Spoiler: Real-deal lavash is not a cracker.
February 26, 2020
Bread is such a staple in Armenia that the word for it there, hats (pronounced “hots”), also means “meal”. But if you’re envisioning a repast of some thick artisan loaf, think again. When Armenians talk about bread, they usually mean lavash, the pliable flatbread cooked on the walls of a wood-fired clay oven called a tonir. Lavash is also the name of this month’s pick for the SAVEUR Cookbook Club. The book, a joint project by Kate Leahy, Ara Zada, and John Lee (read more in our intro to the selection here), offers a rare, mouthwatering exploration of the cuisine of modern-day Armenia—Soviet salads, flame-licked kebabs, cow hoof soups, and, of course, the region’s famous flatbread.
The chapter on Armenian breads, which takes on everything from whole wheat lavash to flatbreads stuffed with fresh herbs (more on those later), is rightly the book’s keystone. As Leahy et al. explain, bread has been made in Armenia since neolithic times, and as such, it’s tied to all sorts of customs, sayings, and superstitions. Ungrateful people, we learn, are said to lack “bread and salt.”
A deeper dive into Armenian food lore reveals that even today, some villagers won’t touch a new tonir until a priest has anointed it with holy water—such is its transcendental importance at the center of the home. According to Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore, by Irina Petrosian and David Underwood, lavash is often draped over an Armenian bride’s shoulder on her wedding day to prove her worth as a homemaker, as well as placed in the highest crevice of newlyweds’ houses for good luck. Children cement their friendship by simultaneously biting either end of a lavash, and an Armenian host(ess) with the most(est) is lovingly regarded as hahtsov, or “bready.”
So, let’s get bready. Here are our favorite Armenian breads to whet your appetite and get you thinking about—and cooking—more food from this oft-overlooked Caucasus nation.
One of the most quintessential scenes in Armenia is that of women (and it’s almost always women) making lavash around the tonir. The ingredients are deceptively straightforward—flour, water, salt, and a hunk of dough reserved from the last batch to help kickstart the fermentation—but the rolling… and rolling… and rolling… to achieve the requisite paper-thin consistency takes brawn, patience, and practice. So does the actual baking, which entails stretching the dough into shape over a straw-filled cushion called a rabata, then smacking it onto the wall of a blazing hot tonir, forearm hair be damned. (Yes, onto the wall of the oven, where it sticks and cooks.) A minute or two later, when it’s pocked all over with deep-brown blisters called bshtiks, it’s ready for consumption: Wrap it around juicy kebabs (khorovats), tear it straight into stews, or use it like you would parchment paper for en papillote dishes like baked Armenian trout. No tonir? No problem. Leahy and company recommend griddling the bread on an upside-down wok to approximate the real thing. Past-its-prime lavash can be transformed into a gooey comfort-food casserole called panrkhash made with the torn-up bread, cheese, and caramelized onions. Here’s how to make lavash.
Leahy calls jingalov hats the “breakout star” of the cookbook, and reader, we detect no puffery. These flavor-packed, football-shaped flatbreads, stuffed with a summer pasture’s-worth of wild herbs and greens, hail from the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh (aka Artsakh in Armenian). It’s such a hyper-regional specialty that you could spend weeks in Armenia and never come across these verdant little wonders—all the more reason to make them at home. Though Armenians toss in over a dozen obscure local herbs like curly dock (Rumex crispus), summer savory (Satureja hortensis), and red sorrel (Rumex acetosella), any bushel of fresh herbs and greens will do. The recipe in Lavash calls for a whopping eight cups and recommends a mix of herbal (e.g., chervil, cilantro), neutral (chard, purslane), and sour (sorrel, watercress) varieties. Here’s how to make them.
If you’re a sucker for tarte flambée, Catalan cocas, and other foldable flatbreads topped with sundry delectables, lahmajo (sometimes spelled lahmajoon) is surely up your street. Measuring some nine inches in diameter, it consists of a floppy yet crackly dough covered with parsley, tomato, onion, green pepper, and dribbly ground meat. This “Armenian pizza,” as it’s sometimes called, is alarmingly inhalable, especially with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of Aleppo pepper, a fitting garnish since the dish is said to have been introduced to Armenia in the 1960s by Syrian Armenians.
Matnakash is an outlier in the Armenian carb canon for its fluffy, focaccia-like texture. Its name means “drawn by fingers,” a reference to the decorative imprints made by the baker on the loaf’s surface. According to Armenian Food: Fact, Fiction & Folklore, these lines were intentionally meant to resemble “a plowed field with rows and furrows” in homage to Soviet productivity. Evidently, matnakash fell into favor during Soviet times due to its conventional-ish “bready” texture and shape, which stood apart from the more rustic Armenian lavash. Culinary propaganda aside, the oval-shaped loaves make an attractive, toothsome addition to any Armenian bread basket.
While Jingalov hats are Nagorno Karabakh’s indisputable gastronomic show-stopper, observant eaters will notice that the region boasts another distinctive bread: tonir hats, or tonir bread. These lightly-leavened, slightly-charred rounds are the size of small hubcaps and are chewy like the best Neapolitan pizza dough. They’re also hefty enough to make epic (nontraditional) sandwiches—slice the loaf open horizontally and stuff it, New York deli style, with cheese, fresh herbs, and Armenian charcuterie such as fenugreek-scented basturma (air-dried beef) or cuminy sujuk sausage.
ArmInfo.The Cypriot-Australian community has joined with the Armenian-Australian, Assyrian-Australian and Greek-Australian communities in calling on the Australian Government to reject a proposed visit by Turkey’s dictator, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the press service of the Armenian National Committee of Australia told ArmInfo.
The President of the Federation of Cyprus Communities of Australia & New Zealand, Michael Christodoulou said that Erdogan had no place in Australia while denying genocides and practicing Turkey’s expansionist policies in the region. “Australia cannot add to the false credibility some countries in the world afford to Erdogan’s Turkey while it continues its illegal occupation of 37% of Cyprus’ territories,” Christodoulou said. “Impunity for Turkey’s genocidal history has led to Ankara thinking its expansionist policies in Cyprus will also go unpunished, and Australia hosting Erdogan would add undeserved legitimacy for a dictatorship, by a democracy that shares none of his values,” Christodoulou added. Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC-AU) Executive Director, Haig Kayserian welcomed Cypriot-Australians joining the calls to reject Erdogan made by the Joint Justice Initiative.
“Cypriot-Australians, who are terribly concerned about the security of their compatriots back home, have every reason to be concerned about news that Australia is apparently considering hosting this despotic dictator,” Kayserian said. “Australians remember that It was only last year, following the Christchurch terrorist attack, that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to return Australians and New Zealanders traveling to Gallipoli for ANZAC Day Commemorations ‘in their coffins like their grandfathers’,” Kayserian added. “Now we are hearing this friend of ISIS, who has created a state of terror by arresting, jailing or dismissing more opposition leaders, minority rights advocates, journalists and academics than any world leader, might be a guest of the Australian Government.”
ArmInfo.Head of the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), Gagik Tsarukyan, believes that a judge should be at least 35 years old. He said this on March 6 in an interview with reporters, referring to the initiative to reduce the age limit for judges from 28 to 25 years.
He noted that he advocated the active participation of young personnel in the life of the country, but this participation should have limitations. “25 year-old young people can be judges on economic issues, but when it comes to the fate of people, then you need a person with experience.
Therefore, in my opinion, a judge should be at least 35 years old, “the MP emphasized. Tsarukyan urged his colleagues to study international experience, where the age limit for judges is also quite high.” This is an objective reality. If they want to make changes, then this should be done with the study of the experience of other countries. You can study the experience of the United States or England,” he stressed.
It should be noted that today a draft law on reducing the age limit for judges from 28 to 25 years was discussed in the Armenian parliament.
ArmInfo.The third president of Armenia paid a working visit to Brussels the day before. As the Republican Party press service told ArmInfo, its leader received permission to leave the country in the manner prescribed by law.
To recall, Serzh Sargsyan is accused of organizing embezzlement on an especially large scale. He was charged under Article 38-179 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia, and a recognizance not to leave was chosen as a measure of restraint.
The report also said that in Brussels the former president met with the former President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who is the head of the European People’s Party, with which the RPA has a partnership agreement.
During the meeting, the interlocutors noted the importance of the Agreement on Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership signed between the EU and Armenia in 2017.
During the meeting, Sargsyan, at the request of Tusk, introduced the political situation in Armenia. The interlocutors also touched upon the need for effective cooperation between the two parties.
Donald Tusk and Serzh Sargsyan exchanged views on regional issues and challenges. The former president emphasized the importance of international partnership in terms of developing democracy in Armenia and strengthening regional stability. The parties also discussed the danger of populism for real democracy.
Sargsyan noted that any changes should be carried out in accordance with the Constitution and exclusively within the framework of legal processes, with the maximum involvement of relevant specialized structures and on the basis of expert opinions.
Sargsyan also visited the Wilfried Martens Center for European Studies in Brussels, where he met with the head of the center, ex-Prime Minister of Slovakia Mikulas Dzurinda. During the meeting, the parties discussed the possibilities of cooperation between the Luys Cultural and Educational Foundation, in which the third President of Armenia leads the Board of Trustees, and the Wilfried Martens Foundation.
To note, however, that one of the first decisions after the resignation of the former president and prime minister Serzh Sargsyan was the closure of the Luys Fund and the cessation of its financing.
ArmInfo.Former Prime Ministers of Armenia are ready to act as guarantors regarding the second President of the Republic of Armenia Robert Kocharian. As lawyer Aram Vardevanyan noted in a conversation with reporters on March 6, the corresponding application will most likely be submitted in March.
Earlier it was reported that former Prime Ministers of Armenia Vazgen Manukyan, Khosrov Harutyunyan and Karen Karapetyan, as well as ex-Prime Minister of Artsakh Anushavan Danielyan declared their readiness to give personal guarantees to change Kocharyan’s preventive measure.
Robert Kocharian is being accused in the March 1, 2008 case. Recall that the Constitutional Court of Armenia appealed to the ECHR to provide an advisory opinion regarding compliance with the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia with Article 300.1 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia. Under this article (Overthrow of the constitutional order), Robert Kocharian is charged.
The owner of Grand Holding, philanthropist Karen Vardanyan has donated 500,000 drams to each of 216 large families with 6 or more underage children in Artsakh on the occasion of International Women’s Day -March 8.
The total cost of the charity program is 108 million drams.
More in the video.
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Azerbaijani military attempted a subversive attack targeting a north-eastern Armenian military position, the Armenian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
The attack was recorded at around 5:30am local time.
The Armenian frontline troops foiled the attack, as a result of which the Azerbaijani group was pushed back suffering losses and leaving behind ammunition and a mine detector.
The Armenian side has not suffered any losses, the ministry said, adding only one serviceman has been slightly injured in the operations. The circumstances of the incident are being clarified.
“An analysis of the actions reveals that the adversary has carried out serious preparatory work for the given cross border infiltration, which was carried out by respectively trained personnel,” the ministry said, adding the Azerbaijani subversive group used German-made mine detector.
How to make sense of tragedy? This is the premise of Narine Abgaryan’s slim, sentimental novel Three Apples Fell From the Sky, now translated into English five years after becoming a bestseller in Russia. The tragedy in question is not a single moment or extraordinary occurrence but rather a hereditary affliction, passed down the generations, believed to have brought famine, suffering, infertility, and death to Maran, a remote village in the Armenian highlands.
This affliction appears to have its origins in a curse that befell one of the village’s inhabitants, Voske Sevoyants, after she was forced to marry the fiance of her sister who died just days before their wedding. As we arrive onto the scene, decades have passed and the curse has become a kind of accepted custom; the long hair of the family’s female members the only perfunctory protective measure they believe they can take against its detrimental effects.
Anatolia Sevoyants, Voske’s only surviving daughter, is the central figure in a cast of well written, if a little one-dimensional, characters. There is the blacksmith, the priest, the always-ready-to-help neighbour, and the chirping of chickens, goats, and a somewhat important peacock. While the book opens with Anatolia laying down “to breathe her last”, quite predictably, her last becomes only the first of a compelling transformation which offers potential release from the inherited curse and a second chance at romantic love.
With the curse forming the novel’s central energy source, Three Apples shares something with Nino Haratsichvili’s epic novel The Eighth Life (2019), set over a similar time period in neighbouring Georgia, which traces the perceived consequences of a cursed hot chocolate recipe on the Jashi family during the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. As with Haratischvili’s Jashis, Abgaryan’s Sevoyants – sev meaning black in the village’s language of Maran – were “a rational superstitious people who nevertheless believed in dreams and signs”. They channel their grief into superstition and mysticism, as perhaps, the only comfort in formless cruelty is the belief it is part of a divine plan. Abgaryan – who writes in Russian but is of Armenian descent – is less interested in what these signs resemble but how people construct the networks of meaning by which they live.
Three Apples is told in a fabular style, split into three sections – “For the One Who Saw”, “For the One Who Told the Story”, “For the One Who Listened” – which echo the Armenian folktale on which the title is based. Time oscillates from present to past and back again, but the narrative voice remains fixed in a monotonous but entrancing melody, as one might deliver a psalm. The narrator of Three Apples feels as though they are standing at a nearby vantage point, close enough to the detail to smell the “aroma of slices of spongy homemade bread” but at a sufficient distance to see the villagers’ story on a more cosmic timeline.
Time oscillates from present to past and back again, but the narrative voice remains fixed in a monotonous but entrancing melody, as one might deliver a psalm
Abgrayan’s prose, translated by Lisa C. Hayden, is vivid and offers moments of spine-tingling imagery (“The evening sky that May was low and sticky, with a bilberry tint”, “eyes the colour of cooled cinders”) evoking these lush lands of pomegranates, apple trees, and baked bread. But on occasion they feel too searching and constructed, and veer into hyperbole (“that dialogue united, indissolubly and forever, two young hearts that hungered for love”). Yet, Abgaryan’s literary project is not one of realism, but one in which she strives to create an environment where suffering and resilience show themselves as interchangeable aspects of the human spirit.
Time in Three Apples appears to be organised more around the unpredictable whims of Demeter (harvests, seasons, geological events) than the calendar, though there are vague allusions to the region’s 20th-century history: there is mention of a villager who “was forced to flee the new regime that overthrew the tsar at the beginning of the last century” while “the North” – in other words, Russia – is referred to as a place of people with strange names who “poop flowers”. This playful allusion to their northern neighbours illustrates both the myths urban and rural communities tell themselves about the other, but also their remoteness from, what was then, the seat of Soviet governance in Moscow.
The village of Maran is not just culturally and politically estranged, but cut off physically too; an old telegraph wire and unsystematic visits from the postman are its only connection with the outside world. It is no wonder then, that the object of focus turns inward, to the language of the winds, the prophecies of gypsies and where the villagers place the highest of significance, dreams. Even the afterlife — despite living in proximity to death through famine, earthquakes, disease — feels remote, as “the other edge of the universe” is guarded by “seven huge seals, each the size of the eye of a needle and the weight of an entire mountain”.
It is not until the final page that Abgaryan reveals how the fable should be read, and it is an unquestionably moving coda. If the book suffers moments of predictability and hyperbole, these are forgiven as Abgaryan finds ways to conduct the warmth of the villagers directly into the reader’s soul. As the book’s title suggests, there are gifts to be found in this novel, if you are prepared to look, listen, and feel.