Every Spring, just as the Wild Grapevines Became Flush with their First, Tender Leaves, Our Whole Family Would Spend a Morning or Two Picking the Perfect Ones for Sarma.
Sarma, also known as "Dolma" in the shops sometimes, is a fragrant combination of rice and and other ingredients rolled into young and tender wild grape leaves and steamed in a sort of Bain Marie until the rice has cooked through. While they can served hot or cold - with or without meat (according to various recipes and tastes) - they one thing all sarmas have in common is that you really do need to make them with wild grape leaves, and grape leaves are generally not found in the produce section of many supermarkets.
So, there is nothing to do but go out and harvest them from the wild vines that grow rampant in most countries situated in temperate zones. For some reason, my grandmother and aunties would only pick wild grape leaves. They insisted that the flavor was better than in the cultivated varieties, so that is all we every had.
Besides being wild, the other big stipulation was that we would only pick the leaves in the early spring - when they had developed properly, but before they had had the chance to become tough. As Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine became more popular in America, we could purchase canned or frozen products from the specialty food store. Grandma would never use them, however, claiming that they were usually harvested when the leaves had already toughened and that they produced an inferior sarma.
So, every spring (late May or early June, in the Northeastern U.S.) we would take to the local roadsides and hedgerows of our town , armed with grocery bags to stuff full of leaves - and some bug spray to fend off any early mosquitoes. By the time I was five or six, I had also learned to distinguish grape vines from poison ivy vines...you might say I learned that bit "the hard way!"
Another one of Grandma's rules for picking is that we never touched leaves that grew too close to the road. She claimed that they tasted bad - today, we know that they are probably absorbing noxious substances from car exhaust. Either way, we usually went 10 to 15 feet away from the road in search of acceptable leaves.
Once home, with our bags full of grape leaves, it was time to can or freeze them for future use. It was usually one of my jobs (supervised by an adult or two until I got a bit older) to inspect each leaf for any imperfections or signs of insect damage and to stack them up on top of each other in bundles of around 30 - with the stems all lined up together. The bundles were then folded over once and tied up with string.
Salted water was boiled in a deep pot on the stove (about 2 quarts of water to about 1/2 cup of salt) and the leaf bundles were dropped in one at a time and quickly removed (in other words, we "blanched" them). The blanched bundles were allowed to cool and either canned, covered in the boiled, salted water or wrapped carefully in waxed paper, placed inside a plastic bag, sealed and then popped into the freezer.
My grandma passed away a few years ago, as have most of the older generation of Armenians. The first generation born in America, I really don't speak much Armenian or do most things in the "old way." But, every Spring, as the wild grape leaves come out in the meadows and hillsides around our home, I usually manage to pick a few bags and package them away (as the fresh-picked ones really do taste better than the store-bought kind). Besides, as I'm picking, I remember my grandmother and her Old World ways.
