Cooking Class

When the lid comes off the tonir the heat hits you hard enough that you take an involuntary step back — the oven is a clay cylinder set into the ground, with wood that has been burning down in it for hours. The dough still has to go in, with your upper body stretched out over the opening, and the first flatbread almost always drops into the embers.

Last night’s pot is still on the stove, and it gets pushed aside to make room for yours. Ingredients are not waiting counted out in little bowls. What reaches the table depends on what the market gave up that morning, and the quantities are written down in nobody’s notebook.

Three things you will almost certainly make. Dolma: filling and rolling vine leaves, tight enough to hold, loose enough for the rice to swell. By the fourth one none of them tear. Lavash: dough drawn thin over a padded cushion and slapped against the inner wall of the tonir, where it is done in under a minute. And khorovats over charcoal, where the actual work is the waiting and the decision about when the meat comes off the skewer.

The order follows the physics of the kitchen. What takes long goes first; what has to reach the table hot goes last. So you stand around in between, and that is exactly when the talking happens.

Fat is the point where this can get unpleasant. Aubergines spit when they go wet into hot oil, and the stove does not stand at working height for tall people. We say where your hands belong before every step, and it sounds over-careful until the first time something hisses.

Afterwards everyone eats together, in the yard or at the kitchen table, and it takes a while. There is no need to get up before three hours are gone.

What you carry home is less a recipe than a feel for quantities. Salt goes into a cupped palm here, and nobody can write down for you the distance between too little and enough.