Interrupted Flavors: Thoughts on Armenian Cuisine

Attitudes toward food and culinary art can reveal much about a people’s past and future. This article observes how we are trying to work with our cultural influences and approach the concept of national cuisine more consciously.

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“Akhpar drink.” This is what many people in Yerevan called coffee when it was brought and then popularized by repatriates who had immigrated to Soviet Armenia in the 1940s. The repatriates were called “akhpars” by the locals, a term derived from the word yeghpayr (for brother) that served to segregate them as the Other.

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In the 1960s, the same fate befell the lahmajo, the flatbread with spiced meat popular among a new wave of repatriates. It was referred to as an “akhpar meal” by locals and treated as something foreign from their own cuisine. Now both of these are standard fare and have found their place in Armenian gastronomy. The “akhpar drink” has become “Armenian coffee” with which our days begin, continue and sometimes end, and we proudly present lahmajo as “Armenian pizza” to otars (foreigners).

The repatriates not only brought their resources and enthusiasm with them, but also many culinary traditions that the people of Armenia had already forgotten. Interruption has become a typical occurrence in our history, which is especially visible in food. For example, there is a big gap in the attitudes of diasporan Armenians and Armenians living in Armenia toward food and culinary art. It took about 60 years for the “akhpar meal,” which was negatively perceived because of the Arabic roots of the word lahem be ajeen (meat and bread) to become “ours” and enter our everyday life.

After World War II, during Khrushchev’s Seven-Year Plan (1959-1965), local Armenians tried to conform as closely as possible to the cultural cues of the Soviet empire. As a result, different approaches to the preparation of desserts began to take shape, and new types of dough were preferred, which had nothing in common with traditional Armenian cuisine. It was during those years that the Napoleon (or mille-feuille) appeared on our tables. It was a reminder of one of the most important events in Russian history—the victory of the “Patriotic War of 1812”—in the form of a dessert. The French mille-feuille was transformed; in this context, it took on cultural undertones as deeply layered as its alternating cream and pastry dough. Napoleon continues to be prepared and eaten in many countries of the former Soviet Union. In this way, slowly but steadily, our culture of sweets shifted from the East to somewhere between the East and Europe, rejecting its syrupy past and embracing a new communist orthodoxy.

Read the full article: “Interrupted Flavors: Thoughts on Armenian Cuisine”

Originally published: EVN Report, Jul 4, 2021

 

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