Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [43]
MELINE TOUMANI is an Armenian-American journalist and is working on a book, to be published by Random House, that delves into the conflict between modern-day Turks and the Armenian Diaspora. She has also written for The New York Times, The Nation, Salon.com, and Mother Jones, among others.
I JUST wanted to know what was ours. I was sitting at a long dinner table with my Armenian relatives in California, and I had raised a simple question that led to a full-scale argument. Among the vast spread of traditional Middle Eastern delights that we ate when we gathered together, was there a single dish that we could say was definitively Armenian?
“The most Armenian food is khorovadz!” declared my uncle. He’d used the Armenian word for kebab, or grilled meat. But that was too easy, I thought. Surely even cavemen had cooked meat on skewers, so the mere fact that we have a word for it in the Armenian language doesn’t make it Armenian.
“I think the most Armenian dish is choerek,” said my cousin. She was referring to a sweet buttery biscuit rolled into twists and sometimes cross-shapes. It had to be Armenian, she argued, because we always eat it at Easter. Armenia was the world’s first Christian nation, with an independent church, so she reasoned—sincerely if not convincingly—that an Easter dish had to stand apart from all the foods that were common with Muslim neighbors.
I raised the same question with Armenian friends in New York, where I live. Many waxed nostalgic for their grandmothers’ lahmajun, a spicy pizza-like snack on paper-thin dough, spread with a fine puree of lamb, tomato, pepper, and onion, crisp at the edges but chewy in the middle. One young woman I know hosted parties with Armenian girlfriends where they rolled dolma and yalanji—varieties of stuffed grape leaves—for hours on end. Others spoke of kufte, a croquette of cracked wheat filled with ground meat, onions, raisins, and pine nuts. I recalled the festive Armenian gatherings of my childhood where we would cook a penny or a dime into the center of just one kufte, and whoever discovered it in their portion would have good luck. And wherever there was kufte there was sure to be manti, perhaps the ideal comfort food: a big bowl of tiny, crusty meat dumplings drizzled with yogurt and a peppery tomato sauce.
But my investigations also engendered a sense of futility. After all, the menu of any Middle Eastern restaurant—Turkish, Lebanese, Persian, Syrian, Georgian—listed nearly all the same dishes, and the partisans of those regions had just as many fond memories to bolster their claims.
When it comes to defining Armenian food, part of the problem is obvious: For much of their history, Armenians have been a people without a country. The Armenian Kingdom reached the height of its power in the first century BC, when it stretched from Syria to the present Azerbaijan. But centuries of conquest followed—Byzantine, Persian, Ottoman, and Russian—and Armenians adapted to survive. They maintained their unique language as well as their religion, in spite of being surrounded by Muslim neighbors. But by 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the now-tiny Armenian Republic regained independence, more than half of the world’s Armenians were scattered around the globe.
Many Armenians in the diaspora have roots in Turkey, as descendants of survivors of the 1915 genocide in which the Ottoman-Turkish government attempted to massacre or deport its Ottoman-Armenian population. These survivors often ended up in Lebanon or Syria. Later, many resettled in the United States. One of the largest Armenian communities grew in Water-town, Massachusetts, where Armenian grandmothers still round up orders for batches of lahmajun after church.
Charles Perry, an expert