Cookery Elisabeth Luard

SOUTH OF RUSSIA

Armchair travellers’ cookbook of the year is Olia Hercules’s Kaukasis (Michell Beazley, £25). Born and bred in the Ukraine, the author trained and worked as a chef before publishing Mamushka – family life and recipes from her homeland, a cookbook that won her a fistful of awards and an enthusiastic following for her pop-up supper clubs all over London, her adopted city.

Olia is now an East Ender with an allotment full of sputnik-shaped squashes and pennyroyal (a key flavouring in the Caucasus).

Her new book takes a hop-skip south-east to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, a region that borders on Russia, Turkey and Iran, and takes its name and much of its independent character from the ridge of high mountains that separate the Black Sea from the Caspian.

Everyone in these borderlands has cousins everywhere, so research was no problem. Culinary strengths reflect the neighbourhood: buttery pilaus with dried fruits, cabbage rolls, the meat and fat of fat-tail sheep, filo-pastry pasties and pies, flatbreads, sweet-and-sour stews fiery with chilli, nut-thickened sauces, pickled vegetables, yoghourt, flatbreads, meat and fish cooked in wood-fired clay ovens in the yard.

Snow-capped peaks, forested hinterland and fertile plains come with the territory. Gorgeous photos of people, places and food illuminate the text. There’ll never be a better guide to a region whose inhabitants live as their ancestors did, cooking and eating what the land provides. Heaven knows how long this will last. Hurry on over before Mr Putin sends in the tanks, President Erdoğan gets greedy or the Ayatollahs declare jihad.

For the full culinary picture – quinces stuffed with lamb and caramelised shallots, chicken roasted with walnuts and sour plums, saffron pilau with pistachios and apricots – rush out and buy the book. Better still, buy several, and spread a little happiness among your friends.

Meanwhile, here is something Georgian to liven up your Christmas storecupboard.

Mint and chilli adjika

A flavouring paste used in Georgian cookery, in much the same way as Tunisian cooks use harissa. Olia suggests spreading a mere smidgen on sourdough toast under a topping of fresh white cheese and sliced winter fruit – pear, apple, persimon. Use as a wake-up call for plain-cooked veg, soups, hard-boiled eggs, or stir a spoonful into thick yoghourt as a dipping-sauce. Makes about 375ml.

125g spearmint leaves (or ordinary mint) 10 green chillies, half de-seeded 5 garlic cloves 20g sea salt flakes

Blitz everything to a paste in a blender or processor, or bash with a pestle in mortar if you want to feel like a real bebia – a Georgian granny. Store in a screwtop jar in the fridge. It will last for a month.

Use (sparingly) as the flavouring for satsivi – a creamy sauce of walnuts pounded with garlic, diluted with boiling chicken stock – that is traditionally served with the Christmas bird.

Elisabeth Luard’s cartoon cookbook, ‘Cookstrip’, is funding online at Unbound.