Armenian cuisine is not so much a static set of recipes, as a style of cooking and a Middle Eastern, Mediterranean pantry.

Armenian cuisine is not so much a static set of traditional recipes as it is an attitude and approach to food and to cooking. Partly, this has to do with the fact that a standard mixture of seasonings - known as chaimen- flavors most prepared dishes.

Besides the chaimen, garlic, onions, peppers, lemons, cinnamon, oregano, mint, tahine (tahini, a sesame seed paste), mahleb (ground cherry pits, available in Middle Eastern specialty stores) and olive oil round out the rest of the Armenian seasoning cupboard.

While vegetables, fruits and grains tend to take center stage in a meal, lamb is also a basic ingredient, with its unique flavor forming the basis for hearty soups and stews (abours), as well as a wide variety of other dishes.

Armenian Yogurt

And then there is yogurt - not the mild or heavily sugared concoctions known in America, but a rich and pungent custard made from scratch. The thing about yogurt is that it takes yogurt to make yogurt. That’s not so much of a problem today, when plain yogurt purchased from the supermarket provides the necessary bacterial starter. But that wasn’t always the case.

Being an organic substance, getting the first yogurt starters into the United States in the 19th century was no easy task. There was absolutely no way for the immigrants to simply bring their needed starter through American customs. But American customs agents greatly underestimated Armenian ingenuity.

The essential ingredient for turning milk into yogurt is a complex set of bacteria that basically takes over the medium (milk) and transforms it. The bacteria can live for a period of time under less than ideal circumstances. This bit of information is essential because, knowing it, savvy Armenian émigrés would dip some fresh white handkerchiefs into a mixture of water and yogurt before they sailed for America. The handkerchiefs were then line dried and neatly folded into their luggage. Once they were safely through Customs and settled into their new homes, they would simply soak the linen in some warm milk, reactivating the culture, and make their yogurt!

The History of the Food

Armenia is a very ancient Aryan cultures that most probably originated in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers thousands of years ago, settling eventually high in the Caucus Mountains, bordered by the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean seas., as well as in the Cilicia region of modern day Turkey. While traditionally not nearly as nomadic as many Middle Eastern tribes, Armenians have long been wanderers of the world. Wherever they have found themselves, Armenians have tended to maintain a strong ethnic identity.

So, in Armenian kitchens throughout the world, spring means picking young, tender wild grape leaves and rolling them into platters of sarmas coming out of the kitchen, cooked when the wild grape leaves used to wrap the fragrant rice and lamb filling were at their very best.

As the tomatoes, peppers and zucchini ripen in the backyard garden, the dolma season comes next. Dolmas taste best when the vegetables used for stuffing the lamb/rice mixture are right off the vine... ripe.... but not as large as the produce becomes further into the season. Whole meals are constructed from dolmas, served warm with dollops of cold, fresh madzoon (yoghurt), Armenian flatbread, and maybe a salad of tomatoes or cucumbers on the side.

Grilled Shish Kebabs

Late summer means Lamajun or shish kebab; the latter cooked out on the backyard grill with pilaf tomato/parsley salad on the side. Summer meals are always accompanied with Tahn (a yogurt drink served icy cold) or an iced tea that is more like a tea punch, blended as it is with the freshly squeezed juices of oranges and lemons, with enough sugar to sweeten it well. Hot summer evenings might also call for a cold bulghur wheat and vegetable salad called Tabbouleh; lots of fresh fruit and cheeses, special oil-cured Greek olives or, possibly, a gentle soup made from the insides of the zucchini used earlier for dolma.

In the Fall, Fasoula ( a kind of lamb, tomato and green bean stew), served usually with a pilaf and the ever-present flatbread, as well as Yogurt or Greek Lemon soup, Pasterma and Eggs, and casseroles like Mousakka or Sou-Berag.

By winter, shish kebab evolves into Tass kebab (which is basically a steamed version of the grilled lamb dish), with Persian Pilaf, or another sort of bulgur and vegetable dish, served piping hot, rather than the cold summer version. Fresh fruits give way to dried fruits, like dates and figs and apricots.

Wherever Armenians have settled, the taste and style of the cuisine never ceases to be Armenian. That is primarily because of the unique blend of traditional spices and seasonings that thread throughout the recipes.

Put it all together and you get...Add lamb, chicken and (to some extent) beef, good, homemade yogurt, tomato (especially paste), bulghur, rice, wonderful flat breads and crackerbreads, oil cured olives, a few traditional cheeses, honey, good dark roasted coffee (most usually served Turkish style) chick peas and fresh fruits and vegetables in season and you have a basic Armenian pantry. The style is somewhat Mediterranean, somewhat Middle Eastern and, at times, even a little Balkan in flavor and texture. In short, it is a cuisine that has added to - and borrowed from - every culture and climate in which the Armenians have settled.

To try some Armenian recipes, please see: Shish Kebab, Cheoreg, Chaimen, Yogurt Soup