For a country roughly the size of South Carolina, Georgia—at the crossroads of Asia and Europe—boasts an astonishingly varied cuisine. In the east, heading toward Azerbaijan, wine-scented stews, salty cheeses, and barbecued meats rule the table, a testament to the region’s deep-rooted traditions of winemaking and animal husbandry. Along the subtropical Black Sea coast in the west, hazelnuts, clarified butter, and cornmeal are culinary staples. And the farther west you go, the spicier the food gets, thanks to the local hand-pounded chile paste called ajika (now likely available at a supermarket near you).

To wrap your mind (and palate) around the full breadth of Georgian cuisine, give our best Georgian recipes a whirl, from spicy beef kharcho to Chechen-style rolled pasta to vegetarian stunners like pkhali and soupy spiced beans. And while you’re at it, pour out a glass of kvevri wine and repeat after us: Gaumarjos! (“To your victory!”).

Adjaruli Khachapuri

Filled with a runny egg and melted cheese—traditionally a mix of imeruli and sulguni—this recipe from the Black Sea region of Adjara is best eaten hot. Here, a blend of low-moisture mozzarella and tart, salty feta gets you close to the original. To eat the khachapuri, tear off pieces of the crust and dunk them into the well of molten cheese, egg, and butter. Get the recipe >

Megruli Khachapuri

The cheesiest khachapuri of them all comes from the western region of Samegrelo. Stuffed and topped with salty cheese, it’s stick-to-your-ribs country fare at its finest. Get the recipe >

Shila Plavi (Funeral Rice)

One of Georgia’s most comforting—yet shockingly little-known—dishes is shila plavi, a peppery Georgian lamb pilaf similar to risotto that’s traditionally served at funerals. Our favorite recipe comes to us from chef Sopo Gorgadze, who uses arborio instead of the usual long-grain rice and adds so much black pepper and caraway that their quantities look like typos. Get the recipe >

Beef Kharcho

Kharcho is a catch-all term for spicy Georgian beef stew. Though it hails from the Black Sea region of Samegrelo, today it’s a staple across many former Soviet countries. Some versions are brothy and flecked with rice, while others, like this one served at Salobie Bia in Tbilisi, are ultra-thick and all about the ground walnuts and spices. Chef Giorgi Iosava ladles his kharcho over creamy millet porridge, a soothing counterpart to the punchy, piquant stew. Get the recipe >

Zhizhig Galnash (Beefy Chechen Noodles)

Zhizhig galnash, beef and dumplings with pungent garlic sauce, is Chechnya’s national dish. We learned to make it at Nazy’s Guest House in Pankisi, a remote valley inhabited by ethnically Chechen Muslims called Kists. You don’t need any special equipment to make the pasta dough, which is surprisingly easy (and quick!) to shape. Don’t let the short ingredient list fool you—it amounts to a decadent, impressive feast. Get the recipe >

Leek Pkhali (Vegetable Dip)

You could call Tekuna Gachechiladze the pkhali queen of Tbilisi for her mouthwatering, innovative takes on Georgia’s traditional vegetable-walnut spreads. Pkhali can be made with any cooked vegetable—traditional choices include beet, spinach, carrot, and green bean—but Gachechiladze eschews those for sweet, melty leeks, which she blitzes together with walnuts, cilantro, and spices. Tahini and olives are unorthodox add-ins that today’s Georgians happily get behind. Get the recipe >

Georgian Roast Chicken With Bazhe Sauce

Bazhe is a velvety, coriander-scented walnut sauce that’s a staple of Georgian home cooking. You’ll often find it served chilled as a sidekick to cold boiled chicken, but this version (by Ninia’s Garden chef Meriko Gubeladze), sings alongside a freshly roasted bird: The heat draws out the spices’ bouquet and the walnuts’ fragrant oils. Get the recipe >

Georgian Cheese and Herb Dumplings

Khinkali are twisted knobs of dough stuffed with seasoned meat, spiced mushrooms, mashed potatoes, or—in this case—mild cheese and fresh herbs. The boiled dumplings were once exclusively mountain fare but are now widespread across Georgia. Ground black pepper is the traditional accompaniment. Get the recipe >

Sinori (Rolled Flatbread with Butter and Cheese)

A rich breakfast dish from the Adjara region, sinori is usually made by spreading flatbread generously with butter and nadughi, a fresh Georgian cheese, but Meri Makaharadze, the head of a cheesemaking co-op in Georgia, prefers the more rustic, aged shushvela (which we’ve substituted for Emmental with excellent results). Get the recipe >

Badrijani Nigvzit (Eggplant-Walnut Roll-Ups)

This classic supra starter consisting of fried eggplant slices spread with garlicky walnut paste makes a wonderful companion for wine and cocktails. Get the recipe >

Lobio (Stewed Beans with Walnuts and Spices)

This wonderfully complex bean recipe is thickened and seasoned with a paste of pounded walnuts and the dried petals and fresh leaves of the orange French marigold plant. The kick of acidity comes from tkemali, a traditional Georgian condiment made from unripe green plums, herbs, and spices. Get the recipe >

Ajapsandali (Spicy Eggplant Stew)

If you like ratatouille, you’ll love ajapsandali, a garlicky eggplant dish brimming with fistfuls of fresh herbs. Compared to Georgia’s fussier, technique-heavy recipes like satsivi (turkey cooked in walnut sauce) and khinkali (soup dumplings), ajapsandali is basically a free-for-all, a blank canvas ideally suited to recipe-averse cooks: No one is getting canceled for making ajapsandali “wrong.” So go forth, and get chopping! Get the recipe >

Khmeli Suneli

This traditional Georgian seasoning is often blended into vegetable dishes such as pkhali, spinach-and-walnut pâté garnished with pomegranate seeds, and badrijani nigvzit, garlicky eggplant roll-ups stuffed with walnut paste. But truth be told, we love its earthy, fenugreek-forward flavor on just about everything. Think of it as the curry powder of the Caucasus. Get the recipe >

Muslim Georgia: A Journey to the Hidden Kitchens of the Kists

The Walnut Whisperers of Georgia

The 17 Essential Dishes of Tbilisi—And Where to Eat Them

The post 13 Outstanding Georgian Recipes to Cook Right Now appeared first on Saveur.

Filled with a runny egg and melted cheese—traditionally a mix of imeruli and sulguni—this traditional Georgian khachapuri recipe from the Black Sea region of Adjara is best eaten hot. We find that a blend of low moisture mozzarella and strong, tart feta gets you close to the traditional version. To eat, tear off pieces the crust and dunk them into the well of molten cheese, egg, and butter.

The post Adjaruli Khachapuri (Georgian Cheese Bread) appeared first on Saveur.

Kharcho is a catch-all term for spicy Georgian beef stew. Though it hails from the Black Sea region of Mingrelia, today it’s a staple across many former Soviet countries. Some versions are brothy and flecked with rice, while others, like this one served at Salobie Bia in Tbilisi, are ultra-thick and all about the ground walnuts and spices. Chef Giorgi Iosava ladles his kharcho over creamy millet porridge, a comforting counterpart to the punchy, piquant stew. 

Featured in “The Walnut Whisperers of Georgia,” by Benjamin Kemper.

The post Georgian Beef Kharcho appeared first on Saveur.

Until I started spending time in Georgia, walnuts were an afterthought in my kitchen. Occasionally I’d toss them into brownie batter and sprinkle them over salads, but truth be told, they usually wound up in the trash, rancid and mealy from months of neglect. What a waste: As I’d learn in the Caucasus, walnuts are far more than a snack or a garnish. They can be the backbone of a dish, blitzed with vegetables into savory spreads, pounded with garlic into heady sauces for meat, or whisked into stews for richness and heft. In other words, your favorite new magic-bullet ingredient might already be in your cupboard.  

Many cultures cook with walnuts—see walnut-thickened fesenjan from Iran, or pickled walnuts from Britain—but in Georgia the ingredient is elemental. From the Azerbaijan border in the east to the Black Sea in the west, walnuts are in everything from soup to—well, you get it, imbuing stews, salads, sauces, and desserts with a woodsy richness that’s a hallmark of Georgian cooking. The more walnutty foods I tried in the region, the more I wondered what these walnut whisperers knew that the rest of us didn’t, and how Georgia became such a walnut-loving nation in the first place.

My fieldwork began in the one-church village of Akura at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. I was at a backyard feast at the home of Tekuna Gachechiladze, whose Tbilisi restaurant Café Littera breezes through 15 pounds of walnuts in a slow week. “So, you want to know about walnuts?” Gachechiladze asked, chuckling. “Go grab a bottle of wine. We’re going to be here for a while.”

Walnuts have been growing alongside humans since neanderthals were our neighbors. Fossil records show that they’ve existed in the Caucasus for millennia, ample time for Georgians to develop their own mythology, traditions, and—of course—foods based on the nut. According to culinary historian Dali Tsatava, walnuts are the oldest-known cultivated food in the Caucasus region. “Walnut trees were always sacred, considered a symbol of abundance,” she explained. “The nuts were offered as a sacrifice at churches, which were often surrounded by walnut trees, and almost every Georgian family had a walnut tree at the gate.” 

The spiritual connection to walnuts has been all but forgotten, but the trees and their bounty remain. Between sips of rkatsiteli, Gachechiladze explained that walnut cookery in Georgia comes down to three components: the walnuts themselves, garlic, and khmeli suneli—a spice blend that usually contains coriander, chile, dried marigold petals, and an extra-floral strain of local fenugreek (Trigonella caerulea)—all forced through a meat grinder or pounded in a mortar to obtain a thick paste. “Dilute this mixture with water, and you have bazhe sauce. Stir it into meat stew, and you’ve got kharcho. Work it into cooked vegetables or greens, and you have pkhali. And on and on,” she said. 

Gachechiladze is persnickety about her pkhali, which at Littera comes in four colorful varieties: beet, eggplant, spinach, and—my favorite—leek. “You should add enough spices and garlic to flavor the dish, but not so much that they overpower the delicate vegetables and walnuts,” she said. Acid is also crucial as it balances the walnuts’ oily richness—not only in pkhali but in all of Georgia’s savory walnut dishes. Lemon juice, vinegar, and fresh pomegranate juice are all fair game. 

But the question remained: What was with the outsize presence of walnuts in Georgian food? Gachechiladze posits that the calorie-rich nuts, high in protein and fat, were historically the most nutritious stand-in for meat, which the peasantry could seldom afford. Further, the whole nation, rich and poor, avoided meat during Lent, which gave rise to an entire canon of vegetarian “fasting” dishes including pkhali and lobio (stewed kidney beans with walnuts and fresh herbs). “I only remember my mother making pkhali when we were fasting,” said Gachechiladze.          

Like Gachechiladze, chef Meriko Gubeladze of Tbilisi’s Shavi Lomi and Ninia’s Garden grew up in a walnut-loving family. “As children, we’d pick them when they were still green and rub their white flesh on our lips. It looked like we were wearing lipstick!” she told me over the phone. Walnuts contain a chemical called juglone that, when exposed to air, becomes a brownish black pigment. 

While the kids dabbled in makeup routines, the grown-ups would be in the kitchen turning the season’s first walnuts into a chthonic spoon-sweet called muraba. This jet-black conserve is so tedious to make that you’re likely to—as the Georgian saying goes—“break a walnut shell between your butt cheeks”: First you have to remove the nuts’ ornery skin (turning your fingers brown in the process), then soak the peeled nuts in multiple changes of water mixed with alum (for color) and lime (for crispness), and finally candy them in sugar syrup and can them for long-term preservation. Georgians serve the resulting orbs with breakfast and tea; me, I like them paired with stinky cheeses and spooned over chocolate ice cream.    

In autumn, when walnuts’ tender green skins ossify into brown, brainy exoskeletons, they’re harvested and sent to market. Even at corner groceries, Georgians have the luxury of choosing from several bins of walnuts segregated by size and color. Broken brownish nubs, the most affordable option, are snapped up for soups and pkhali for which color is unimportant, while the prized whiter intact walnut halves lend gozinaki (walnut brittle) its attractive cragginess and sauces like bazhe their requisite ivory hue. 

“Anyone can whip up bazhe in five minutes,” said Gubeladze, and she’s right, provided you have walnuts and a few key spices (coriander, fenugreek, and marigold) on hand. Roast chicken with tomato-cucumber salad and a passed bowl of bazhe is Georgian weeknight fare at its finest: gutsy, simple, fresh. Gubeladze’s recipe, my go-to, is lighter and tangier than most, thanks to the double whammy of acid in the form of white wine vinegar and pomegranate juice. It plays as well with sheet-pan veggies as it does with grilled meats and even fish. 

But for newcomers to Georgian cuisine, the biggest revelation may be what walnuts do for stews. Georgians employ garlicky walnut paste like the French use cream, adding it in the final minutes of cooking for richness, texture, and depth. Walnut-thickened stews are so prized by Georgians that the country rings in each New Year with satsivi, a slow-simmered cauldron of turkey braised with garlic, cinnamon, and allspice and anointed with drops of orange-hued walnut oil. (Food scholar Darra Goldstein, author of The Georgian Feast, makes the case that satsivi descends from north Indian curries, but that’s a tale for another time.)  

Bolder and spicier than satsivi is kharcho, a west Georgian meat stew brimming with ajika and walnuts. It’s such a crowd-pleaser that it was adopted by cooks across the former Soviet Union, where it remains a staple from St. Petersburg to Samarkand. Indeed, one of my favorite bites on earth is the beef kharcho at Tbilisi restaurant Salobie Bia, where chef Giorgi Iosava ladles it over creamed foxtail millet akin to polenta. The spoon-tender brisket and silky porridge are so delightfully soft that the combo ought to be prescribed after wisdom teeth surgery.

Back in Akura, Gachechiladze was using kharcho as a verb—“If you haven’t kharcho’ed shrimp, you haven’t lived!” My stomach audibly groaned as we stood and walked over to the overflowing supra table. There, beneath the boughs of a gnarled, old tree, we toasted to friends, to ancestors, and—naturally—to Georgia. When I looked over at Gachechiladze, she was pointing up at the foliage with one hand and down at the table with the other, her eyes glinting: “Any guesses?” she said.

Recipes

Georgian Roast Chicken With Bazhe Sauce

Get the recipe >

Georgian Beef Kharcho

Get the recipe >

Leek Pkhali (Georgian Vegetable Paté)

Get the recipe >

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Welcome to One Pot Bangers, Benjamin Kemper’s column, where you’ll find our freshest, boldest cooking ideas that require just one pot, skillet, or sheet pan. Busy week? We’ve got you covered with these low-effort, high-reward recipes from around the globe.

Khachapuri adjaruli, that internet-famous carbo-kayak jammed with cheese, eggs, and butter, seems to get all the attention when it comes to Georgian food. But the more time I spend in Georgia, the more enamored I become with the country’s subtler, lesser-known vegetable dishes such as ajapsandali. 

Ajapsandali is a spicy, rib-sticking vegetable stew made with eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and—importantly—fistfuls of fresh herbs. It also happens to be vegan. Reminiscent of ratatouille and pisto manchego, it’s bolder than both in the flavor department—so much so that (lo siento) I no longer make pisto, despite living in Madrid.

Compared to Georgia’s fussier, technique-heavy recipes like satsivi (turkey cooked in walnut sauce) and khinkali (soup dumplings), ajapsandali is basically a free-for-all, a blank canvas ideally suited to recipe-averse cooks: No one is getting canceled for making ajapsandali “wrong.” After all, depending on the region and the cook, the stew might arrive bobbing with carrots and potatoes in addition to the standard late-summer veg. Spices—most commonly coriander and blue fenugreek—are usually in the background jazzing things up, though they’re not always present. Ground chiles or ajika, Georgia’s fiery red pepper condiment, give the dish its signature kick. 

My favorite version of ajapsandali contains a mix of cilantro and parsley, though Dark Opal basil, dill, and celery leaves are frequent foliage add-ins. Peering over the shoulder of Georgian chefs like Meriko Gubeladze (of Tbilisi’s Shavi Lomi) has taught me that the key to the dish’s multilayered freshness is dropping in chopped herbs at different stages of the cooking process, as South Asians are wont to do with spices. 

In Kakheti, Georgia’s wine country, locals drizzle piping-hot bowls of ajapsandali with unrefined sunflower oil, whose sesame-like scent, paired with the cilantro and garlic, always transports me a couple of thousand miles east. In Imereti, in the center of the country, cooks make a thick, relish-like ajapsandali that’s eaten chilled alongside grilled meats. And in Samegrelo, farther west, the dish is spicy enough to make your nose run. No matter the region, ajapsandali always comes with a basket of tonispuri, Georgia’s chewy quintessential bread licked by the flames of a tandoor-style tone oven.

At home, I make do with the crustiest baguette I can find. After ladling out bowls of steaming ajapsandali, I like to pass around a jug of olive oil for friends to pour from liberally. Then I pray for leftovers: Few dishes brighten one’s morning like a bowl of the reheated stew topped with crumbled feta and a runny fried egg. Khachapuri who?

Ingredients

The post Ajapsandali (Spicy Georgian Eggplant Stew) appeared first on Saveur.

You could call Tekuna Gachechiladze the pkhali queen of Tbilisi for her mouthwatering, innovative takes on Georgia’s traditional vegetable-walnut spreads. Pkhali can be made with any cooked vegetable—traditional choices include beet, spinach, carrot, and green bean—but Gachechiladze eschews those for sweet, melty leeks, which she purées with walnuts, cilantro, and spices. Tahini and olives are unorthodox add-ins that today’s Georgians happily get behind.    

This recipe is adapted from a dish made by Tekuna Gachechiladze, chef of Café Littera and Khasheria in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Featured in: “The Walnut Whisperers of Georgia.”

The post Leek Pkhali (Georgian Vegetable Pâté) appeared first on Saveur.

Bazhe is a velvety, coriander-scented walnut sauce that’s a staple of Georgian home cooking. In Georgia you’ll often find it served chilled as a sidekick to cold boiled chicken, but we love it even more alongside a freshly roasted bird. The heat draws out the spices’ bouquet and the walnuts’ fragrant oils. Dribble walnut oil over the sauce for extra decadence. 

This recipe is adapted from a dish made by Meriko Gubeladze, chef of Ninia’s Garden and Shavi Lomi in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Featured in: “The Walnut Whisperers of Georgia.”

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In Georgia and the greater Caucasus, ajika comes in an array of colors and textures—red or green; saucy or pasty or granulated—but all are devilishly spicy. This shelf-stable, sprinkle-able version from chef Meriko Gubeladze of Shavi Lomi in Tbilisi comes together in minutes and hits the spot with minimal elbow grease. Swirl ajika by the tablespoon into soups, sprinkle it on salads and sheet-pan vegetables, or rub it on roast meats and fish for a floral yet fiery kick. 

Georgian chiles are traditionally dried over smoldering hazelnut wood; in the absence of that ingredient, Gubeladze suggests supplementing more widely available Aleppo pepper with a touch of Spanish paprika to approximate ajika’s signature smoky note. Look for dried marigold flowers and blue fenugreek in local Eastern European markets, or otherwise try your neighborhood spice shop or (of course) Amazon. Blue fenugreek is milder and sweeter than more widely available Indian varieties, while marigold blossoms lend a delicate earthy-fruity note. Both of these spices are also ingredients in another important Georgian spice blend, khmeli suneli; read more about it and find the recipe here.

Featured in “Georgian Ajika Goes Mainstream.”

The post Ajika appeared first on Saveur.

Ajika, the spicy, faintly smoky condiment native to the Caucasus, just hit the aisles of Trader Joe’s, and if you aren’t shaking it over scrambled eggs, swirling it into soups, and rubbing it deep into the crannies of a chicken before roasting it Georgian style, well, you deserve a good finger-wagging from a Georgian grandma.      

In Georgia, ajika takes countless forms: It can be saucy like jarred salsa, thick like tomato paste, or granulated like shichimi togarashi. Trader Joe’s version lands squarely in third camp, dusky red-orange and packed with loads of dried chiles, coriander, and garlic. Though perhaps not as potent as its fresh, perishable counterpart—nothing beats the heady aromas of just-pounded chiles, garlic, and herbs—the dried mixture lasts far longer, is shelf-stable, and comes with a shaker top for easy ad hoc sprinkling. 

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Anya von Bremzen, coauthor of Please to the Table, the current pick for the SAVEUR Cookbook Club, says she can’t live without dry ajika. “I do slow-roasted pork shoulder with it and it creates the most addictive juices,” she said. “Man, I’m literally the kind of person who sprinkles ajika on morning toast. It’s awesome with cold butter and on avocado toast.” She’s in good company: Reddit is currently abuzz with early adopters adding TJ’s ajika to everything from popcorn to pork chops to pizza.    

Once you’re sold on the sprinkle-able stuff, von Bremzen recommends dabbling with the wet ajika sold in jars at Eastern European groceries, the type she was weaned on in Moscow, which brims with vinegar, herbs, and tomatoes. “As kids we used to spread it on black sourdough bread and eat it with salo, which is basically Slavic lardo,” she said. 

In-between these two textural extremes is a third pastier ajika, which is common in Mingrelia and Abkhazia, the subtropical Black Sea regions where the condiment is said to originate. It’s perhaps the most complex of the bunch with ground coriander, blue fenugreek, marigold powder, garlic, salt, and red chiles smoked over hazelnut wood, plus other dried spices such as savory, dill, and black pepper. Locals scoop it by the heaped spoonful into stews like beef kharcho. And then there are the milder green ajikas, redolent of mint and cilantro, customarily spread between stretched-curd cheese layers and rolled up in a dish called gebzhalia that oozes fresh, cool cream like burrata.  

But for all you from-scratch diehards out there wondering if you can make your own ajika, the answer is a resounding yes, according to Georgian chef Meriko Gubeladze, who owns Shavi Lomi and the soon-to-open Ninias Baghi in Tbilisi. Whether you settle on a wet, pasty, or dry ajika recipe, “be sure to track down real Caucasian blue fenugreek and ground marigold,” she said, since together they are intoxicatingly floral. 

Special-ordering a couple of spices is one thing, but roasting red Georgian chiles over hazelnut embers, as is traditionally done in ajika production, is another entirely. Happily, Gubeladze has a hack for emulating that smoky undertone: a pinch of smoked Spanish paprika, or pimentón, thrown into the mix. “It’s amazing in ajika. I buy it whenever I’m in Europe and bring it back in my suitcase as contraband,” she said with a laugh. Gubeladze is also ruthless with the raw garlic, which she said is a much-needed counterpunch to the fiery chiles. “Oh, and one last tip,” she said. “Steer clear of ajika if you’re going on a date.”  

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Open Please to the Table to a random page, and you might land on a recipe for chicken Kiev, Armenian lamb dumplings, Uzbek cilantro buns, or Latvian cornmeal mush. Such dishes may appear to have nothing in common, but as this seminal cookbook on the cuisines of the Soviet Union reminds us, they once belonged to a rich culinary patchwork quilt that stretched 8.6 million square miles, from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia. 

That quilt came unstitched three decades ago with the collapse of the USSR, but the 400-some recipes in Please to the Table—the SAVEUR Cookbook Club pick for April and May—read as current as ever with dishes like rye cookies, tahdig, Georgian khachapuri, and foraged bitter-green salads in the mix. 

Georgian Cheese Bread (Adjaruli Khachapuri)

Shepherding us through the complex, variegated territories of the former Soviet Union is Anya von Bremzen, who was born in Moscow in 1963, and John Welchman, her coauthor. If von Bremzen’s name rings a bell, that’s because her byline has appeared in all the major food and travel magazines, as well as on award-winning books including The New Spanish Table and Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, her memoir. 

Almost as enticing as the recipes in Please to the Table are the essays and anecdotes peppered throughout, which offer colorful glimpses into topics ranging from geography and religion to the etymology of kasha (it originally meant “feast”) and the proper way to serve Uzbek pilaf (rice buried under the meat in serving bowls; tea and pickles on the side). Literature buffs will be pleased to find a bevy of food-related excerpts from greats like Pushkin, Dumas, and Chekhov interspersed among the recipes.  

Von Bremzen is a cookbook writer with an emphasis on the writer. Her prose is snappy and evocative, especially when she’s on a jag about gastro-cultural curiosities. In the chapter on Russian cuisine, for instance, she recounts the cross-cultural horror story of a Russian friend who was invited to an American’s apartment, only to be offered a bowl of ice cream. “It sometimes takes years for Soviet emigrés in the United States to understand that a casual invitation to someone’s home doesn’t necessarily mean a full-scale meal,” she writes. Later, in an explainer on Armenian cuisine (the book is organized by main ingredient with explainers interspersed throughout), she paints such a vivid picture of her first breakfast in Yerevan that you can almost smell it through the page: “We were greeted with eggs scrambled with ripe tomatoes and green peppers, local sheep’s cheese (chanakh), a delicious spicy sausage called sudjuk, and generous cupfuls of strong black coffee. And there were freshly prepared stuffed vegetables (dolma) awaiting us for later.” 

Even the sample menus in the margins manage to be transportive. You can keep your Pinterest moodboards and Instagram recipe reels—I’ll be getting my cooking inspo on page 452 with “A Rustic Luncheon for Eight,” which reads: “herring in sour cream sauce, my mother’s marinated mushrooms, beet caviar with walnuts and prunes, pumpernickel bread, vodka, schi, meat-filled pirog, Russian cranberry mousse.” 

Last week I had the privilege of chatting with von Bremzen about what it took to produce this 659-page behemoth and how the cuisines explored in the book have changed since its first print run.  

BK: You’ve lived a fascinating and rather peripatetic life. Tell me about it. 

AvB: I was born in Moscow in 1963 during the Brezhnev years. It was a time of Iron Curtain stagnation. Like every Soviet kid, I wanted jeans and foreign commodities and was obsessed with the idea of being abroad, being a foreigner. My mom and I immigrated to the U.S. in 1974 because she hated the regime and was Jewish. She felt trapped. Being Jewish in the USSR then, you weren’t persecuted but you were discriminated against.

We wound up in Philadelphia, but weirdly I wanted to be perceived as a foreigner still. This early fantasy of not belonging was very powerful to me, and immigration was hard. I felt homesick because our past was so complicated. We were cooped up in the Soviet Union under a terrible, repressive regime, and when we emigrated, it was without the right to return. We were traitors of the homeland. To our friends and family, it was like dying with a right to correspondence. 

BK: In Please to the Table, there are recipes for a staggering variety of dishes from across the former Soviet Union. Give me the lay of the land. 

AvB: When I was growing up, the mindset was, you can’t see Paris or Rome, so why don’t you have a holiday in Odessa or Uzbekistan or Georgia? For us, these were exotic destinations. As a child, you could call me a propagandist because I was obsessed with this idea of the Soviet Union and fascinated by its diversity. At the market in Moscow, you’d see Georgians with mustaches in hats and Uzbek ladies in braids that sold very expensive produce that could cost a month’s salary. 

BK: Were you always a cook? 

AvB: God, no! I trained to be a concert pianist and went to Juliard. It was rigorous. But I got a hand injury in my 20s that forced me to look for another career. I spoke Italian from spending some time in Italy, and I wound up translating a cookbook from Italian to English. It made me think—shit, maybe I should write my own cookbook. My boyfriend was a British travel writer and a sort of academic type, and he and I wrote the proposal together in 1988. It got a James Beard Award the year they had started giving them, and the book [was] one of Amazon’s top 100 cookbooks. 

BK: 1988 was right when the Soviet Union started to disintegrate. 

AvB: Yes, and everyone was saying, right, a book about bread lines and shortages and herring? But I wanted to explore the whole diversity of Soviet cuisine. There were these Cold War stereotypes of gray clothing and people starving. Many Americans imagined the whole Soviet Union as a gulag, but the truth was, some of the food there was actually amazing. I think I was one of the first people to write about Georgian or Uzbek cuisine in such detail. In the end, Workman Publishing, which had just come out with The Silver Palate, bought the proposal. 

BK: What surprised you most in researching the book? 

AvB: Driving through Ukraine on Christmas, our car broke down. We wound up sleeping in a kind stranger’s hut, and there was this amazing salad of white beets, cracklings, and wild mushrooms. 

It was a long time ago now, but I remember other little things as well, like how in Uzbekistan they made pilaf with yellow carrots and quince and steamed cilantro buns that tasted almost Chinese. Other discoveries were Tatar wedding pie and an Azerbaijani pilaf with a chestnut and pumpkin crust. 

BK: A little birdie told me you’re working on a book about food and national identity.  

AvB: Yes, but I don’t have a name for it yet. It will look at how national identity is a social construct. We assume cuisines are primordial like languages, but we forget that nation states basically didn’t exist before the 19th century. The idea of cultural appropriation in food assumes an essentialist vision of a national cuisine, which is in fact a hybrid construction that is fluid. Take the current gastro-nationalist fight about borscht, for example, between Russia and Ukraine—it says a lot more about the state of geopolitics than the provenance of a dish that has been eaten in a wide geographical region. Dishes often existed long before current national borders did. So arguments about “whose hummus” or “whose baklava” are really about other issues. 

BK: So, food played—and continues to play—a role in post-Soviet nation-building?

AvB: Yes, but even today, there’s a pan-Soviet cuisine enjoyed across the region: Everyone makes salade olivier and vinegret [pickled vegetable salad] and kotlety [beef and buckwheat patties]. In Uzbekistan, the old Soviet dishes—herring, etc.—are still prestigious.  

BK: How has the way people eat in the region changed since you wrote the book? 

AvB: There are more ingredients available now. Some old breeds of goats and cows and vegetables are being revived. That’s different from the Soviet way, which favored monoculture—Uzbekistan made cotton, Moldova made wine. It’s a long conversation. 

And there is a new national consciousness around food that is not dictated by Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, food became more proprietary and gastro-nationalistic. Suddenly there were arguments in Samarkand over whose pilaf was better—the Uzbeks’ or the Tajiks’. Georgians were going on about Abkhazians having no cuisine and no culture. In Armenia, there’s an NGO that goes into the mountains to find 19th-century recipes; ditto for Azerbaijan, where they’re writing books about how Armenians plagiarized their cuisine. The thing is, cuisines don’t stand still—well, maybe except for in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, where the food is still very 70s.   

BK: What Please to the Table recipes do you keep coming back to?

AvB: My mom’s borscht, of course, which is super quick and delicious. It’s the version she is teaching people to make in her new League of Kitchens online class. I also love the rice pilaf with almonds and orange zest—it’s my go-to side dish for everything. I make the Uzbek lamb and rice plov often. It’s a classic. Then there’s the beef stroganoff recipe, which is so good because it calls for filet mignon. 

BK: What are some popular springtime dishes or traditions? 

AvB: Winter was always so long, and the taste of the first dill or cucumber was always so special. People make cold borscht and soups this time of year. Maslenitsa, the blini and butter festival, just passed. There’s a whole section on Easter cooking in the book—we do a cheese mold that’s eaten with kulich coffee cake, but you can sub panettone. People love it. 

BK: For American food lovers planning post-pandemic travel, what country in the region should be at the top of the list? 

AvB: I was in Azerbaijan four years ago, and it has mind-boggling food. It’s sort of Persian with some Soviet influences. They have a million types of pilaf, some with tahdig. Many dishes are bright green with herbs—green stews and green meatballs and green omelets with green sauces. It all tastes so fresh. And because Azerbaijan has oil money, there’s a restaurant culture, and you can walk along the Caspian Sea and stop into tea houses where they serve teas with jams made from yellow cherries and figs.  

BK: Can I pick a bone? The title of the book is Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook. That seems a bit narrow, right? 

AvB: It’s true: The book goes from Lithuania to Central Asia and gives you the full scope of the former empire. When I published it, I thought, I can’t call it a Soviet cookbook, so this was the next-best thing. But then I got angry letters from Ukranians and Armenians. Who knows, maybe you could put “USSR” in a cookbook title now and it would be a retro cool thing. 

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We’ve seldom met a stuffed bread we didn’t love, and khachapuri—Georgia’s national dish and the country’s catch-all term for various breads filled with cheeses—is the latest and most tempting example.

Sometimes flat and chewy, other times tender and fluffy, khachapuri dough comes in many forms, and its myriad potential fillings are adapted and improvised all over Georgia. For months we’ve been turning out our own classic and creative variations from the test kitchen (nine kinds to be exact), but our favorite is one of the most traditional and recognizable: adjaruli khachapuri, a yeasted crust with a gooey filling of salty brined cheese, runny egg, and melted butter. While you may be tempted to eat one of these on your own, this one’s meant to be shared and devoured as an appetizer by a hungry, carb-loving crowd.

For the recipe, plus more on khachapuri and its variants, check out our Guide to Georgian Breads »

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