With the start of a new year, I have found myself reflecting on the things most important to me. Traditions keep coming to mind; why do we do them and who are they for? The start of a new year is preceded by diverse celebrations and traditions from around the world, but my family does most of our celebrating after the new year. While Christmas for many is on the twenty-fifth of December, my family keeps up with the tradition of an alternative one: Armenian Christmas.
On the twenty-fifth of December, my dad’s side of the family come together for light Christmas festivities. We exchange presents, decorate our Christmas tree, and share a meal. Then, eleven days later, we meet up with my mom’s side of the family to celebrate the Armenian way. For many years The Armenian Church used January 6th as a day to come together for a great feast. The change of date isn’t even a unique idea – historically, up until the fourth century, all Christian churches celebrated on the sixth. It’s structured around the idea of coming together to share a meal with your family.
My family is largely areligious, so I’ve always experienced both celebrations of Christmas around cooking as opposed to other Christmas traditions. Today, I’d like to invite you, the reader, into my kitchen to cook for the holidays. Pull up a chair and give me your hands. Let me guide you through the unofficial rules of cooking Armenian meals.
Rule One
The first rule of Armenian cooking is that you should’ve started 48 hours ago. Armenian cooking isn’t for the impatient. The lentils you should have soaked the night before are uncaring in the face of your last-minute panic; they don’t work on your time.
“Absolutely not” is always the answer to your inquiry about substituting the bag of dry chickpeas for canned ones. Reader, it’s important you remember to skip rule one almost every year. You forgot, of course, to do these preparations early. This is especially true on holidays like Christmas because it wouldn’t be a holiday without last-minute appeals to legumes to work a little faster.
Rule Two
The second rule is particularly important after you fail the first; don’t panic. I say don’t panic because once the panic sets in, you will start to rush. Reader, rushing Armenian food is like asking your SUV to run on diesel. It doesn’t work and the concepts are incompatible. Give it a shot, if you wish. You can try and rush rolling yolanchi, but spend two minutes unraveling the delicate grape leaves from one another and you’ll learn they have a mind of their own. Trimmed off the grapevine, now preserved in a solution of water and citric acid, you must take steady hands to lay out the easily torn pads. It is best to try not to think about how each individual frond has spent a year in a jar preparing for this very moment; when they inevitably tear, this thought will cross your mind often. Panicking will only make them tear more easily. Now is a good time to ask whose hands picked those leaves. Generations ago it could have been your great grandmother right from the vine in her homeland. Now, a grocer in Italy mass harvests these salty plants and they are sent to chain supermarkets for you to buy. Ignore the strange tug you feel at the thought of this.
Rule Three
The third step is to embrace the dance. All cooking has a rhythm, a cadence of steps to which you cook. I’ve always felt this tune when making yolanchi or dolma – grape leaves stuffed with a mixture of rice, meat, and all sorts of spices. Reader, come dance with me. You fold and tuck those briney leaves, these whisps of life around a filling, usually a mixture of rice and meat, again and again. Lay the leaf out flat. Place a small amount of filling inside. Tuck the leaf in on and over itself, surrounding the filling in a salty cocoon. Look over at your mother; she has done five in the time it’s taken you to do one. Take a moment to wonder if you will ever have such speed, such gentle hands. Wonder when it last was she looked so content.
Rule Four
Fourth is a rule shared by many households across the globe: measure with your heart.
Sometimes your mother will go to grab a cookbook. The big orange one, tattered and well-loved. For a moment you wonder if she is breaking her own rule on measurement. You know she doesn’t need the book. Your mother knows the ratio of garlic to tomato paste for the filling in her bones, the same way you know how much parsley goes into the tzatziki; it’s half practice, half spiritual.
She opens the cookbook, old pages preserved carefully. Neat, gentle handwriting crowds the margins of the recipe book as your mother flips through the pages. You feel a new pair of hands at the table, unwrapping bundles of briny leaves with practiced precision and laying them out for you to scoop filling into. It’s those hands that will help you decide how much garlic is too much or how much dill is too little. You were too young to remember the hands that wrote those notes in the margins, but sometimes the heart remembers what we do not. And so, while your mother traces her hands over the penmanship, you watch her, and you wonder if your mother is watching hers. She tucks and folds the leaves, swaddling the filling, the way a mother might swaddle her baby.
Rule Five
The fifth rule often happens automatically: make more than you need. Not for you, but for others. Your grandfather used to keep extra watches and pocket knives around his house, tiny essentials to give as gifts for those who have freshly immigrated to America – sometimes with nothing. His family knew what it felt like to own nothing. Now you make extra grape leaves for your aunt to take home with her. Nobody leaves the table without leftovers.
From the kitchen, reader, we move to the dinner table. Your family sees more family. They talk over bowls of kefta and kabob, hands tearing at pita while they wildly gesticulate. They have all brought their own dishes from their own kitchens, and if you look closely, very closely, you might notice the shadows of hands responsible for their creation.
Everybody celebrates differently, but I hope you enjoyed learning about how my family does. As I embark on the New Year I’m hoping to spend more time appreciating traditions. I hope this inspires you to do the same!
By Milo Heard