Glorious Golden Georgia

There is a remarkable country in the Caucasus region, where rivers run with gold dust. Once upon a time, people would soak sheep’s fleeces in the quick-flowing waters, hoping to catch a fortune with their dampened wool traps. This is a country where for 8,000 years, the sun’s light has ripened acre upon acre of grapes and the soil in which the vines grow is seamed with precious, gleaming metals.  A country with an ancient tradition of winemaking: grapes are placed into womb-shaped vessels made from clay, which are then planted into Mother Earth’s belly and left to gestate into rose-gold liquid – Georgian Qvevri wine.

I travelled to Georgia in late summer, after the weather had been cruel . Earlier in the year floods had struck its capital, Tbilisi. Two days before I arrived, vicious hailstorms had battered the countryside – damaging vines and spoiling grapes. But Georgia is a farming nation with a very long history, and its people know better than to micromanage agriculture, or to be surprised by the vagaries of nature. The Georgians carry on with their lives, they pray, they sing, they drink their wonderful wines and enjoy feasts known as ‘Supra,’ where vast numbers of people gather to celebrate with food, wine and polyphonic song. The country is truly beautiful, and the people charming. It seems right that Georgia should be a country famed for longevity, as such hospitable and kind people deserve to spend many years on our earth.

Georgia is famous for its wine, but its cuisine is wonderful too. Recipes are rustic and make use of the excellent local produce -fresh vegetables and young cheeses, and the walnut is a star ingredient. Walnuts trees flourish in Georgia -in fact most plants and crops seem to do well -a combination of fertile soil, sunshine and millennia of farming experience..

Georgians mix walnuts with chopped beetroot, or spinach, then mould them into delicious spheres of pâté. Walnuts are also used to stuff sweet peppers, or are spread onto slices of grilled aubergine. While I was in Georgia, I enjoyed a delicious walnut sauce which was poured over salad vegetables -such a change from boring old French dressing. This sauce features another Georgian treasure -marigold powder – made from the petals of golden flowers, which open each day with the rising of the sun and close at night when it sets. Marigold adds a floral bitter-sweetness to the walnuts in the paste, which if good and fresh (as walnuts always are in Georgia) do not taste bitter at all. And there could be health benefits to this unusual salad, aside from the happiness felt while eating it -marigold is supposed to still the trembling of the heart, draw evil humours out of the head and to strengthen the eyesight. Hard to argue with that.

November is possibly not the best month for tomatoes and cucumber -but the recent miserable and damp weather makes me crave the sunshine taste of these juicy and colourful vegetables. The main flavour will come from the walnut sauce, but be generous with the herbs -they add a perfect, fresh dimension and will do you good. I can’t promise that you will live as long as a Georgian if you make this salad -but you might just understand what makes the place and its cuisine so very lovely.

Georgian Golden Fleece Salad

Delicious, different and satisfying -Georgian salad with walnut sauce

1 large Spanish onion (or other mild onion) thinly sliced and soaked in cold water for about half an hour

6 vine tomatoes cut into wedges

1 cucumber cut into chunks. I leave the peel on, but you can peel and deseed the cucumber to make it more digestible

1 green capsicum, deseeded and cut into chunks (optional -I don’t hugely like peppers -but they do add a sweetness and crunch)

1 small bunch of purple basil leaves shredded

1 small bunch parsley, chopped.

.250g walnuts -the fresher the better

1 tsp. ground marigold flowers

2 tsp paprika (resist the temptation to use smoked -the sauce is delicious and light with ‘normal’)

1 tsp ground fenugreek

1 tsp ground coriander

3 cloves garlic

3 tbsp. white wine vinegar

cooled and boiled water.

Blitz the garlic and walnuts together in a mixer adding the vinegar to make a paste. Put into a mixing bowl and stir through the spices. Add water, stirring carefully  and adding more until the mixture is a thinnish paste. Season to taste with a little sea salt.

Drain the onions and squeeze them in kitchen paper to remove as much liquid as possible. Place in a bowl together with the other ingredients. Pour over the walnut sauce and serve.

Nigvziani badrijani – or aubergines even my sister will eat

Aubergines here are wonderful. Long, skinny and purple. Not for us the bloated, black-as-your-hat European ones, Asian aubergines are milder in flavour, less bitter and better suited to Eastern dishes. Like their fat, Mediterranean cousins, Asian aubergines benefit from being degorged (sliced, sprinkled with salt and left to drain) and when placed in hot oil, will drink it, like a stag party in Prague drinks lager, but their texture is firm and they tend not to disintegrate during cooking.

Most cuisines can find something exciting to do with the aubergine. You can bake it and squish it up into a dip. You can chop it into hunks and stew it with other nightshade vegetables. You can slice it and griddle it and eat it lukewarm. It needs garlic, likes sesame, is acquainted with lemon and pomegranate and can get on fine with coriander and ginger.

As I have been thinking about Georgian food recently, I am going to give you a Georgian recipe for aubergines stuffed with a garlicky, walnut paste. I have adapted it slighty and used a bunch of fresh coriander and flat leafed parsley, which improves the colour from a cement-like grey, to a fresh, bright green. It also obviates the dilemma one always faces when stuffing things; the problem of more stuffing, than stuffee. No matter what I cook, how obediently I follow the quantities in a recipe, it always happens that I am left with a bowlful of stuffing. It’s not the end of the world, leftovers are marvellous and can often be the springboard to another delicious meal. Any excess walnut paste from this recipe can be converted into a rather delightful pesto, which you can simply spoon through warm pasta, or spread on a fish steak to make a fresh and beautiful crust, or slather onto slices of baguette to make bright green, fragrant crostini.

I have eaten badrijani in Georgian restaurants all over the world, and I was served something similar in an Azerbaijani place – but with a slight twist – they provided a harissa-like dip to spice it up. I am totally behind that, especially if you like things a little on the hot side. The aubergines themselves are nicely seasoned, but they don’t have a lot of heat. So – if you have some harissa, or even some of that incredibly fiery, Jamaican hot pepper sauce, I would give it a try. It cuts through the richness very well.

I used lime juice to lift the darkness of the walnuts. I love the combination of coriander and lime and feel it works well here. If you don’t like the thought of that, then replace with lemon – or if you are feeling very daring, a little dash of pomegranate  juice.

They make a perfect starter, are ideal for a mezze style buffet, or to accompany barbecued lamb. Allow three to four per person – they are pretty filling.

Nigvziani Badrijani

Four long, skinny, purple aubergines. Mediterranean ones are fine too but you’ll just need two of them

100g walnuts

 1/2 onion very finely chopped

4 peeled cloves garlic

1 small bunch coriander

1 small bunch parsley (flat leafed is best)

juice of 1 lime

1 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon curry powder

sea salt

Cut the stalks off the aubergines and slice them lengthways. Make them about half a centimetre in thickness.  If you are using mediterranean aubergines, you will need to cut the slices in half lengthways as well, so they are about 5 cm in width. Leave the skins on. Sprinkle with salt and leave to drain for 20 minutes. Rinse off the salt and pat dry.

Put a little olive oil in a frying pan and fry the onion, curry powder and paprika gently until fragrant. Place in a mixing bowl.

Put the walnuts into a food processor and blitz to a coarse powder. Remove and set to one side.

Put the garlic, coriander and parsley into the food processor with about two tablespoons water. Blitz until a fine paste. Return the walnuts to the processor, along with the onion mix and blend until all ingredients are an even, smooth pesto-like texture. Add the lime juice and season to taste.

Cover the bottom of a frying pan with a mixture of sunflower and olive oil. Shallow fry the slices of aubergine on each side until a glamorous golden colour. Drain on kitchen paper. You will need to replenish the oil, as they do tend to suck it up as they cook.

Take the strips of aubergine and spread them with a thin layer of the walnut paste. Roll them up and pierce them with a cocktail stick. Decorate with pomegranate seeds and serve with a spicy pepper dipping sauce.

Georgian Gregg’s Pasty

Georgia, slapped in the middle of the Caucasus, has erratic electricity, arsenic mines and its own alphabet. It produced Katie Melua and Stalin, and is famed for the longevity of its people. The Georgians believe that their diet – rich in olive oil, pulses and vegetables, light on meat and favouring wine over vodka, has a lot to do with that.

I had never met anyone from Georgia, until I lived in Beijing 12 years ago. Beijing, like Hong Kong and other places I have lived as an expat, is a bit of a goldfish bowl. Everyone knows and is interested in each other’s business – which I understand, but find tiresome. Everyone hangs out in the same places after work. It’s all rather parochial and wife-swapperish.

I got around that problem by finding new places to go out, where I wouldn’t bump into the whole of the British Embassy visa section, the expat football team and all of the Hash House Harriers. I managed to do this by being mistaken for a Siberian prostitute. It happened to me a lot – simply because Beijing was awash with Russian girls from over the border, keeping the various Azerbaijani shoe salesmen, Kazakh fur traders and Libyan gun runners nicely serviced during their business trips. Because I am blonde and tall and have the sort of bone structure normally found in a socialist country, I used to get propositioned a lot if I found myself in the wrong part of town. I didn’t mind, apart from the fact that I was never offered very much money. Clearly it’s not a lucrative profession in the Middle Kingdom. However – one bonus of my ‘prozzie’ appearance was that I could get into a nightclub for free, a rough boozer/knocking shop, catering for ‘businessmen’ from the former countries of the USSR, where I never saw anyone from my community, unless I took them there. One night I saw a Libyan stab an Algerian. Another night, I watched a cat fight between two Russian hookers, pulling at each others gaudily coloured nylon wigs. It was brilliant.

When my friend Katie came to visit at the end of a year travelling, I wanted her to have a different experience. She is very game and I suggested a trip to my favourite club. I made her wear more makeup than normal, taught her how to say ‘Good Evening’ in Russian and we set out to dance with some gangsters. The doorman looked at her dubiously (she is a real English Rose and was trying not to laugh) but let us in. We headed to the bar, where the form was that the girls sat around it in a circle, waiting to be approached by the punters. It wasn’t an aggressive place (apart from the stabbing/cat fights) it was quite low key. We got chatting to a Georgian man and were interested and relieved to find out that he spoke perfect English.

He was very pleased that we had approached him and scolded us for being in bar full of ‘bad women’. He answered all my moronic questions about how old his relatives were (he had a 70 year old grandfather, a 92 year old great grandfather and until fairly recently (he was in his twenties) had some old boy knocking about who was pushing 110. He told us about Georgian green wine, a type of spirit, that steals your memory and makes time stand still. He told us a slightly worrying story about how he and his father would play tricks on each other, by nailing their shoes to the floor. The most important thing he told us, was that Georgian cuisine was by far the finest in his neck of the woods. The Russians prized it. Every city in Russia had a Georgian resturant for people who didn’t like sweaty schnitzels, and didn’t want everything smothered in smetana.

I checked out Georgian food shortly after meeting our new friend and he was absolutely right. Georgian cuisine is the perfect thing for me – as Russian food is fairly unforgiving to the vegetarian. When I subsequently travelled to Russia and Uzbekistan, I found Georgian restaurants my salvation. And the wine is pretty good too. There is an emphasis on freshness and simplicity. Lots of beans and pulses, which is good. One thing which I loved was this delicious  cheese pie – called Khachapuri. The pastry is made with a yeast dough, rather than a shortcrust. Serve with salads, ideal for picnics and more delicious and exotic than a Ginsters cheese and onion. There are recipes around which use a non-leavened dough – but I would give them a miss. This is the one I trust – and the coriander in the dough is just perfect. Gaumarjos