The streets were narrow and mostly untarred. Historically, it had been a fishing town and following the collapse of the Soviet Union many people living there had become very poor. There were rumours of vast reserves of oil in the area and the only decent hotel in the town catered to a trickle of oil exploration people passing through. The Ural River is considered to form part of the border between Europe and Asia and the most interesting thing for visitors to Atyrau in those days was that you could wander back and forward from continent to continent on foot.
Nowadays the existence of the vast reserves of oil has been confirmed and the swanky hotels and office blocks are beginning to sprout. There's even a business centre. The trickle of incomers has swollen to a flood. Prices are rising but many of the town's long-time residents are still very poor. Fences and security guards figure quite prominently along the interface between the old and the new. I revisited the original hotel, which has since been smartened up and has its own security system. There's a sense of siege about the place. The residents are generally oil workers who have just arrived, quiet and depressed about the thought of fifteen days on an oil field ahead of them, or those who have just come in from the fields, desperate to get to the airport the next morning. Not being an oil worker, I didn't click with any of them.
The hotel has a posh-looking restaurant with good coffee. Many of the guests are Italian and wherever you find Italians, you find good coffee. The food isn't bad as far as hotel food goes, but meat figures heavily on the menu. I was often reduced to scavenging at the salad bar and that's where this recipe was born.
Every day at the salad bar, there were slices of fresh tomato, pieces of fresh orange and occasionally grapefruit, walnut halves and black olives in olive oil. I ate this combination at least once a day, sometimes twice. It sounds unusual and it is, but it tastes good. On my return home I experimented and discovered that a little chopped green coriander brought all the tastes together nicely. Chopped basil also goes quite well if you are using grapefruit.
I was happy to escape Atyrau. I don't enjoy the ex-pat oil scene and despite the flashy buildings and other trappings of the town's new found wealth, beneath the surface it is very much as it was five years ago. The most exciting thing to do of an evening still seems to be to escape the confines of the hotel and pop over to Europe for a beer.
This isn't an amazing salad but then, Atyrau isn't an amazing place.
Ingredients
1 orange or grapefruit (or a mixture of both)
1 tomato
A small handful of walnut halves
A handful of pitted black olives
A few sprigs of green coriander
A splash of olive oil
Just a little salt
Peel the orange or grapefruit with a knife, removing the pith completely. Cut the fruit into chunks and do the same with the tomato. Break the walnut halves into slightly smaller pieces and chop the coriander. Mix everything together.
PS. If you really fancy the idea of nipping back and forward
from Europe to Asia, I would recommend Istanbul.