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The Times (London)
May 28, 2011 Saturday
Edition 1; National Edition
4 COW'S HOOVES AND ANKLES (de-haired and cleaned) 1 COW'S BRAIN
(optional) BOIL FOR 32 HOURS (without seasoning) REMOVE SCUM (put
bones on plate to gnaw)
'First I think I've burnt my tongue... then I gag.' Alex Renton
experiences haute cuisine, Armenia-style Is this the worst dish in the
world?
by Alex Renton
Khash, "the masterpiece of Armenian cuisine", is always eaten early in
the morning. "It is not wise to eat it late," says our host, Shirak.
"Khash is so rich, you need all day to digest it." He takes us to
visit the kitchen the night before the feast; we inspect the great pot
where four cow's feet and ankles and one bovine brain are bubbling.
"It started cooking last night, because khash must be stewed for 32
hours," says Shirak. We agree to meet when that time is up: at 7am.
; I wake with a sense of dread. I dreamt I was back at school, faced
with an important exam: Shirak was the invigilator. When I get
downstairs, I think how much I would give for a cup of tea and no
breakfast-time challenges. But on the table is a pile of crispy lavash
flatbread, some radishes, a bowl of crushed garlic and salt. And a
bottle of vodka.
; The khash arrives: a steaming bowl of murky beige and pink shreds,
with yellow fat already beginning to coagulate around its edges.
Shirak pours us all a glass of vodka. Then he breaks up the flatbread
and stuffs the shards into the bowl, stirring it. Then a big spoonful
of the raw garlic and another of salt. We are ready. All eyes are
watching me.
; At first I think I've burnt my tongue because I can taste nothing.
Then I realise that actually it does taste of nothing, in a sort of
oily way, except when you get a hit of garlic. Then I gag. "I think
you need more salt," says Shirak kindly. That helps, but the vodka
helps more. By bracketing soup sips with vodka gulps I quite quickly
get half the bowl down. Everyone looks pleased.
; Shirak tells the story of khash. "Once, a great Armenian king saw
that the children of his servants were very healthy. More healthy than
his own children. He asked why, and found that when the cow was
slaughtered, and the rich people took the meat, the poor were taking
what was left - the feet - and making soup. So he ordered that from
now on the feet would be served to him as khash. And so it is now a
soup for the rich. In restaurants it costs 2,500 drams (£4) a
serving."
; Fat is now congealing around my mouth as though I've put on too much
lip balm. But the best is to come. The cow's ankles are placed on
plates before us. Salt and garlic are taken and we rub them into the
floppy skin and gristle hanging around the bones. And we bite. When
this is done I return to the soup, which is now setting into the glue
that, in more ignorant cultures, cows' feet usually become. It is
nearly hard enough to take lumps out and hide them in my pockets.
; When we are done, Shirak says, "Now you are ready to work all day."
But I don't feel like that at all. What I really want to do is burp
safely and go to sleep. But below the nausea and the wooziness is a
little bit of pride - I've eaten khash. Over the next few days, I tell
Armenians this and they are impressed: "You ate khash? That is a man's
dish."
; Before I went there, an Armenian in London said, "You'll hate it.
Much as I love my country, it has the worst cuisine in the world." The
new Bradt guidebook - the only one for the country - is keen on
Armenia's fresh ingredients, less so on the cooking: "In Britain or
France one goes to a restaurant for a good meal. In Armenia one goes
to a restaurant to give the wife of the family a rest and accepts that
the food will be worse than at home."
; How bad could Armenian food be? I've eaten in a lot in places where
Michelin does not venture - and I've had some horrible food. The
cassava root stodges of West Africa, roast guinea pig in Peru, fried
tarantula in Cambodia, fermented mud-crab purée in Vietnam: all of
them delicacies as lovely to those who grew up with them as haggis is
to the Scots.
; Foods like these, born of necessity, often make an intriguing
journey from the plates of the poor to the tables of the gourmet rich.
Oysters were not a luxury in the 19th century. Sun-dried tomatoes did
not always come with a designer label. And frequently these foods
carry an encouraging myth by way of marketing: the Armenian king who
fancied the poor people's cow's foot soup is typical. Armenians of
their diaspora - there are more than half a million in the United
States - really love khash. There's a Facebook group devoted to it,
and Californian-Armenian restaurants celebrate the beginning of the
"khash season".
; "Most Armenian traditional food is created by poverty," says Lilit
Chitchyan, a project manager who works with the United Nations in
Armenia. We are eating in a rather good roadside restaurant in the
northern province of Tavush: on the table, alongside a fried trout and
some salty cheese, is a dish called pruyr. This is chunks of pork fat
served on grilled potato, a delicacy. "When we were children my
grandmother would make us this dish of potato, boiled with onion and
thyme. It was all she had. Its name translates as 'potato water'." She
laughs at the look of commiseration on my face. "No, it was delicious.
We asked for it every time we visited." Lilit tells me of another
childhood favourite, khangyal. "Boiled dough with yoghurt and onion on
it. Very tasty!" The cow's feet from which khash is made are shipped
frozen to Armenia from European slaughterhouses. Armenia is not
allowed to trade any foods back to Europe. The obscure little
Christian country is a cul-de-sac, stuck in the Caucasus to the north
of Iran, surrounded by neighbours who, through history, have made a
habit of nibbling away bits of Armenian territory whenever they can.
The borders of two of them - Azerbaijan and Turkey - remain closed
today. Dependent through much of its modern history on Russia - not a
gourmet's paradise - Armenia has always got the thin end of the loaf,
and now it is getting hungrier.
; Most of its staples - wheat flour, rice - are imported, and food
prices are rising rapidly, as they are across the world. Food-price
inflation was 14 per cent over the past year, twice as much as in
Britain. But the 50kg sack of flour that most poor families we meet
need to buy each month has doubled in price in three years. Eggs went
up 40 per cent over Christmas, amid dark mutterings of corruption and
cartels.
; Nothing seems to get better for the Armenian rural poor. When we
visit, a cruel late snowfall and frost looks as if it will, for the
second year running, destroy the blossom on most of the country's
fruit trees. Last year an excessively hot and dry summer destroyed
most of the potato crop. Not long ago, the Minister of Agriculture
said that his only advice to the farmers was that they should go into
their fields and pray.
; He was sacked, and now the Government has told ministers to visit
the farmers and be photographed in the fields. As the rulers of every
fragile country have learnt this year, food prices cause riots, and
riots lead to revolution. The Armenian Government, though, does not
appear to have any other idea for addressing the problem of hunger in
the country.
; Long and grinding poverty explains a lot in Armenian cuisine, though
not everything. When food is short, it makes sense to use all the
protein you can get - and though most Britons might throw up their
hands in disgust at a dish like pruyr, it's not so different from (and
probably more tasty than) the beef dripping on toast that our
grandparents loved.
; But how do you account for a dish like harissa? It is, quite simply,
a chicken boiled whole with wheat and nothing else, not even salt (the
Armenians were insistent on this). It's boiled for a minimum of six
hours. And all the time it boils, you beat it. At the end, you pick
out the bones and serve it. It tastes pretty much as you'd expect -
thin porridge with a chicken flavour; not so very bad, but dismally
bland.
; We travel into the southern Armenian highlands, to a region called
Vayots Dzor, which translates as Gorge of Woes. It is sad indeed, a
land of harsh, jagged mountains, much of whose population are refugees
from Azerbaijan, Armenians driven out of that country when the two
neighbours went to war in the late Eighties. They live mainly in the
homes of Azeris who left under duress at the same time. The snow still
lies around the high villages; it is mid-April. Outside sub-Saharan
Africa, I have not seen people so poor.
; The first man we meet in the little village of Yeghegis - a target
site for an Oxfam programme trying to address rural poverty in Armenia
- shows us with triumph the first vegetables he's managed to gather in
the fields since last autumn: a basket of young nettles he intends to
boil up for soup. Or sell. Children in these villages are clearly
malnourished, their growth stunted both mentally and physically. "We
have not eaten meat this year... Only one of my children has ever had
a banana," says Yasmik Josephyan, a 29-year-old mother of five whom we
meet in Yeghegis. Khash, she says, is her favourite food, along with
barbecued meat and dolma (stuffed vine leaves) - but she has only
eaten these once in her life.
; We eat far better here in the mountains, where cow's feet stew and
chicken porridge are a dreamt-of luxury, than we had in richer
Armenia. The first mushrooms are up, and people we meet fry them for
us with wild sorrel and eggs. Delicious home-preserved juices and jams
made from dogwood and buckthorn fruits, lavash bread and freshly made
yoghurty cheese appear in every household we visit. There is a
wonderful sour soup called spas, made of yoghurt and wheat. And, no
matter how poor the house, we are always offered coffee and usually
vodka.
; We go off into the hills foraging with Yasmik Josephyan. High, just
below the snow line, we come to the grounds of a ruined monastery.
Yasmik kneels on the turf and digs up white shoots like miniature
sticks of celery. This is mandak. Raw, it tastes a little lemony, a
little of fennel. In Armenia it is a rare delicacy, said to be good
for the heart: Yasmik and the other needy villagers can sell it to
traders for 200 drams (30p) a kilo. What are her shopping priorities?
"Potatoes, flour, school books and medicine," she says.
; With typical generosity, Yasmik cooks the mandak for us to try. She
boils it for 30 minutes, fries it a little and then stirs an egg into
it - "an omelette". She serves it with pasta fried brown and then
boiled. The cooked mandak tastes much less good than it had raw - like
parsley that has been boiled for 30 minutes. I deliver a rather
pompous lecture on how much she and the children would benefit from
the nutrients in the vegetable, which were surely lost with so much
boiling. Yasmik politely puts me right: "I know. And, of course, we
drink the water it was boiled in."
; As Yasmik cooks, the electricity, always unreliable in the
mountains, comes on. A TV crackles into life. On it is a Russian
cookery programme. I groan at the irony of it. But Yasmik says, "I
love these programmes. They do make me feel hungry, but I can dream of
having those ingredients to cook with. Josepha [her eldest, 9 years
old] saw a pizza being made on the television and she wants one. I
would love to make her a pizza one day." n Next week Oxfam launches a
campaign to address the failing food system and ever rising prices in
Armenia and other countries across the world. oxfam.org.uk/system
Before I went there, an Armenian in London said, 'Much as I love my
country, it has the worst cuisine in the world'
'We have not eaten meat this year,' says Yasmik. 'Only one of my five
children has ever had a banana'
May 28, 2011 Saturday
Edition 1; National Edition
4 COW'S HOOVES AND ANKLES (de-haired and cleaned) 1 COW'S BRAIN
(optional) BOIL FOR 32 HOURS (without seasoning) REMOVE SCUM (put
bones on plate to gnaw)
'First I think I've burnt my tongue... then I gag.' Alex Renton
experiences haute cuisine, Armenia-style Is this the worst dish in the
world?
by Alex Renton
Khash, "the masterpiece of Armenian cuisine", is always eaten early in
the morning. "It is not wise to eat it late," says our host, Shirak.
"Khash is so rich, you need all day to digest it." He takes us to
visit the kitchen the night before the feast; we inspect the great pot
where four cow's feet and ankles and one bovine brain are bubbling.
"It started cooking last night, because khash must be stewed for 32
hours," says Shirak. We agree to meet when that time is up: at 7am.
; I wake with a sense of dread. I dreamt I was back at school, faced
with an important exam: Shirak was the invigilator. When I get
downstairs, I think how much I would give for a cup of tea and no
breakfast-time challenges. But on the table is a pile of crispy lavash
flatbread, some radishes, a bowl of crushed garlic and salt. And a
bottle of vodka.
; The khash arrives: a steaming bowl of murky beige and pink shreds,
with yellow fat already beginning to coagulate around its edges.
Shirak pours us all a glass of vodka. Then he breaks up the flatbread
and stuffs the shards into the bowl, stirring it. Then a big spoonful
of the raw garlic and another of salt. We are ready. All eyes are
watching me.
; At first I think I've burnt my tongue because I can taste nothing.
Then I realise that actually it does taste of nothing, in a sort of
oily way, except when you get a hit of garlic. Then I gag. "I think
you need more salt," says Shirak kindly. That helps, but the vodka
helps more. By bracketing soup sips with vodka gulps I quite quickly
get half the bowl down. Everyone looks pleased.
; Shirak tells the story of khash. "Once, a great Armenian king saw
that the children of his servants were very healthy. More healthy than
his own children. He asked why, and found that when the cow was
slaughtered, and the rich people took the meat, the poor were taking
what was left - the feet - and making soup. So he ordered that from
now on the feet would be served to him as khash. And so it is now a
soup for the rich. In restaurants it costs 2,500 drams (£4) a
serving."
; Fat is now congealing around my mouth as though I've put on too much
lip balm. But the best is to come. The cow's ankles are placed on
plates before us. Salt and garlic are taken and we rub them into the
floppy skin and gristle hanging around the bones. And we bite. When
this is done I return to the soup, which is now setting into the glue
that, in more ignorant cultures, cows' feet usually become. It is
nearly hard enough to take lumps out and hide them in my pockets.
; When we are done, Shirak says, "Now you are ready to work all day."
But I don't feel like that at all. What I really want to do is burp
safely and go to sleep. But below the nausea and the wooziness is a
little bit of pride - I've eaten khash. Over the next few days, I tell
Armenians this and they are impressed: "You ate khash? That is a man's
dish."
; Before I went there, an Armenian in London said, "You'll hate it.
Much as I love my country, it has the worst cuisine in the world." The
new Bradt guidebook - the only one for the country - is keen on
Armenia's fresh ingredients, less so on the cooking: "In Britain or
France one goes to a restaurant for a good meal. In Armenia one goes
to a restaurant to give the wife of the family a rest and accepts that
the food will be worse than at home."
; How bad could Armenian food be? I've eaten in a lot in places where
Michelin does not venture - and I've had some horrible food. The
cassava root stodges of West Africa, roast guinea pig in Peru, fried
tarantula in Cambodia, fermented mud-crab purée in Vietnam: all of
them delicacies as lovely to those who grew up with them as haggis is
to the Scots.
; Foods like these, born of necessity, often make an intriguing
journey from the plates of the poor to the tables of the gourmet rich.
Oysters were not a luxury in the 19th century. Sun-dried tomatoes did
not always come with a designer label. And frequently these foods
carry an encouraging myth by way of marketing: the Armenian king who
fancied the poor people's cow's foot soup is typical. Armenians of
their diaspora - there are more than half a million in the United
States - really love khash. There's a Facebook group devoted to it,
and Californian-Armenian restaurants celebrate the beginning of the
"khash season".
; "Most Armenian traditional food is created by poverty," says Lilit
Chitchyan, a project manager who works with the United Nations in
Armenia. We are eating in a rather good roadside restaurant in the
northern province of Tavush: on the table, alongside a fried trout and
some salty cheese, is a dish called pruyr. This is chunks of pork fat
served on grilled potato, a delicacy. "When we were children my
grandmother would make us this dish of potato, boiled with onion and
thyme. It was all she had. Its name translates as 'potato water'." She
laughs at the look of commiseration on my face. "No, it was delicious.
We asked for it every time we visited." Lilit tells me of another
childhood favourite, khangyal. "Boiled dough with yoghurt and onion on
it. Very tasty!" The cow's feet from which khash is made are shipped
frozen to Armenia from European slaughterhouses. Armenia is not
allowed to trade any foods back to Europe. The obscure little
Christian country is a cul-de-sac, stuck in the Caucasus to the north
of Iran, surrounded by neighbours who, through history, have made a
habit of nibbling away bits of Armenian territory whenever they can.
The borders of two of them - Azerbaijan and Turkey - remain closed
today. Dependent through much of its modern history on Russia - not a
gourmet's paradise - Armenia has always got the thin end of the loaf,
and now it is getting hungrier.
; Most of its staples - wheat flour, rice - are imported, and food
prices are rising rapidly, as they are across the world. Food-price
inflation was 14 per cent over the past year, twice as much as in
Britain. But the 50kg sack of flour that most poor families we meet
need to buy each month has doubled in price in three years. Eggs went
up 40 per cent over Christmas, amid dark mutterings of corruption and
cartels.
; Nothing seems to get better for the Armenian rural poor. When we
visit, a cruel late snowfall and frost looks as if it will, for the
second year running, destroy the blossom on most of the country's
fruit trees. Last year an excessively hot and dry summer destroyed
most of the potato crop. Not long ago, the Minister of Agriculture
said that his only advice to the farmers was that they should go into
their fields and pray.
; He was sacked, and now the Government has told ministers to visit
the farmers and be photographed in the fields. As the rulers of every
fragile country have learnt this year, food prices cause riots, and
riots lead to revolution. The Armenian Government, though, does not
appear to have any other idea for addressing the problem of hunger in
the country.
; Long and grinding poverty explains a lot in Armenian cuisine, though
not everything. When food is short, it makes sense to use all the
protein you can get - and though most Britons might throw up their
hands in disgust at a dish like pruyr, it's not so different from (and
probably more tasty than) the beef dripping on toast that our
grandparents loved.
; But how do you account for a dish like harissa? It is, quite simply,
a chicken boiled whole with wheat and nothing else, not even salt (the
Armenians were insistent on this). It's boiled for a minimum of six
hours. And all the time it boils, you beat it. At the end, you pick
out the bones and serve it. It tastes pretty much as you'd expect -
thin porridge with a chicken flavour; not so very bad, but dismally
bland.
; We travel into the southern Armenian highlands, to a region called
Vayots Dzor, which translates as Gorge of Woes. It is sad indeed, a
land of harsh, jagged mountains, much of whose population are refugees
from Azerbaijan, Armenians driven out of that country when the two
neighbours went to war in the late Eighties. They live mainly in the
homes of Azeris who left under duress at the same time. The snow still
lies around the high villages; it is mid-April. Outside sub-Saharan
Africa, I have not seen people so poor.
; The first man we meet in the little village of Yeghegis - a target
site for an Oxfam programme trying to address rural poverty in Armenia
- shows us with triumph the first vegetables he's managed to gather in
the fields since last autumn: a basket of young nettles he intends to
boil up for soup. Or sell. Children in these villages are clearly
malnourished, their growth stunted both mentally and physically. "We
have not eaten meat this year... Only one of my children has ever had
a banana," says Yasmik Josephyan, a 29-year-old mother of five whom we
meet in Yeghegis. Khash, she says, is her favourite food, along with
barbecued meat and dolma (stuffed vine leaves) - but she has only
eaten these once in her life.
; We eat far better here in the mountains, where cow's feet stew and
chicken porridge are a dreamt-of luxury, than we had in richer
Armenia. The first mushrooms are up, and people we meet fry them for
us with wild sorrel and eggs. Delicious home-preserved juices and jams
made from dogwood and buckthorn fruits, lavash bread and freshly made
yoghurty cheese appear in every household we visit. There is a
wonderful sour soup called spas, made of yoghurt and wheat. And, no
matter how poor the house, we are always offered coffee and usually
vodka.
; We go off into the hills foraging with Yasmik Josephyan. High, just
below the snow line, we come to the grounds of a ruined monastery.
Yasmik kneels on the turf and digs up white shoots like miniature
sticks of celery. This is mandak. Raw, it tastes a little lemony, a
little of fennel. In Armenia it is a rare delicacy, said to be good
for the heart: Yasmik and the other needy villagers can sell it to
traders for 200 drams (30p) a kilo. What are her shopping priorities?
"Potatoes, flour, school books and medicine," she says.
; With typical generosity, Yasmik cooks the mandak for us to try. She
boils it for 30 minutes, fries it a little and then stirs an egg into
it - "an omelette". She serves it with pasta fried brown and then
boiled. The cooked mandak tastes much less good than it had raw - like
parsley that has been boiled for 30 minutes. I deliver a rather
pompous lecture on how much she and the children would benefit from
the nutrients in the vegetable, which were surely lost with so much
boiling. Yasmik politely puts me right: "I know. And, of course, we
drink the water it was boiled in."
; As Yasmik cooks, the electricity, always unreliable in the
mountains, comes on. A TV crackles into life. On it is a Russian
cookery programme. I groan at the irony of it. But Yasmik says, "I
love these programmes. They do make me feel hungry, but I can dream of
having those ingredients to cook with. Josepha [her eldest, 9 years
old] saw a pizza being made on the television and she wants one. I
would love to make her a pizza one day." n Next week Oxfam launches a
campaign to address the failing food system and ever rising prices in
Armenia and other countries across the world. oxfam.org.uk/system
Before I went there, an Armenian in London said, 'Much as I love my
country, it has the worst cuisine in the world'
'We have not eaten meat this year,' says Yasmik. 'Only one of my five
children has ever had a banana'