Demonstration record
Our food story
Tskitishvili
A Georgian family kitchen recorded in Tbilisi.
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Tbilisi
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
Oral history
Friday yaprak, in the languages she actually spoke
Бабушка готовила yaprak каждую пятницу. Горсть риса, виноградный лист, немного мяса — «пока не почувствует себя правильно». Потом, уже в Хайфе, она сказала לי בקול שקט: זה הריח כמו הבית. The name stayed yaprak. She would not say dolma. She would not say stuffed grape leaves.
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Oral history
The sound of the cheese bread
Nino Tskitishvili judges a khachapuri by the sound it makes when you tear it. If the cheese whispers, it is ready. If it shouts, the oven was too proud. In Tbilisi her Imeretian round bread is for guests who did not warn her, which is to say for everyone. She folds sulguni into a dough she does not measure. A handful of flour until it feels right. Cook until done. At weddings the khachapuri sits beside satsivi. Bread first, she says, then the walnut. The table is not a performance. It is a sentence with many clauses.
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Stories
Walnut sauce for a wedding
Satsivi must cool. That is the whole argument of the dish. Nino grinds walnuts until they become a paste that can stand a spoon, then loosens it with the broth of the bird, garlic, marigold, a little cinnamon. Pomegranate seeds at the end, because the eye has to eat too. She learned it from her aunt, who learned it for a wedding in Kakheti. Whether the sauce is older than the wedding or the wedding older than the sauce is not a question this kitchen asks. A visiting cousin from Yerevan said the walnuts reminded her of a stuffing at home. Nino nodded. Mountains talk to each other, she said, even when people do not.
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