A2 · Elementary
12 min
food and cuisinehistory and culturediplomacylanguage learning
The Table of the Caucasus: Armenia and History on the Plate
La Mesa del Cáucaso: Armenia y la Historia en el Plato
This week, leaders from nearly fifty countries gathered in Yerevan for the European Political Community Summit. Fletcher and Octavio ask the obvious question: what are those leaders eating? That question leads them through thousands of years of Armenian history, the Silk Road, and an eternal argument about who really invented dolma.
Esta semana, líderes de casi cincuenta países se reunieron en Ereván para la Cumbre de la Comunidad Política Europea. Fletcher y Octavio se preguntan: ¿qué comen esos líderes? Y esa pregunta los lleva a miles de años de historia armenia, rutas de la seda y una batalla eterna sobre quién inventó el dolma.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| lavash | lavash (traditional Armenian flatbread) | El lavash es un pan muy antiguo de Armenia. |
| la hoja | leaf | El dolma tiene carne y arroz en una hoja. |
| guardar | to keep, to store | La gente necesita guardar la carne para el invierno. |
| las especias | spices | El basturma tiene muchas especias. |
| el escudo | coat of arms, shield | La granada está en el escudo nacional de Armenia. |
| lo | it (direct object pronoun, masculine) | El lavash es delicioso. Las familias lo hacen juntas. |
| la uva | grape | La uva es muy importante en Armenia. La gente hace vino con ella. |
| la memoria | memory | La comida tiene memoria. Cuando comes, recuerdas tu familia. |
Here's a question I've been turning over all week.
Fifty world leaders just flew into Yerevan, Armenia, for the European Political Community Summit.
That's heads of state, foreign ministers, all the protocol and motorcades.
And what I keep wondering is: did any of them actually eat anything while they were there?
Because Armenian food is extraordinary, and I'd hate to think they got through the whole visit on catered sandwiches.
Armenia tiene comida muy buena.
Armenia has very good food.
El pan de Armenia es famoso.
Armenian bread is famous.
Se llama lavash.
It's called lavash.
Lavash.
Right.
Thin, slightly chewy, baked on the walls of a clay oven.
The UN actually put it on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list back in 2014.
That's how serious they are about this bread.
El lavash es muy antiguo.
Lavash is very old.
Las familias lo hacen juntas.
Families make it together.
Es tradición.
It's tradition.
And that's the thing with Armenian food generally.
It's not just cuisine in the sense of recipes and techniques.
It's embedded in family ritual, in agriculture, in the landscape.
When you eat Armenian food, you're eating something shaped by mountains and cold winters and a very long memory.
Armenia es muy antigua.
Armenia is very old.
Tiene más de tres mil años de historia.
It has more than three thousand years of history.
Three thousand years as a recognized civilization, yeah.
Though there are settlements in the Armenian highlands going back much further than that, close to ten thousand years in some cases.
This is some of the earliest agricultural land on earth.
En Armenia hay muchas frutas.
In Armenia there are many fruits.
La uva es muy importante.
The grape is very important.
El vino armenio es muy viejo.
Armenian wine is very old.
The oldest winery ever found, actually.
Archaeologists dug up a wine-making facility in the Areni cave complex in southern Armenia, and it dates to around four thousand BC.
Six thousand years of Armenian wine.
Think about that the next time someone calls their wine region 'ancient.'
El coñac armenio también es famoso.
Armenian cognac is also famous.
Churchill lo bebía mucho.
Churchill drank it a lot.
That story is so good.
Churchill allegedly received a case of Ararat brandy from Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943, and he became completely devoted to it.
He supposedly called it the best brandy he'd ever tasted.
Coming from a man who consumed cognac the way most people consume water, that's a meaningful endorsement.
Armenia está entre Europa y Asia.
Armenia is between Europe and Asia.
Muchos pueblos pasan por allí.
Many peoples pass through there.
La comida también pasa.
The food passes through too.
Exactly the point I wanted to get to.
The Silk Road ran right through the Armenian highlands.
Spices from India, dried fruits from Central Asia, techniques from Persia, ingredients from the Mediterranean.
For centuries, Armenia was literally a kitchen where all of those things met and transformed each other.
El khorovats es carne a la brasa.
Khorovats is grilled meat.
Es el plato favorito de Armenia.
It's Armenia's favorite dish.
Khorovats.
And I've read that this is more than just a barbecue.
Men in Armenia treat it as a kind of ceremonial act.
It's the dish you make when family comes together, when something important happens.
You don't throw a quick khorovats together on a Tuesday.
There's weight to it.
Es como el cocido en España.
It's like cocido in Spain.
La familia come junta.
The family eats together.
Es un momento importante.
It's an important moment.
That's a comparison I hadn't thought of but it tracks.
Both are slow, communal, winter food at heart.
Food that takes time and requires people to sit together and wait for it.
El dolma también es armenio.
Dolma is also Armenian.
La gente pone carne y arroz en una hoja.
People put meat and rice in a leaf.
Luego la cocina.
Then they cook it.
Now here's where things get contentious.
Because if you ask a Turkish cook, they'll tell you dolma is Turkish.
If you ask a Greek, they'll say dolmades are Greek.
If you ask a Lebanese cook, a Syrian, an Iranian, an Azerbaijani.
Everyone in the region claims it.
The word itself comes from a Turkish root meaning 'stuffed.' But Armenians would tell you that the practice predates the word.
La comida viaja.
Food travels.
No tiene pasaporte.
It has no passport.
Pero la gente discute mucho.
But people argue a lot.
That might be the most accurate description of food history I've ever heard.
No passport.
But the arguments are real, and they carry political weight.
After the Armenian Genocide in 1915, one of the ways Turkey and Azerbaijan have sometimes pushed back against Armenian cultural claims is by disputing the origins of shared dishes.
It becomes part of a larger erasure.
El genocidio armenio es muy triste.
The Armenian Genocide is very sad.
Muchos armenios mueren.
Many Armenians die.
Muchos van a otros países.
Many go to other countries.
One and a half million people killed between 1915 and 1923.
And the survivors scattered to France, to Lebanon, to Syria, to the United States, to Argentina.
There are more ethnic Armenians living outside Armenia today than inside it.
And every community they built, wherever they went, they rebuilt the food first.
It's one of the clearest examples I know of cuisine as an act of survival.
En Beirut hay muchos armenios.
In Beirut there are many Armenians.
La comida armenia está en los restaurantes de Líbano.
Armenian food is in Lebanese restaurants.
I spent time in Beirut, and that's absolutely true.
The Armenian quarter, Bourj Hammoud, is a neighborhood where you can eat manti dumplings and sujuk sausage and things that feel completely different from the Lebanese food three streets over.
The diaspora preserved things that might otherwise have been lost.
El basturma es carne seca con especias.
Basturma is dried meat with spices.
Es como el jamón serrano, pero diferente.
It's like jamón serrano, but different.
Walk me through that comparison, because I'm genuinely curious.
You're saying the underlying idea, preserving cured meat with time and spice, is the same even if the flavor profiles are completely different?
Sí.
Yes.
En el norte de España hay frío.
In northern Spain there is cold.
En Armenia también hay frío.
In Armenia there is also cold.
La gente necesita guardar la carne.
People need to store meat.
Por eso la cura.
That's why they cure it.
Climate shapes cuisine.
That's such a fundamental point and it's easy to forget it when you're eating somewhere in midsummer with beautiful produce everywhere.
But the great preserved foods of the world, jamón, prosciutto, basturma, dried fish in Scandinavia, they're all solutions to the same problem: winter is coming and meat doesn't keep.
En Armenia también comen muchas hierbas frescas.
In Armenia they also eat many fresh herbs.
Hay mucho tomillo y menta.
There is a lot of thyme and mint.
Es diferente de España.
It's different from Spain.
That herbal generosity is something I associate with the whole eastern Mediterranean corridor.
In Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, Georgia, fresh herbs aren't a garnish, they're a major component of the meal.
You get a plate of them alongside your food the way you'd get bread.
Fletcher Haines, man of the footnotes, would like the record to show he finds this deeply appealing.
El tarator es una sopa fría con yogur.
Tarator is a cold soup with yogurt.
El yogur en Armenia es muy bueno.
Yogurt in Armenia is very good.
Cold yogurt soup.
I'd have that right now.
And Armenian yogur has that particular tang, that almost fermented sourness, that you don't get from the commercial stuff.
There's a reason Armenians have been making yogurt for thousands of years.
They had time to get it right.
En la cumbre de Ereván hay líderes de Europa.
At the Yerevan summit there are leaders from Europe.
Ellos comen comida armenia ahora.
They are eating Armenian food now.
That's the mental image I keep coming back to.
Emmanuel Macron eating lavash.
The whole thing is slightly absurd but also genuinely wonderful.
Armenia has been fighting for European recognition and partnership for years, navigating a very complicated position between Russia and the West.
And now the continent's top leaders are sitting in Yerevan, and someone had to think about what to put on the table.
La comida es política también.
Food is politics too.
Cuando un país invita, cocina su mejor plato.
When a country invites, it cooks its best dish.
Diplomatic gastronomy.
There's actually a term for this, gastrodiplomacy, and it's taken more seriously than it sounds.
South Korea has run official programs to promote Korean food globally as a soft-power instrument.
Thailand does it.
Peru does it.
The idea being that if you love a country's food, you think about that country differently.
It's harder to be hostile to somewhere whose kitchen you respect.
España también hace esto.
Spain does this too.
El jamón y el aceite van a todos los países.
Jamón and olive oil go to every country.
Spanish food exports are genuinely a soft-power story.
I remember years ago in Buenos Aires, the arrival of proper Spanish jamón ibérico in the good restaurants was almost a cultural event.
People talked about it.
It created associations with Spain that no tourism campaign could have manufactured.
Armenia quiere esto también.
Armenia wants this too.
Su comida es muy buena.
Its food is very good.
El mundo no la conoce bien.
The world doesn't know it well.
That's the gap.
Armenian food is genuinely extraordinary.
The complexity of it, the age of it, the preservation of technique through centuries of catastrophe.
But outside communities with Armenian diaspora, it's almost invisible.
Which makes this summit in Yerevan, fifty governments, every camera in Europe, a remarkable opportunity.
Yo quiero ir a Armenia.
I want to go to Armenia.
La comida es una razón muy buena para visitar un país.
Food is a very good reason to visit a country.
Agree completely.
And you know what, the pomegranate alone would be worth the trip.
Pomegranates are almost a national symbol in Armenia.
They grow them in the Ararat Valley, and they're unlike anything you buy here.
That valley, by the way, right there under Mount Ararat, which is technically now in Turkey.
Another layer to this whole story.
El monte Ararat está en Turquía, pero los armenios lo aman mucho.
Mount Ararat is in Turkey, but Armenians love it very much.
Está en su escudo nacional.
It's in their national coat of arms.
You carry the mountain that belongs to someone else.
On your national coat of arms.
That's a kind of grief I don't have a word for in English.
The pomegranate sits in the coat of arms too, right there next to Ararat.
The fruit that grew in the valley you can see but can't reach.
La comida tiene memoria.
Food has memory.
Cuando comes lavash, recuerdas quién eres.
When you eat lavash, you remember who you are.
That's a sentence I want to write down.
Food has memory.
I think that's the whole thesis of this conversation, honestly.
The reason food fights between countries are so heated is that they're not really about recipes.
They're about whose past gets to be recognized.
Fletcher, ¿tú cocinas comida española en casa?
Fletcher, do you cook Spanish food at home?
I try.
My son-in-law came from Madrid and I've watched him cook enough times that I can handle a tortilla de patatas.
Though I will not enter into any debate about whether or not it should have onion.
I know where that road leads.
La tortilla lleva cebolla.
Tortilla has onion.
Esto no es una opinión.
This is not an opinion.
Es un hecho.
It is a fact.
There it is.
Every single time.
But actually, I wanted to ask you about something you said earlier, when you described the lavash.
You said 'las familias lo hacen juntas.' The 'lo' there.
I can never quite place that word in a sentence.
What exactly is it doing?
'Lo' reemplaza al lavash.
'Lo' replaces lavash.
Es el objeto.
It's the object.
'Lo hacen' significa 'hacen el lavash'.
'Lo hacen' means 'they make the lavash'.
So it's a direct object pronoun.
The lavash becomes 'lo' because you've already mentioned it.
Like 'it' in English, but in Spanish you have to put it before the verb, not after.
Sí.
Yes.
'Yo lo como.' 'Tú lo haces.' El 'lo' va antes del verbo siempre.
'I eat it.' 'You make it.' The 'lo' always goes before the verb.
Which is the opposite of English, where we say 'I eat it' with 'it' at the end.
And I keep wanting to say 'hago lo' instead of 'lo hago.' My brain does not want to lead with the object.
Sí.
Yes.
'Hago lo' no existe en español.
'Hago lo' doesn't exist in Spanish.
Es un error muy común.
It's a very common mistake.
Pero 'lo hago' es fácil.
But 'lo hago' is easy.
Solo practica.
Just practice.
Lo hago.
The lavash, the dolma, the tortilla de patatas with onion.
Fine, with onion.
I'll practice by cooking, which seems like the right approach to most things in life.
Con cebolla.
With onion.
Muy bien, Fletcher.
Very good, Fletcher.
Hoy aprendes algo importante.
Today you learn something important.