October 2020: GEORGIAN FOOD ON MY MIND
As relief from featuring American food writers for two consecutive monthly themes, I decided to take The Kitchen Scholar into a different path this month by exploring the cuisine of an unknown and poorly represented country for a change. But, which country?
My eyes and mind coursed through the world map for two weeks, picking locations and testing myself how much I know about their history, art, culture, and the reproducibility and adaptability of their respective cookery, well, at least in theory. Do I really need to be in that country to have a first-hand experience of their gastronomy? But, who travels for leisure and learning nowadays in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic? After so much searching, I ended up choosing a country that I had never been to, yet a sovereign nation that has a cuisine I could live and cook vicariously through, an application of social distancing in the context of cookery. That country is the Republic of Georgia, which, for the sake of trivia, is geographically smaller and historically older than the American star-and-stripe state of the same name.
Doesn’t Georgian cuisine equate to Russian food? At a surface level, yes, indeed; for an uninformed or outdated mindset! Georgian dishes were cast members of Soviet gastronomic repertory. However, their prominence and assimilation into Russian cookbooks of the previous century would have been nonexistent had the most famous yet vindictive and genocidal Georgian native, Joseph Stalin, failed to dominate and shape the post-Leninist landscape of the Kremlin, an extraordinary case of the vanquished becoming the conqueror. Plus, Soviet Union had long dissolved for almost 30 years as a ramification of Cold War closure, therefore, granting Georgian cookery the autonomy it had long aspired and deserved.
Georgian cuisine is just as independent as the republic, if not more so, since the latter recently encountered military skirmishes against separatists and Russian forces along the Caucasian border in 2008, thus, losing its two provinces, Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia, in the process. The flavor, taste, and identity of Georgian dishes do not only tie to the fertility of the plains and valleys overlooked by the Caucasus Mountains, the abundance of the Black Sea and local rivers, and the temperate to subtropical Mediterranean-like climate but also to the hospitable people who struggled and survived centuries of various foreign rule and invasions and tolerated the diverse outsider influences.
Three ingredients, namely walnuts, coriander or cilantro, and marigold, characteristically stand out and define Georgian cookery, and each of them will figure prominently in most dishes of this month’s gastronomic primer. Evidenced by the simultaneous emphasis of the delicate nutty notes and attenuation of the perishable oiliness, Georgian cooks have successfully mastered and integrated the intricate chemistry of the walnut into their savory and sweet dishes. The essential herb in every kitchen is the coriander or cilantro, which Georgians will not hesitate from eating excessively. Marigold flowers that grow in the western province of Imereti are irreplaceable floral elements that give sauces and stews their radiant and earthy connections.
The Russian Romantic poet, Alexander Pushkin, once lauded every Georgian dish as a poem. If you are uncertain about Pushkin’s hype, The Kitchen Scholar will introduce a sampler of recipes, ranging from Borani to Khachapuri to Tkemali. With the exception of marigold, most ingredients are highly accessible, thus, every featured food is adaptable and reproducible in bringing Georgian fantasy into an exotic gastronomic reality. Fingers crossed that learning and experiencing Georgian dishes from a social distance will lead not only to a deeper interest in the cuisine itself but also to similar monthly themes in the future.
