SOLSTICE EVE GREETINGS

Here we are on the eve of the solstice, the shortest darkest day of the year. I like it, for it marks the start of our climb back into the light.

Speaking of climb: I seem to have been lost in a tunnel underground for the last six weeks, so tied up with writing and recipe-testing for the book, and with some magazine work too, that I have been paralyzed and unable/unwilling to focus on writing here. My apologies for the long gap.

I got back to Toronto from the Caucasus on October 25^th. As always after a trip, I felt immersed in where I’d been, with echoes of language, people’s voices, the taste of all the food I’d eaten, the mental pictures of places and people, and unwilling to let all that go. And so I plunged into recipe testing and some writing too. I can now look back on those first post-trip weeks with satisfaction, because they produced a satisfyingly thick sheaf of recipes and also some cross-connections to earlier work. I still have a lot more to do of course. Yikes!

I’m now exactly six months from when I’d like to be sending the manuscript to Ann Bramson, my wonderful editor at Artisan. She has such a good sense of the shape of a book, and a marvellous aesthetic sense too, so that I know it will get pulled together and made beautiful as we work our way through the editing and design stages. That confidence I feel is an essential part of what keeps me on track.

In mid-November I went to New York for an overnight, to see Ann and to see a show at the Met that is due to close January 4, 2015: From Assyria to Ancient Iberia. It was spectacular, an exploration, through statues, cookware, jewelry, and other artifacts, of the cross-communication and evolution of cultures between the region of Assyria and ancient Armenia (known as Urartu) in the east to the Phoenicians and the Hittites, the Etruscans, and settlements on the Iberian peninsula (the Mediterranean coast of present-day Spain) all in the ten centuries before the Christian era.

If you have the chance, do go and see it. It explains the interstices between empires…whereas in school we learned about empire and conquest, this is about trade and communication of ideas, especially ideas of design and artistic endeavour. Fabulous. And encouraging as a sign of human perseverance and continuity.

More immediately, in the here and now of the solstice season, I did manage to get the garden dug in mild weather and the last chiles and arugula etc harvested. I’ve made quark stollen using mostly red Fife wheat (delicious) and Cretan biscotti, entirely with red fife, and candied lemon peel and candied turmeric. Next on my list are mandel melbas (thin fine almond biscotti).

But in the next few days I will be out and about, eating other people’s cooking and taking a break from the kitchen and from recipes and productiveness. I tell myself that it’s a good idea to change rhythm. And the seasonal celebrations give me a good excuse to slack off!

I hope that during the holidays you are going to have some time to kick back and read or play or be out with friends or do whatever your heart desires, without worrying about obligations. We all need a little respite from our daily round.

And raise a glass to the returning sun, once we pass the solstice tomorrow, in hopes that it brings us a more peaceful year and some joy and hope…

THOUGHTS AS I LEAVE ARMENIA

Suddenly, here in Yerevan, I realise that I have now been away for four weeks. I feel as if I have been here in Armenia for four weeks; that's how full the past fortnight has been. And before that came the complexities and interestingnesses of Azerbaijan. I have eaten very well, but that's not the full-upness, almost indigestion I feel. Instead it's the richness of my encounters and of the food cultures here in the Caucasus that gives me a feeling of fullness and threatens to overwhelm me.

I sure have a lot of work to do to sort through the things I have learned, and all my impressions of Armenia and Azerbaijan from this trip. After that of course comes the recipe work, and the integrating of all of it into the writing and recipes I have already done...

Everything I learn feels like a confirmation of the interconnectedness, historically and culinarily, of this Persian World, from Iran and Kurdistan to the three countries of the Caucasus. And at the same time each culture and region is so distinctive, and has a very clear view of its own importance.

As with many neighbours, there's a mistrust between the three Caucasus nations. The Azeris and Armenians are in a ceasefire but still feeling actively hostile (the Azeris in particular in my experience) about the Nagorno Karabagh issue. The mountainous region is under Armenian control now, and the Azeri population that lived there moved to Azerbaijan in the mid-nineties. Conversely, the many Armenians who lived in Baku and elsewhere in Azerbaijan left, had to leave.

Yesterday I met one of them, an Armenian woman born in Baku. When she learned I had been there recently she asked, and did the wind blow? She had tears in her eyes, as people do who have been severed from their homeland and are reminded of their loss. Multiply her by thousands, and you have a sense of the layers of painful history in the region.

At the same time, there's a vibrancy too. Georgians and Armenians each speak a distinctive language, each with its own alphabet, that has survived invaders and conquerers for several thousand years, including the oppressions of the Soviet Union. The fall of that empire in 1990, the destruction of one pattern and the emergence of the individual nation states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, was both painful and exciting. People lost jobs and security as Soviet industries crumbled or were sold off to enrich the oligarchs. Yet that first feeling of having their own country, rather than being ruled from Moscow, was exhilarating for many.

Nearly twenty-five years later, afer various traumas - not just the Karabagh war but also Georgia's two conflicts with Russia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), and pollution problems in Azerbaijan because of its Caspian Sea oil, and massive and growing inequality of income in all three countries - the future is a little murky.

But one thing people do know and are proud of, are their cultural traditions, among them, having an important place of honour, their food traditions.

As always, then, travel and inquiry through the lens of food has been exhilarating and rewarding... Now I need to do honour to the rich traditions and hitory I have learned about, and I need to convey the warmth and generosity of the people I have met, and the wealth and enticingness of their culinary traditions....

A QUICK WORD FROM THE CAUCASUS

Greetings from the Caucasus. When I last wrote I was in Azerbaijan. Now, have a couple of days in Tbilisi, I'm in Yerevan, capital of Armenia. The battles between Azerbaijan and Armenia mean that there is no border crossing between the two, so it's necessary to go via Georgia. And that is not a hardship, of course!
After days of cold and rain or cloud, things started to clear two days ago and today is warm and sunny. I saw Mount Ararat clearly for this first time this morning, on a drive out of town to Garni...and it floated like a mirage, well over 5000 metres, in the eastern sky, its little brother mountain, a perfect volcanic cone, to the south.
There's so much to say, but somehow, in the middle of being astonished at everything from the History Museum to the landscape, to the generous hospitality of a village family I met yesterday, I don't know where to start. After a mere two days here I feel overloaded with impressions, including music, art, food and drink (some incredible home made cognac last night, and homemade mulberry vodka too), as well as history, politics, and layers of language.
So I'll just keep this short, for now, and say that if you are thinking of travel, do consider a trip to Armenia and Georgia, and to Azerbaijan too...

GENEROSITY OF STRANGERS - SHARING FOOD & DRINK

I've now been in the village of Lahic (pronounced lahitch) for two days. It's in a steep sided valley, in the foothills of the Caucasus, about 180 kilometers west north west of Baku. I'm in a homestay here, the house of a delightful Lahici couple whose two children are grown and have left home. Jairan is a brilliant and attentive cook, so I am learning a lot. And Dadash is a teacher with enormous curiosity who speaks English as well as Russian, Azeri, and, like most of the villagers and others in this small region, Lahici. It's a close cousin of the Tat or Tati language, and they are Iranic, in the same family as Farsi.

Yes, it's complicated, and just think of the different language families involved: slavic, Turkic (for Azeri, (though it also has a lot of words with Farsi roots I am told), Iranic, and then English too. When we talk about plants, hawthorn, rose hips, sea buckthorn, for example, all of which grow here and are well used, Dadash goes to his computer to find the equivalent words in other languages. and so I get to learn them too.

I just posted on FB a long little thing about the Garden of Eden that lies a pleasant walk away in the hills behind the village. There are wild barberry bushes, and sea buckthorn, and white thorn or hawthorn (we couldn't be sure on the computer) and wild plum...and then there are about a hundred, maybe more, apple trees, mature, loaded with fruit, and of many different varieties. I tasted until my mouth was a little raw...

And I photographed the apples, the light, the shadows. A horseman had come by as I was walking, loving the openness, the air, the view. There was a quick exchanged "Salaam" as he went by, then he cantered off along the track. Apart from him, and several shepherds with flocks of sheep and goats, I saw no one. And then suddenly I heard a labouring car engine. Round the corner came an old Lada with three guys in it. They turned around and then parked the car under a tree. One headed up the hillside through the trees carrying two buckets, clearly on an apple gathering mission.

Another, lean and bony, in his seventies, with a tanned high-cheekboned face and a smile, came over and shook my hand as he said Salaam. And then he spoke to me in Russian. I said my few words, which say that I don't know Russian. But he went on and I gathered he was inviting me to join them in drinking vodka. "No thank-you" I said. He continued, to say something like but we'e making a fire and cooking shashlik... "Thankyou, yes, I said with a few more of my Russian words, accepting with pleasure.

What a treat. We gathered dried bits of twigs and wood, Ajdar, for that was the thin guy's name, made a fire, and as Vali made several trips up with empty buckets and back down with loads of apples, Ajdar threaded lamb onto three wide skewers, arranged two rocks on either side of the fire, and then placed the skewers across the embers. He also buried three potatoes farther over, not under the meat, to cook in the coals.

I learned that apart from wood and a rock or something for balancing skewers on, you also need water. As he felt the embers get too hot, Ajdar would sprinkle water on them, and sometimes onto the meat, to cool things down a little.

Meantime the others set out cardboard from a folded out box as a table, placed glasses and napkins on it, opened the vodka bottle, opened a jar of whole pickled tomatoes and a jar of homemade yogurt, and sliced one of the two flat loaves of bread they'd brought.

Soon Ajdar brought over the first skewer and slid it onto a plate. Then came the other two, making a heap of beautifully grilled lamb that had been flavoured only with salt.

As we started eating a guy appeared walking down the hillside. He'd ridden past us earlier, on a horse that also carried box-shaped panniers, on an apple gathering trip, clearly. Here he was, having tied the horse somewhere uphill, and so he too was included in the feast.

The open hospitality, the preparedness to share food and drink with a stranger or a neighbour (for the horseman was also from the region, though not specially known to any of them), is part of the culture here it seems, as it is in Georgia. I wondered what would have happened in the equivalent situation in Canada, the US or Europe. We are shy about sharing. I don't think it's always greed. I think it is a kind of social hesitation. But here, in what we outsiders might consider a more traditional culture, and in a place where people have suffered a lot from war and change, there's this hospitable generosity.

It's something to think about...

MUSINGS FROM BAKU & A PLEA TO DISCARD "EXOTIC"

I've been thinking about the difference between anticipation and arrival, these last couple of days, my first days in Baku, Azerbaijan. Before a trip to a place unknown to me, I read history and geography, look at maps, read about culture too, and politics, but I avoid making a list of sights to visit or any other kind of "want list". I like to think that somehow I will manage to find my way, by stumbling into unexpected places or people or learning once I'm there. If I go with a list I feel that I'm setting the trip up as a "these are my expectations, now the place has to meet them".

But this formless version of trip planning also leaves me with vague anxieties in the weeks before I leave. What if the place and people are, for reasons known or unknown to me, ungenerous and impenetrable? What if I am going to feel closed out?

That edginess pre-trip is part of why I haven't written here for about two weeks. I don't like the way the edginess takes over, becomes like a pretrip queasiness, and I think each time: "surely by now I should have learned to NOT feel like this!"

Once I'm on the plane, it goes. In this case the first flight took me to Istanbul and a six hour wait for the flight to Baku. In the end there was confusion and delay on that flight, so that we arrived (given hour changes too) at about 3 in the morning. AFter changing money I shared a taxi into town with a guy I'd met during our inteminable waiting around for the flight. The taxi ripped us both off in the end, the hotel I had booked through bookings.com had no room for me, and altogether it was a bumpy hour or two before I was in a bed in a room, as daylight started lightening the sky.

None of those messinesses were a worry, and indeed I am never fussed ahead of time about that kind of thing. Dealing with it all also gave me my first glimpse of the working people of Baku, those who are stuck with the overnight front desk responsibilities at small hotels, with sweeping the streets, with opening a small corneer store early, and other poorly paid work. And all those people were delightfully nice, generous-minded, tolerant of my feeble attempts at Russian.

That emotional ease and welcome on arrival has continued. The guy up the way from my hotel in the Old City (no traffic here, so wonderful) runs a fruit and veg store, a small one. Outside it is a large tree that creates a hanging out zone for passers-by and people in the neighbourhood. There is conversation, banter, shared pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds, and other undemanding exchanges, from early morning until well after dark. The proprietor sits outside too, then gets up each time someone walks up the slope from the tree into his shop.

Two nights ago when I went in to buy something, I'd already spent some time hanging around, answering the odd qustion and watching the ongoing scene. And so the shopkeeper already knew I was from Canada, that I am travelling alone, that I have two grown male children, and that I plan to leave Baku tomorrow, heading northwest towards Sheki and area. I bought a couple of pears and a cucumber, for a total of about 50 cents. Today as I came by after a long morning out photographing at Yalish Bazaar and other doings, he greeted me with a raised hand and a hearty "salaam" then turned to the guy he was with and explained I was a tourist from Canada.

I feel as if in this short time I've become a temporary part of the lane. I'm greeted by women, waved at shyly by little kids, and given a nod of acknowledgement by the men.

All of this is to tell you that there is an unimaginable gulf between the anticipations bred of anxiety on the one hand and the reality of arrival on the other. And in my experience it is always this way. Wherever we are, human beings are just that, human. We are all social animals, curious about each other, and curious about the stranger. As a visible stranger (my clothing and the way I walk give me away) I get the benefit of that curiosity. And I welcome it of course, even when, as can happen, it feels intrusive, or it would if I were subject to it in my home town.

This brings me to another word I would like us to toss on the trash pile, at least in the food context, but really in every context, and that is "exotic".

I saw something on FB the other day referring to spices and a talk that would help people make "exotic" foods. What are we doing here with this idea? Everyone's home food is a solid reality. And the foods we don't know about are not exotic, they are just foods we don't know. I feel that the word "exotic" is part of the kind of "Orientalising" that Edward Said wrote and talked about.

If and when a food or cuisine is unfamiliar to us, it seems valid to me that we are curious, just as the people here in Baku have been curious about me. And that curiosity is a kind of welcome too, as in, "I would like to know more". It's a respectful interested kind of curiosity that seeks to get closer, not to create distance.

But if something or someone is described as "exotic" the word and idea create a distance. It's not the distance of respect. It's the distance of that other kind of attitude to a stranger, which is a compound of mistrust, fear, and a kind of self-protective mocking. I find it ugly and not something that we ever want in the world of food and culture that I engage with.

And so please add "exotic" to the pile of words to discard, along with those others I wrote about earlier this month.

Thank-you!

AND LET'S DITCH THE TERM "ORGANIC" TOO

Last time I posted I was chasing after the use and abuse of the words artisanal and rustic. I proposed that we ditch them, at least for awhile, until we can give them meaning and substance again…

The next word on my hit list, even more abused and distressing, is of course “organic”. Do we really want to keep on with this hopeless label? I remember when the first mindful grocery opened in my hometown of Ottawa, an “organic” shop in the Market area, selling bulk this and that and vegetables and fruit fresh and dried and frozen, grown without pesticides or other chemicals. It was entirely new as an idea for a food shop. I’d been lucky: most of what I’d eaten growing up had come from my mother’s vegetable garden, or from local farmers, and bore little resemblance to the offerings in the grocery stores, for sure.

But why is it called “organic?” I remember asking the woman who owned the store. Well we want to convey that it’s “naturally grown or naturally produced food” she said. You know, like the magazine “Organic Gardening”.

Yes, I knew the mag, for my mother had a subscription. Sometime later she also took out a subscription to Harrowsmith, then a small Canadian-published magazine.

I don’t think the words “sustainable agriculture” were in the air at all then. We knew about pesticides because of Rachel Carson’s work… but still, they weren’t scary to most people. Soon after the opening of the store I had a chance to work with farmers and people in small rural communities in the Ottawa area. I met a woman who was very engaged in local political issues. She and her husband farmed, and she also had a huge vegetable garden. It’s so great she told me, I have no weeds in my garden. The pesticides my husband puts on the fields also go into the garden before I transplant my starts in the spring. It’s so clean and weed-free.

Yikes! I thought, but tried not to show any appalled reaction to her. I did ask her if she wasn’t concerned at all about the pesticides, and no, she wasn’t. It’s such a small amount, she said. And the food is washed and cooked…

There are probably still many farm gardens which produce huge amounts of food for families thanks to chemical fertilizers and the application of herbicides to keep weeds down. For sure people need to be fed.

But it occurs to me that perhaps we’d have less wasted food if it tasted better and if we paid a little more for it. Wouldn’t we be more mindful as we shopped? And more mindful about figuring out how to use leftovers?

So if when you see the word ‘organic” you try substituting the word “sustainable”…see how it feels. Of course we all have different views about what sustainable means. But it’s less about “purity” (not achievable and frankly an elitist idea don’t you think?) and more about process and an acknowledgemnt that we’re all in this together.

We need to figure out food systems that give us all access to food that tastes good and has nutritional value, and in a way that enables us to go on farming and feeding humanity. That means paying more for food, paying attention to food and how it’s grown and produced, and most of all, that means having respect for the people who do all the work of directly feeding people every day, all over the world: the farmers, the people who transport and process agricultural production, and those who sell it, as well as the cooks who get it onto the table. 

LET'S DITCH THE WORDS ARTISANAL & RUSTIC

It’s a unfamiliar feeling, the heat of today, as in Toronto we have our first scorcher of the summer…in early September. The kids are back in school, the Toronto Film Festival is in full swing, and I’m dopey with the unaccustomed heat.

Since I last wrote, I’ve had the good news that my visa application for Azerbaijan has been approved. That means that I can fly to Baku, as planned, in late September, and from there explore a little of Azerbaijan before taking a bus into Georgia. I’m delighted. Autumn is such a lovely food time to travel. I’m especially looking forward to learning more about Georgian and Armenian “kompot”, thick fruit syrups, and also about Armenian technique for making vodka from fruit.

All these things when made by a home-cook or small crafts-person might be called “artisanal” foods. But that word, and a similar one, “rustic” have become so debased and mis-applied, it seems to me, that we should give them a rest for awhile. My friend Dawn the Baker (Dawn Woodward) and her husband Ed Rek of Evelyn’s Crackers make whole grain crackers by hand, with care. Those are “artisanally” made crackers. But the label is now applied to so many small-production foods and other products that it’s lost its value. Let’s just say hand-crafted? Or, when it’s appropriate “home-made”.

And then moving on to “rustic”, there’s a lot to be said. My friend Dina, who has read and bought cookbooks of every description for decades, was talking to me about this the other day. We were talking about the way “rustic” is sometimes used to describe a sloppy or crude-looking tart or cookie, or other food. “Rustic” does NOT mean made carelessly or without skill and sophistication. At least, it shouldn’t.

Country cooks, “peasant” cooks as many cookbooks refer to them, are those most likely to know their ingredients well and to be most reluctant to waste good food. So there’s nothing casual, and everything intended, about country cooking. And there’s great sophistication, in the sense of deep skilful knowledge, about how to get the most flavour out of ingredients. The word “rustic” originally meant, in the food context, not “chef-ed”, not loaded with sauces, and not part of the classic haute cuisine canon.

Why am I bothering to talk about this? I guess because the debasing of the term and idea of artisan is disturbing, and the misuse of both artisan and rustic involves a lack of respect for the skill and intention of the original.

Perhaps I am reacting to a certain kind of condescension. It’s an attitude that assumes that just anyone can work artisanally and that a rustic food is the product of less skill and attention and sophistication, rather as if rustic meant “produced by a crude cook.”

The next word I have in my sights is “organic”. But that’s for another day!

It’s time I went out to pick the remaining tomatillos (raccoons and/or squirrels stole some of them) and thought about supper. Chopped tomatoes, green salad, and leftovers from last night seem the best way to go in this heat, perhaps with some chilled white wine, or even the luxury of a gin and tonic, made with Fever Tree or another good tonic….

LEARNING RESPECT, IN SCHOOL & OUT

It’s warm and kind in the sun, but sitting here in the shade, in my small back garden, the cool of autumn is tickling my skin and reminding me that Labour Day is around the corner. I’m not ready for this! Perhaps no-one is, including teachers and kids heading back to school. And here in Toronto, where we’ve had an unusually cool summer after a long harsh record-setting winter, we’re feeling a little robbed of warmth and renewal.

You can’t tell that though from looking at gardens and farmers’ markets. Somehow the tough winter helped many plants and crops thrive, in a kind of “if you weren’t killed by the cold, then you are stronger and more vigorous” kind of scenario. Thus the stone fruits are full of flavour, the arugula and sorrel in my garden are still luxuriant, and the cool weather has kept the lettuce lively too. The bees are humming, working hard, sucking at the chive flowers and the remains of the phlox and lilies, the flowering arugula gone wild, and the odd daisy.

Meantime next door the neighbours’ little kids are playing in water, splashing and squabbling and then laughing again…a last hurrah before the older child heads to kindergarten next Tuesday.

I think of school as a process of socialisation: we learn about the diversity of characters and interactions from spending time with people we did not choose, in a relatively orderly environment, and with distractions, such as learning, to help us stay on track and focussed. If school helps us maintain respect for ourselves and others, and learn to discern and work with the differences between us, then that’s a huge accomplishment. The marks and “benchmarks” are so much less important!

Up the street, speaking of school and turning points in the year, the campus of the University of Toronto has been mown and tidied and repaired and touched up, in preparation for the arrival of students. Awkward first year students and their worldly possessions are being unloaded in front of residences by their parents this weekend; the cooler at-ease-in-the-city upper year students will be around in a week’s time. So now is the last day to get to the University bookstore for supplies before the huge long line-ups start. The next time for easy access will be in four weeks.

And so the world turns in this safe-feeling Toronto of no war and predictable seasonal cycles.

But across the water people are suffering in fragmented and war-torn landscapes. Syria is a catastrophe, and parts of Iraq too, and in Ukraine Putin is flexing the muscles he first used to wrest Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia. The era of the cold war, so static and buttoned down, and full of bluster, with two clear “sides” must feel desirable to some people in retrospect, just as many in the ex-Soviet Union after 1990 spoke fondly of the certainties of life under the Soviet dictatorship. But now we’re in a new era and have to feel our way and figure out how to stay open to the wider world.

It’s too easy to turn our backs on the pain of others. Their pain and suffering make us uncomfortable; perhaps we feel guilty for being so well off in our peaceful place while other suffer. But I do think it’s important to keep thinking about the individual human beings on the ground, anywhere and everywhere in the world. They deserve our attention, our respect, and our help.

Food is a thread that we can use to help understand others, in fact to help visualise ourselves in their place. Even as there are rocket launchers attacking, in Gaza or Syria, there are home cooks figuring out how to feed their families, and bakers heating their ovens to get the day’s bread baked.

And that visualising of the daily food preparation, and family meals of others, in turn helps us remember that we are all on this planet together. It helps us have respect for the people we share the planet with, just as, when we were in primary school, we were all in the classroom together, with our differences and our difficulties, embarked on trying to understand what was going on and to learn.