Demonstration record
Nino Tskitishvili
ნინო ცქიტიშვილი
Home cook · b. 1949 · Tbilisi
Keeps the Tskitishvili supra table in Tbilisi: cheese bread, walnut sauce, pickles.
Tskitishvili family kitchenStories
Demonstration record
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.
Recorded by Archive demonstration
Demonstration record
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.
Recorded by Archive demonstration
Dishes cooked
Khachapuri Imeruli
Demonstration record
იმერული ხაჭაპური
A round filled cheese bread of Imereti, baked until the sulguni runs. Recorded here in a Tbilisi family kitchen.
Satsivi
Demonstration record
საცივი
A cold walnut sauce, often over poultry, thickened with garlic and spices, finished with pomegranate. A wedding and supra dish in the Tskitishvili records.
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