Azerbaijani cooking is built on sourness, and Teze Bazar is where the sourness is sold. Before the dolma and the kebab and the plov, there is the raw material — and at Baku’s oldest food market the raw material is stacked into pyramids and sorted into trays until the whole national palate is laid out in one room. Walk the fruit aisle, then the spice counter, and you have read the menu backward to its source.
The fruit table
It is June, and the tables are a census of the Azerbaijani summer. Apricots — the country’s signature stone fruit — run in two shades of yellow. Donut peaches sit flat beside ordinary ones. Dark cherries and pale Napoleon cherries share a row with mulberries, loquats, and three kinds of plum. And then the green ones: alça, the hard sour cherry-plum that Azerbaijanis eat unripe, dipped in salt, while it is still mouth-puckeringly tart. The sign over the crate says as much. Sourness here is not a flaw to be ripened out of the fruit; it is the reason for the fruit.
The spice counter
The spice trays make the same argument in powder. Saffron and turmeric for plov, the rice dish that anchors every celebration. Sumac — dark red, lemon-sharp — dusted over grilled meat without exception. Dried barberries, zirinc, the little garnet beads scattered through rice for acid and color. Cinnamon, ginger, paprika, and blends with no English name. This is the Silk Road inventory: Iran to the south, the Caucasus around, the Caspian at the door, all of it metabolized into one Azerbaijani spice rack. Jars of dark cornelian cherry and mulberry preserve hold down the back shelf — the sour fruit from the next aisle over, cooked down and bottled.
The market
Teze Bazar — “New Bazaar,” though it has stood some eighty years — sits on Samad Vurgun street, a short walk from the boulevard and the Old City. It is a working market, not a tourist set piece: butchers, a dairy hall, Caspian fish and black caviar, walls of dried fruit, pickles by the jar. Vendors will hand you a cherry to taste before you commit. Come in the morning, when the pyramids are still intact and the light through the roof is doing the produce favors.
The dolma comes with cornelian cherry sauce because the cornelian cherry was here first. Teze Bazar is the argument; dinner is only the conclusion.