In Praise of Aunties: Roberta and The Crunchy Armenian Pastry That Tells a Story
As a young woman, Roberta Kochakian knew that if she wanted to preserve Armenian recipes that had been passed down orally for generations, she needed to do what many often neglect to: ask a lot of questions and write down detailed directions. That foresight cemented her role as a rare chronicler of familial culinary heritage, a documentarian of a cuisine with a timeline cut short, derailed, and fused together again due to transformative events like genocide, forced migration, and war.
Roberta wanted to know things like exactly which side of the leaf the filling should be wrapped in for proper yalanchi, or stuffed grape leaves; how many ounces the demitasse used to pour olive oil in the pot actually held; the exact proportions for the spice mix known as chemen, a carefully guarded recipe used in the making of basturma, an air-dried cured beef her family had perfected over generations before arriving in the United States.
"Nobody knows how to do this," she recalls thinking…”