Toorshi/Torshi
In life, I’ve known one thing to always be true: a pickle is a glorious thing.
There were many things I hated as a kid - spinach, beets, broccoli - but pickles have always been a food I craved, an obsession that has only become more intense as I’ve gotten older. Any dinner table lacking in a plate full of vegetables dunked and cured in vinegar for months is a table that is frankly, incomplete.
And like bread rolls or ketchup are for the standard American table, pickled vegetables are a quintessential part of any Armenian meal.
Known as “toorshi,” “tourshou,” or “torshi,” all across the Middle East (from the Persian “torsh,” meaning sour), pickled vegetables are revered in many cultures. Take the South Asian Achaar or the Korean kimchi for example. Kimchi, a fermented and seasoned cabbage side dish has been a staple in Korean culture for eons, but has grown in popularity in the West in recent years.
Like practically all people from in and around the Middle East, Armenians eat toorshi religiously. The consumption of toorshi is a culinary survival strategy rooted in maintaining a healthy food stock supply during long, cold winters as well as just being proprietors of good taste - there are few meals that the humble pickle doesn’t complement.
The art of pickling has been around for thousands of years, and dates as far back as 2030 BC, where they were pickled in the Fertile Crescent’s Tigris Valley, an ancient region which Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and many other communities call home.
Preserving food in this manner is embedded in the Armenian DNA, and a tradition still carried on by families in the diaspora. Century old Armenian cookbooks published in America tout the different types of “tourshou” made from pickled beets to eggplants and watermelon rinds.
“The Oriental way of preserving vegetables is not only old fashioned and thus not only original, but also free from adulteration,” one cookbook author wrote over 100 years ago.
In George Mardikian’s “Dinner at Omar Khayyam’s,” the quintessential pioneering book on Near Eastern cuisine, he writes about a centuries-old wheat process of fermentation in Armenian households, where vegetables and spices are placed in a jar with barley and covered with water for three weeks.
U.S. newspapers in the ‘70s and ‘80s started to become intrigued by this new, mysterious and pungent food with tempered glee, often found at Armenian food festivals and bazaars held across churches in the U.S.
In Kansas, Sharon Kessinger of the Marysville Advocate wrote about making Armenian food for the first time for a dinner party.
“Sally decided a group such as ours could do alright with Creole or Armenian. Not knowing much about either, we went for Armenian,” she wrote. “It wasn’t a mistake.”
Along with the cheese boregs, and dolmas and olives, there was toorshi, of course.
“The toorshi, a kind of pickled vegetable dish was okay even though in typical American fashion, I neglected to read the recipe until three days before the dinner and found out it was way too late to let the cabbage, cauliflower, celery and marinates marinate for a week or two as the Armenians certainly would have done.”
These days, you can find dozens of different jarred pickles at your grocery store, but the process is so simple and gratifying, it feels good to make them at home. As a kid, opening up the fridge at home meant finding plastic containers and jars once meant for other commercial foods now filled to the brim with my mom’s pickled mix - cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, cauliflower and peppers all swimming together in a beautiful salt and vinegar brine.
Last year, fueled by being away from family and having space in my garden to grow cucumbers, my pickle obsession grew rapidly. Astonished at their mere existence under my care, I ate my garden cucumbers before any could be actually preserved, so I had to go looking for them elsewhere. I ate Polish sauerkraut, French cornichon, and gorged on piccalilli from London. Pickled Bengali mango, Salvadoran curtido and Italian giardiniera hit all the right taste receptor cells. On a reporting trip in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, I ate chow-chow and eggs pickled in red beet juice along with generous helpings of buttered noodles and fried chicken.
And then, all my fermented dreams came true: I got invited to a pickle party.
In the kitchen of St. John’s Armenian Apostolic Church in Southfield, Mich., Ara Hachigian and his family have organized a Tourshi/Tourshee jarring extravaganza for years. It’s more than a just a family affair, it’s an all night community event fueled by pizza, pop, and lots of peppers.
The jars - and there’s hundreds of them - are sold at the annual St. John’s Armenian Bazaar, a three day event where Armenian-Americans come to buy and taste the food from their childhoods, the dishes their Armenian Genocide survivor grandmothers once cooked for them, and revel in the ancient cuisine cooked in their forgotten and obliterated villages in what is now the Republic of Turkey.
The pickling assembly line was in full force when I walked into the kitchen that night. Long tables held containers filled to the the brim with vegetables, including cucumbers, green tomatoes and carrots.
At one end, there was a jar station where spices - dill, garlic, coriander were carefully put in. Then came the vegetables, stuffed to the top by a line of women who had the innate skill to submit any pepper they wanted to their will.
Once stuffed, the jars were prepped for the brine, a water, vinegar and salt concoction boiled in large pots and ladled into the jars before they were sealed.
The style and variety of the pickles, snug as can be in their respective jars, reminded me of a previous reporting trip to California’s San Joaquin Valley, a old diaspora stronghold where many Armenians had pioneering roles in introducing the country to many vegetables and fruits. Upon arriving at a family home, I was gifted two large jars of toorshi, pickled by an Armenian family nearby who had heard I was dropping by.
It took hours, but all the jars at the kitchen that night were filled, and all of them sold. The Hachigians’ yearly pickle party did something more for me that night than I initially realized. Like the pickles themselves, I left and let my thoughts ferment for weeks before I could formulate them correctly: disconnected from many of the indigenous lands we’ve come from and scattered across the world, Armenians have lost a lot. But the opportunity to labor together, to talk, exchange stories and engage in camaraderie that’s steeped in vinegar and dusted with salt, is one of those small, yet necessary acts that ends up preserving us too.
Toorshi
Adapted from Treasured Armenian Recipes, Published by the Detroit Women’s Chapter of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, 1949
Small cucumbers
Cauliflower (separated into small flowers)
Sweet yellow peppers (quartered)
Green tomatoes (quartered)
Carrots (quartered)
Pimento (quartered)
Hot red pepper (cut into 1-inch pieces)
Green beans
Dill
Garlic
Coriander seeds
Wide mouth jars (16 oz)
Wash and cut vegetables. Add a bud of garlic, 1-inch piece of red hot pepper, two sprigs of dill tops and 1/2 a teaspoon of coriander seeds to each jar. Pack vegetables into clean jars.
Brine:
3 quarts water
1 quart vinegar
1 cup salt (not iodized)
Boil water, vinegar and salt together with dill stalks for 10 minutes. Using a funnel, pour the vinegar mixture into the jars filled with vegetables while still hot. Tightly seal. Ready to serve in 2 - 3 weeks.