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Rus-Georgian Cuisine: A Primer of Georgian Foods and Cuisines

© Dr. Donald R. Houston

All nations have their special and favorite dishes, which have long stepped over the national boundaries and because of their virtues have suited everybody's taste. Suffice yourself to recall Hungarian goulash, English roast beef, Austrian schnitzel, Russian beef Stroganoff and others. However not everyone can brag & boast of what is actually a national cuisine - a list of dishes differing in gustatory sensation & slightly similar in some qualities. French cuisine is notable first of all for its exquisite sauces. Russian cuisine is so well known for appetizing fish dishes, pies & pancakes. Chinese cuisine differs from any other by using uncommon products & possessing quite a specific taste of its own. There is no one cuisine however, anywhere, that has the plethora of variance in tastes & flavors as well as compositions of ingredients that produce such marvelous dishes as the Georgians have in their uniquely delicious and multiply varied cuisine.

Georgian cuisine uses many familiar products but due to varying proportions of its obligatory ingredients such as walnut, aromatic herbs, garlic, vinegar, red pepper, pomegranate grains, barberries and other spices combined with the traditional secrets of the chef's art the common products do acquire a special taste & aroma, which make Georgian cuisine very popular and unique. This uniqueness is the hallmark as well as the trademark of Georgian cuisine

Georgian national cuisine is most notable for the abundance of any & all possible kinds of meat, fish & vegetable hors d'oeuvres, varieties & sorts of cheeses, pickles & many pungent spices & seasonings that are truly the only ones of their kind.

All guests invited to the Georgian table are offered first, the golden-brown "khachapuri", a thin pie-type of bread filled with mildly salted cheese. They are then asked to try "lobio" kidney beans ripened from fresh green beans which in every family is cooked according to the family's favorite recipe, stewed chicken in a garlic sauce, small river fish "tsotskhali" cooked when it is still still alive, sheat-fish in vinegar with finely chopped fennel, "lori", a sort of ham, muzhuzhi, boiled & soaked in vinegar pig's legs, cheese "sulguni" roasted in butter, pickled aubergines (eggplants) & green tomatoes which are filled with the walnut paste seasoned with vinegar, pomegranate grains & aromatic herbs, a vegetable dish "pkhali" made of finely chopped beet leaves or of spinach mixed with the walnut paste, pomegranate grains and various spices.

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