Thought for Food
BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
No doubt you heard about Azerbaijan’s recent bellicose pronouncements
about `cuisine plagiarism’ by Armenia, i.e. we are `stealing’ their
food. As if that weren’t enough, Armenians stand accused of doing all
that Azerbaijan ACTUALLY DOES by way of cultural destruction
(think-khachkars in the Julfa cemetery), changing place names
(think-Gandzak becoming Gyanja), and misappropriating national values
(think- the Azerbaijani invented history of Armenia). These people
must have psychologists drooling over a potential study of the
psychological phenomenon call projection.
All that is pretty cheeky for a country that never existed before the
birth of the Soviet Union. Not only that, but there was never a
recognition of the people living there as a nation. They were just
called Turks or Tatars. So how there could have been a `national’
cuisine attributable to these people is really a mystery. But, it all
fits the pattern of behavior – using any and all excuses to defame,
vilify, and beset the Republic of Armenia and Armenians – that Baku has
adopted as state policy. How ridiculous it is that the Ministry of
Defense of Azerbaijan is spearheading this ridiculous campaign.
Contemporaneously, you probably also learned of Turkey’s effort in the
halls of Europe to register sarma/dolma (mispronounced by Eastern
Armenians as tolma) as its national food. Again, this is pretty
cheeky for a country whose origins stem from a bunch of murderous
horsemen arriving on the Armenian plateau and Anatolia from Central
Asia. Is it really plausible that they carried with them a food as
complex and requiring agriculture – not something nomads engage in – as
sarma?
While admittedly the word dolma is Turkish, and is prevalent
throughout much of the territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire,
there’s a reason for this phenomenon. It turns out the Ottomans had a
policy of spreading the food of the lands they occupied throughout the
empire, but exclusively under Turkish names. Now, it’s hard to tell
where any of these foods originated as a consequence. I had this
experience in college. My freshman year, I’d brought some sarma to
the dorm. I shared some with a sophomore who was a Croat. We were
both surprised to learn we had the same name for it. Gee, I wonder if
Croatia ever suffered Turkish misrule…
This vying over the ownership of food is not unique to Armenians and
Turks. For a while, I was getting videos or other forms of news about
what can only be described as food `wars’ between Lebanon and Israel.
People there were making outsized versions of what they considered
their `own’ dishes. The example that stands out the most is the 5
meter-wide, 233 kilogram (16 ¼ feet, 513 pound) seenee koefteh (again,
the Turkish name for it), kibbeh in Arabic, cooked in Lebanon. This
is how people are vying to retain ownership over `their’ cuisines.
It’s no surprise that something so viscerally important as food
triggers such emotion, energy, and even jealousy.
That’s why it’s galling, on one level, to learn, from the Turkish
Cultural Foundation’s newsletter that it held a lecture Constantinople
(renamed Istanbul as part of Turkey’s cultural destruction practice)
about Armenian food, then served up some of it. On the other hand,
this might also be good in that it helps reestablish the Armenian
presence where it was brutally ripped out by the Genocide.
That fervor is also why a cookbook such as Armenian Cuisine, by Aline
Kamakian and Barbara Drieskens, published last year, is so important.
These ladies went to occupied Western Armenia and other areas of
pre-Genocide Armenian habitation to gather recipes for various dishes,
compared them with the traditions handed down to us from our
great/grandparents from the same locales, and served them to us in
this very well done book.
All this is the best response to Gustavo Arrellano who, writing in the
Orange County Register two years ago, reacted almost contemptuously to
one of my pieces in which a criticized the usurpation of Armenian
dishes through the teaching of `Turkish’ cooking classes in Orange
County under the auspices of the Pacifica Foundation (one of the Gulen
Movement’s front organizations).
Let’s proudly retain and regain what’s rightfully ours, despite what
the murderous cousins – Azerbaijan and Turkey – might say and do.