Supra: A Feast of Georgian Cooking by Tiko Tuskadze (Pavilion, 2017)
Growing up in 1980s’ Armenia, dinner parties with extended family on special occasions were a popular thing. On our long table – actually, several, joined together – were red and black Caspian caviar, tinned Latvian sprat, home-made spicy Georgian ajika and Russian Stolichny salad; sometimes also Uzbek plav, back then all belonging to one and the same country.
Among our guests was Aunt Alla, our glamorous neighbour. An ethnic Armenian from Georgia, a sister Soviet republic, she fitted the stereotype of a Tbilisian woman, the Parisian of the Transcaucasus, Queen Tamar personified - graceful, regal posture, elegant dress sense and culinary prowess. In summertime, she received sunny citrus fruits from her family in Georgia’s Black Sea coast; in wintertime, she made chicken satsivi, the Georgian equivalent of the Christmas turkey – my first Georgian main dish.
Since then, I have had countless slices of khachapuri (cheese bread) in Yerevan, varieties of lobio by my mother’s Laz friend, and platefuls of khinkali (dumplings with meat or alternative fillings) – in pre-pandemic Krakow, of all places.
All three dishes feature in Supra: A Feast of Georgian Cooking by Tiko Tuskadze, the London-based Georgian restaurateur. Through sketches of the life and times of Georgians of the late Soviet period, Tuskadze recalls school holidays at her family dacha and her gourmand grandmother’s myriad bean dishes during the early 1990s’ post-Soviet food shortages, civil war and energy crisis.
So how does Georgian cooking, as presented in Supra, compare with its nearest peers and those further afield?
If sofrito is the base in Italian sauces, the ground spice and walnut purée mixture is indelible in the Georgian ones. There is less rice than in a typical Iranian feast, fewer grains than in Turkish cooking, no lentils (other than red kidney and black beans) as found in the Armenian cuisine, and no pickles, in contrast to the Russian one. As for Soviet influences, mayonnaise and soured cream make several appearances.
Then there is the pomegranate, which others in the region (not least Armenians and Iranians) venerate and lay claim to it as being their national symbol. The initiated might notice other shared culinary creations, such as dolma, the stuffed cabbage or vine leaves named slightly differently around the Eastern Mediterranean, or lavash, the unleavened Armenian flatbread included on UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Indeed, the concept of supra - a feast - with a procession of dishes, blurred boundaries between courses, and toasts and music, is a cultural feature of Georgia’s neighbouring Turkey (sofra) as well as Iran (sofreh).
Author’s take on Tiko Tuskadze’s Kidney Bean Salad with Walnuts
Lovers of high-carb foods will find filling, tasty breads, such as Adjaruli khachapuri, shaped like a boat, owing to Ajaria’s seaside location, with the egg in the middle signifying the sun. However, for a coastal country, Georgian cuisine is not associated with fish. Among desserts, uniquely in West Asia, you will find pelamushi - a purple jelly based on grape juice. When I had it at a London restaurant, it included pomegranate molasses and, in true Georgian fashion, added red wine. No grapes are used in the Supra recipes, so get used to sour green plums, found for instance in the tangy Tkemali sauce.
The abundance of herbs may take some getting used to for the Western palette: by Tuskadze’s own admission, walnut recipes are overwhelmingly numerous. However, the book has a clear structure, short instructions, and a great hack: rather than removing the sautéed onions, push them to the side of the pan before adding tomatoes to the centre. Warning: most portion sizes are too large (for a house-full of supra guests?). There is hardly anything that would be hard to source or execute for an average, if experimental, cook like myself. Two exceptions are dried marigold and blue fenugreek, an herb endemic to Georgia, required for the suneli spice mix and tricky to find.
Author’s take on Tiko Tuskadze’s Borscht
I tried the satisfying Nigvziani Ziteli Lobio (kidney bean salad with walnuts), using cranberries instead of pomegranate seeds, and Beetroot Soup (yes, the Slavic influence). The vegetarian Borscht, my first carrot- and potato-free one, substitutes cabbage with fennel and Bramley apples in a nod towards Tuskadze’s changed geography. The result is tart and light on the digestive system. Because food gets adopted and adjusted (remember when curry became Britain’s national dish?), Tuskadze, having tried her recipes through living in England and running her restaurants called Little Georgia, also recommends alternatives – including an alternative to sulguni cheese - one portion of feta with half a portion of mozzarella.
Georgia, the land of polyphonic singing, of Rustaveli, Pirosmani and Parajanov, is becoming an accessible tourist destination, while its food is making waves abroad. One Georgian restaurant I recently visited in London was full of Russian speakers; another had an overwhelmingly British crowd. Then again, Georgian cuisine had for decades been revered throughout the Soviet empire, owing in no small amount to Stalin’s roots and culinary preferences, and so Aladebi (or Oladi in Russia) breakfast pancakes, Chakhokhbili (chicken stew) and ajapsandali vegetable stew with aubergines, a staple in the Caucasus and Levant alike, have long since entered the Armenian household. The latter is garnished with purple basil, which Tuskadze calls ‘pink’.
As is typical of first-generation immigrants, underlying Supra is a recollection of lost social and familial moorings, an attempt to re-create tastes and smells of one’s homeland. Yet, whilst vignettes affectionately paint a picture of a bygone world, its main function is to give the English-speaking cook an easy-to-follow introduction to the cuisine of ‘the other Europe’. It does this without being overbearing, with sweet illustrations, retro family photos and stylish photography of somewhat Eastern-looking food, like the rounded, intricate, ornamental letters of the Georgian alphabet. But then what is cooking if not a "landscape in a saucepan", as food writer Claudia Roden termed it (quoting Catalan author Josep Pla)? And what is food if not culture on a plate?
Written by Naneh Hovhannisyan for “Breaking Bread With Neighbours”, a short series on culinary culture across the region.
Naneh grew up as a closet gourmand in the latter days of Soviet Armenia. She prides herself on taste - also called ‘gustatory’ – memory, and on her ability to survive on rounds of strong coffee alone. Cooking is for her an act of resistance, creativity and indulgence. She lives in England with her family, and in the time left from selling books for a living, tries to read them for pleasure.