Demonstration record
Our food story
Petrosian
An Armenian family kitchen recorded in Yerevan.
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Yerevan
How food knowledge traveled
This is not a genealogy. It records who cooked, who taught, and how a kitchen moved from one pair of hands to another.
Dishes
Stories and oral histories
Demonstration record
Stories
Pumpkin for the new year
Anahit Petrosian’s ghapama is a pumpkin that has become a bowl. Rice, dried fruit, honey, butter, a little cinnamon. In Yerevan it comes to the new-year table whole, then is opened so the steam stands up like a blessing nobody wants to name too loudly. She bakes lavash the day before, slapped to the tannur wall, thin enough to fold around herbs. The bread is for every day. The pumpkin is for the day the year turns. A Georgian guest once said the stuffing was a cousin of something at home. Anahit said: then sit, and we will see how close.
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Oral history
The thin bread of the tannur
Lavash is not a recipe so much as a temperature. Anahit knows the oven is ready when the wall is too hot for the back of the hand and not yet angry. The dough is flour, water, a little salt. A handful until it feels right. She drapes it over a cushion, then onto the wall. Seconds. If you wait for a timer you have a cracker. She has seen thin breads in other places with other names. She does not collect names. She collects the moment the bread comes off in one piece.
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