‘The centre of everything’
Lavash is an exploration of Armenian cooking as it exists right now Laura Brehaut
Providing the basis of virtually every meal, sitting on the shoulders of newlyweds in a rite of fertility and prosperity, and acting as a swaddling blanket of sorts, lavash extends far past staple- food status in Armenia.
Commonly crafted by a small group of women, the flatbread cannot merely be defined by its brief assemblage of ingredients — flour, water and salt — or subterranean baking method. Much more than a culinary cornerstone, lavash belongs to a special category of symbolic foods permeating all aspects of life.
“You dance around with it at weddings and wrap babies in lavash,” says Los Angeles- based chef Ara Zada. “It’s the centre of everything.”
The unleavened bread, popular throughout the South Caucasus and Western Asia, is recognized as being so essential to Armenian cuisine it earned a place on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list in 2014. Just one year later, the seed of a unique cookbook was sown.
Lavash (Chronicle Books, 2019) — written by Zada, food writer Kate Leahy and photojournalist John Lee — started with an encounter with “earth-shattering lavash” wrapped around locally foraged herbs and homemade cheese in the Armenian village of Zovk. While teaching a food photography workshop to teenagers in the capital city of Yerevan in 2015, Lee had the opportunity to watch his student Inessa Karapetyan’s grandmother making lavash the traditional way, in a tonir (underground clay oven). He was hooked.
“It was this magical process of the way that she spins the dough super thin, puts it on this pillow-like thing ( batat) and then plops it into this oven buried in the ground,” recalls Lee. “What came out 30 to 50 seconds later was this chewy but blistery and crisp and salty, really wonderful, thin bread that was slightly reminiscent of Neapolitan-style pizza crust but it wasn’t. It was just really beautiful.”
Inspired by Lee’s tale of life-changing lavash, the authors ultimately united over their shared interest in Armenian cuisine and set out to research the dishes being made in the small South Caucasus country today. Offering an overview of its history, including how the differences between Eastern and Western Armenian cooking came to be, the book is an exploration of not just a wealth of flatbreads but whole-grain stews, hearty soups, salads, pickles, feasting dishes and sweets.
Zada emphasizes that they didn’t aim to write a book of traditional Armenian cookery, but a collection of dishes they happened upon during their travels, which took them into homes, bakeries and restaurants countrywide. “We’re not staking claim that these are the ancient, old Armenian dishes,” he says. “It’s dishes that are being cooked within the geographical borders of Armenia itself. So we have dishes in there like salat vinaigrette, which you’ll find anywhere in Armenia but it’s a Russian dish.”
In addition to a culinary snapshot, the authors also present a portrait of a country in transition. Lee underscores the relatively recent influx of Syrian-armenians, who have transformed the Yerevan restaurant scene with Middle Eastern flavours, and a burgeoning wine industry “that did not exist a decade ago.” On their final research trip for the book, which they planned for April and May in order to mark Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on April 24, and partake in spring foraging, they unexpectedly witnessed political change as well.
Lee, who is a former Chicago Tribune staff photographer, was shooting a march in Yerevan when he was hit by the first flash grenade police tossed at a crowd of protestors. Navigating his leg injuries and “a lot of stitches” made shooting the cookbook more challenging, not that you would guess it from the resulting photography, which is a highlight of the collection. “John’s the only person that got hurt in a peaceful revolution,” laughs Zada, referring to what became known as the Velvet Revolution of 2018.
“This cookbook was so unusual in so many different ways. Not only was it three authors from different backgrounds — a photojournalist, an Armenian-egyptian chef, a food writer — we (experienced) a political revolution, and we were going into a country and asking for recipes from people that we didn’t know until these trips,” says Leahy with a laugh. “It could have been a complete disaster but instead I feel like we formed a community behind this book. It’s not our personal story. It’s the story of a broader perspective — of the people who helped us, of a country at a really pivotal moment in history — and that makes it a pretty crazy story when we look back at it.”