Cooking Under the Red Star
Welcome to Buffet Magazine, an independently owned digital food magazine. Our Thursday editions are where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: Gamarjoba! It’s the Georgia issue—we’ve got a gleeful beef and walnut stew, a tale of cornmeal Flubber, and a run through the last hundred years of Georgian cuisine.
Appetizers
საქართველო on My Mind
I was reminded last week of just how gratifying cooking from a cookbook can be. My day-to-day cooking is usually inspired by what I see before me: whatever cuts look good at the butchershop, the CSA veg that needs using up, the leftovers that could stand to be transformed. It is rare that I set a new-to-me recipe in my crosshairs, seek out all the necessary ingredients, and set plodding down untrod track.
But last week, I had the pleasure of a small (smell?) epiphany. In anticipation of today’s newsletter, I was cooking through the kharcho recipe from Benjamin Kemper and Meriko Gubeladze’s lovely new book, Georgia: The Cookbook, and had just stirred heaps of mortared walnuts into the stew before moving it to the back burner for a final five-minute simmer. I stepped outside to grab some firewood, and when I crossed back over the threshold I took a deep breath and stood still, stupefied. In that moment I realized that my house had never smelled like that before. The grassy-sweet aroma of Georgian blue fenugreek and a chamomile-esque topnote from powdered French marigold—two ingredients I had never encountered and was glad to have purchased online—commingled with the wet earth of walnut and the familiar lingering musk of browned beef to create a heady perfume that stopped me in my tracks. I was overcome with glee. To smell something new! What a gift. Beyond the novelty of it all, it was a balm to my jaded soul to inhabit that moment and feel the vastness of experience that cooking offers us. This is all to say, in case you needed the nudge: Do yourself a favor and cook something new. —Amiel