A Favorite Armenian Lunch

My physical therapist put me in touch with his mother, Maggie Saab (right), to learn how to cook Armenian food. Click at right for the story, the recipes, and how-to photos.

The Recipe - Armenian Itch

As Maggie Saab, whose family was from Kilis, Armenia (today part of Turkey), taught Lindsay Sterling in Falmouth, MA, in August 2015.

Active time: 20 minutes
Total time: 1 hour
Serves 4-6

1 Tbsp olive or vegetable oil
2 yellow onions, diced
6 oz. tomato paste
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp sumac*
2 tsp salt
1 cup fine grain (#1) bulgur wheat*
3 cups water
1 head fresh lettuce or 1/4 head cabbage or fresh grape leaves
6-12 sprigs fresh spearmint
6-12 sprigs fresh parsley
Small dish of delicious olives with pits (optional)
6 pita bread or flatbread (optional)
8 oz. mild white cheese such as hallum (queso blanco also works) (optional)
6-12 small sprigs fresh thyme (optional)

*you'll likely need to find these ingredients online or at a Middle Eastern market.

In a large pot with lid, saute onions in oil until soft. Add tomato paste and three cups water and bring to a boil. Add salt, sumac, lemon juice, and salt. Once this boils, stir in the bulgur wheat and cover. Let the mixture sit off heat for about 40 minutes.

(If after resting it is not a paste, stir in a little bit more bulgur, which will soak up more liquid. The ideal texture is a soft yet firm paste. If the mixture is too firm and dry you could stir in little bit more water. If adding water or bulgur, let the mixture rest again before serving so the bulgur has time to soak up liquid.)

Serve on a platter and garnish with fresh parsley. Serve with fresh leaves of lettuce, cabbage, or grape vine. Add a spearmint and/or parsley leaf to each bite. Delicious! Armenian itch also goes well served with olives and pieces of pita with slices of mild white cheese and a sprig of fresh thyme.


Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015

See How To Do It

 Here are some pics to use along with the recipes so you can see what each stage looks like. Click at right for the recipes.

Armenian Itch

Fine grain bulgur wheat:

After you stir in the wheat, you cover the pot off the heat and the wheat soaks up the delicious liquid.

After it sits for a while, it turns into a thick paste, like this:

People scoop up bites with fresh lettuce, cabbage or grape leaves. The leaves pictured below Ali plucked right off a concord grape vine in his back yard. 

 Baklava

She takes two sheets at a time of phyllo dough. Butters the top layer, and then adds another two pieces on top of that, then butters again. Then she lays down the nut filling in a row.

 Butter the top of each roll before slicing into bite-sized pieces.

Here is the rose water that she adds to her simple syrup, which she pours over the baklava right when it comes out of the oven. It sizzles and the baklava sucks up all the sweet syrup. It's awesome. For some reason that sizzle is so satisfying!

Burek

Her cheese filling is a mixture of garden parsley, crumbled feta, and shredded Muenster.

Again, she uses two sheets at a time (right on top of each other). Then she cuts it into long rectangles.

She just butters the edges because when the cheese melts it adds fat then, too. 

Put filling in the bottom, fold the phyllo over to make a triangle shape, and then fold the triangle shape like flag over and over up the rectangle until you can't fold any more. 

Butter the tops and sprinkle sesame seeds on. 

What a lovely day! Thank you Maggie and Ali!

This is Ali playing the oud, an ancestor of the guitar. He played an arabic song form called a samai that was in mostly 10/8 time. New to my ears! Lovely, Ali!

The Story

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