Armenian Cooking
Secrets:
Live Music and a Tablespoon of Rose Water
By Lindsay Sterling
When my physical therapist, Amin
Saab, in Brunswick heard about my quest to learn a dish from every country in
the world, he connected me with his Armenian mother in Cape Cod. In August, she
and I sat together on her back porch, overlooking a beach packed with orange
parasols. Over the sounds of distant waves crashing and kids playing, Maggie
Saab told me the story of the foods she was about to teach me how to cook.
The first dish was called itch in Armenian. It’s a tangy vegetarian
paste eaten with mint and fresh lettuce, cabbage, or grape leaves. To make itch, you sauté diced yellow onion in
oil and then add tomato paste, water, generous salt, and a couple tablespoons
of sumac. Once the liquid is boiling, then you stir in fine-grain bulgur wheat,
cover the pot, and let the wheat soak up the liquid.
Maggie’s parents, who lived in the small
Armenian town of Kilis (which is today part of Turkey), made this dish when
they cleaned the house and did laundry because it was easy to prepare and eat
for lunch. “During the Armenian genocide in 1915,” Maggie explained, “They
escaped through the hot desert to Aleppo, Syria, where I was born.” When Maggie
was eighteen, her aunt helped her get a scholarship at a nursing program at the
American University of Beirut in Lebanon. At school she got on a bus to go skiing
with some classmates. There were a handful of medical students in the back of
the bus playing live music. “I go crazy for music,” Maggie explained, “I love
to sing.” The musicians called out to her group, “Come and sit with us!” Maggie
did. The young man who was playing the oud, an ancient stringed instrument, would
become her husband (the father of my physical therapist).
As the bulgur wheat dish was resting,
Maggie showed me how to make cheese burek,
a collection of flakey triangles of cheese-filled pastry, and baklava, a dessert of crushed walnuts and
cinnamon. Maggie prefers to make her baklava in long rolls, which she slices crosswise
at a diagonal into bite-sized, rounded nuggets. She also likes to add a
tablespoon of rose water to the cooled syrup before pouring it over the hot pastry.
Maggie laid platters of the itch, burek, and baklava on the
table on the back porch along with plates of sliced farmer’s cheese, olives,
pita bread, and fresh garden herbs. Maggie’s husband, Ali, joined us for a
lunch. I asked if Maggie being a Christian and Ali being a Muslim was ever a
problem, and they said it never was. When they got married, though, Maggie was worried about one thing. “I didn’t
even know how to cook rice!” Ali had worked in his parents’ restaurants in Lebanon
and helped her learn how to cook. As they lived in the Boston area for almost
forty years, Maggie picked up cooking secrets from Armenian friends and family,
too.
Through the years Ali has continued
studying and practicing the oud. It seemed fitting to ask him to play
something, considering his music was responsible for bringing us together. He
played a song form called samai. Its changing
time signatures and microtones (notes between Western music notes) opened my
mind and heart to the vastness of the beauty inherent in our world.
Click at right for the recipes and how-to-photos.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015
