Milk Soup

Come teach English in Georgia, the birthplace of wine, and sample delicious homemade cheeses, jams, and bread baked daily in a wood-burning stove.

When I first read about Georgian cuisine, I was sitting in the living room of my Denver apartment finishing a bowl of leftover Kraft macaroni and cheese that had been sitting around so long I could no longer remember exactly when I made it. I was seduced by the descriptions of fresh fruit ripening in hilly orchards, stews bubbling merrily away in quaint country kitchens, and families, neighbors, and friends gathering together for large meals prepared straight from their gardens. I doubt that I was the only TLG volunteer who was attracted to the program because, besides free flights, we were also provided with a host family who would feed us at least twice a day. The reality of the food situation in Georgia, however, is somewhat different from the picture I was painted as I picked bits of hardened cheese product out of my lunch that day on the sofa.

I want you to try to imagine everything that you have eaten in the last week. My guess is that you came up with somewhere between seven and fifteen items depending on how often you eat out, how often you eat leftovers, and how much you just enjoy eating the same thing day to day. In the last seven days, I have eaten four things: bread, beans, borscht, and different beans.

When I arrived in Georgia I had the distinct fear that I was going to leave much heavier and with much tighter clothing. My first week, at orientation in Tbilisi, I spent visiting Georgian restaurants and indulging on the rich and exotic flavors of a variety of what I was assured was traditional Georgian cuisine.  Those meals were a blur of spicy meat dumplings, succulent hen salad, sharp cheese, and lots of khachapuri (cheese bread), as the other volunteers and I passed dishes from hand to hand, crowded around one long table in a close sub level restaurant. What I didn’t realize then was the incredible disparity between the traditional foods that Georgians talk about and the ones they eat. After settling into my host family, gone were the rich and exotic flavors, replaced with a few staple meals that I would see again and again and again.  

Lobio is the Georgian word for beans (in the dialect of Samegrelo it’s labia, no joke). It is a dish made by boiling red beans with ajika (ground peppers and salt), onions, garlic, and cilantro. It is about the consistency of a watery bean soup and is eaten with bread or ghomi (corn paste/grits).

Borscht is one of my favorite things to eat here. Though at the sound of the word borscht most of you immediately thought “beats!” this soup consists mostly of boiled cabbage. My host grandmother always makes enough to fill a pot the size of a monster truck tire, and the family will ladle portions out day after day, until the remaining mush (most of the vegetables have dissolved by now) begins to smell like vomit. At this point, the soup is brought to a boil before being fed to the cow.

Green beans are one of the vegetables that almost every Georgian family grows in their garden. They are especially valuable because they are easily preserved for the winter. As far as I can tell, the beans are boiled in large quantities and then placed in jars along with the water that they were cooked in. When they are eaten, most of the water is drained away and they are pureed with salt and ground nuts, or fried with eggs and lots of oil. These are also always eaten with bread.

The other thing that we eat on a regular basis, I hesitate to refer to this particular item as food, is souis (pronounced “sah-oose”), which is just the Russian word for sauce. And that is a pretty accurate description of this dish: a thick, gritty sauce, sometimes containing bits of potato or beef bone, cooked in largish quantities like a stew but eaten from a plate by being soaked into bread.

And then there’s the cheese. It’s true what I read in all the brochures, Georgians make a lot of cheese, and many of the families make their own cheese using milk from their cow. This cheese is sort of like a very fatty, salty mozzarella. Some families even smoke the cheese, a practice I find very agreeable. However, what the brochures don’t talk about is the Georgian’s habit of allowing food to sit out for days on end. Not every house has a refrigerator, but even where there is available refrigeration, it is not always utilized. The result being that the cheese is allowed to ripen for as long as it takes the family to work their way through the batch, which can land you with some pretty rank dairy product. When the cheese is fresh, and not too salty, it’s a treat, and I will gladly help myself to one of the deck of card sized slices that my host mother lays out with each meal. Unfortunately, more often than not I can smell the cheese I am about to be served before I can see it.

Finally we come to bread. I like bread. I like carbohydrates in almost every form: pasta, rice, sugar. It’s all good. In fact, I like these starchy carbs so much that one of my favorite things to eat growing up was a spaghetti sandwich. Just like it sounds: a big helping of spaghetti (light sauce) between two pieces of Wonder Bread. However, the Georgians completely put me to shame in the bread consumption department.

Every meal we eat is served with bread. This might not sound so strange. Most American meals involve some kind of bread or starch, and we would be disappointed if we went out to a nice restaurant and they didn’t give us bread. This is different. When I say that every meal is served with bread, what I really mean is that every meal is served alongside bread. Most meals consisted of a small serving of beans, soup, or souis, that is sponged off of the plate using enormous chunks of home made white bread. On one occasion my host grandmother offered me some bread that had just come out of the oven. When I accepted (who turns down fresh baked bread), she laid down what must have must have been a third of a loaf next to my plate. It is the primary source of calories for most Georgians, and the primary utensil used at most meals. Though we always have forks and spoons available, almost every dish is consumed using bread to get the rest of food from the table to the mouth. To serve a meal without bread is like serving a meal without plates, you simply don’t do it.

I don’t want to complain, necessarily, about the food that my host family serves me. The women who cook this food work hard to keep the family fed and I appreciate their efforts greatly. However, after the sixth week of bread and beans and borscht it starts to feel a little like I’m following the meal plan of a Russian prison.

In order to mix it up, Elie and I decide to make something of our own. I’m not really sure how we decided on corn chowder (this was Elie’s idea), but that’s what was bubbling away on the stove the first weekend we decide to cook for ourselves. Elie found the recipe online, during the fifteen minutes of internet time he fought his host brothers for, and we collect the ingredients on a Friday afternoon, loading them into our backpacks and hauling them the four miles back to my house. We use fresh milk from my family’s cow, and Austrian bacon that we find at Elie’s host families market.

Elie and I chop and simmer and worry away in the kitchen for several hours while my host grandmother’s brother tries to get Elie drunk on wine, and Tiko and Tedo giggle from behind their schoolbooks at the spectacle of me frantically whisking flower and butter in one of the families enormous metal pots so that the rue won’t burn over the open flame of the wood-burning stove. In the end, the corn chowder is rich and delicious: sweet from the corn, salty from the bacon, and just the right consistency. My host family raves over it saying, “Hannah, you must make the milk soup again.”

After one success, we are eager, the next Saturday, to try our luck with homemade pizza. There are pizzas available in Georgia, at restaurants and very occasionally at home, but they are much more mayonnaise centered and, while delicious, tend to sit in the stomach the way I imagine it would feel if I ate an equal measure of cement. Our pizza is loaded with peppers, tomatoes, garlic, olive, and sausage and smells like heaven as we pull the golden discs out of the oven.

The next weekend it’s tacos, then calzones, and after that egg salad. Our food projects give us something to work toward during the week, something to look to forward to, and something to accomplish. It’s a strange sense of purpose, but it’s there, and it makes the weeks move by that much quicker.

One weekend, a group of our friends decides to head to Tbilisi. They all plan to get tattoos in Georgian from an artist who is   in town for the weekend, and to spend some time enjoying the nightlife that the city offers. Elie and I discuss whether or not we want to go and abandon the plans we had made to cook that weekend.

“The thing is,” Elie says, “I’d be really disappointed if we didn’t get to hangout and make tacos.”

I couldn’t agree more.