Today my husband and I spent the day cooking.
Normally that wouldn’t be a big deal. But we were making Armeninan dishes with Ed’s mother, Alice. That IS a big deal. Alice is in her seventies and her time to be able to teach us how to make traditional recipes from her childhood is fleeting.
Normally our fare is simple. Microwaveable, sometimes. And once a week or so we go to a fast food restaurant. But right now Alice is visiting with us and we feel the need to take our meals a step further. The Armenians have a wonderful food heritage that is endangered and could die with our generation. So today we passed some of that heritage down from Alice to Ed and I, and we in turn will pass it to our children.
It started with Kourabia, an Armenian butter cookie. We had three recipies to choose from in the Soor Adsvadzadzin Apostolic Church cookbook http://armenianchurchofwhit.org and we decided to choose the most difficult one. We figured this meant it would be the most traditional. It started by clarifying butter (I had to look up how to do it on the Internet) and a very, very long process of whipping butter and adding other ingredients. Alice proudly directed the project. 
As we worked, each of our children in turn came up and took turns mixing, beating, adding ingredients, and shaping the dough. We had three generations of Armenians cooking- Alice, her son Ed, and his three children, Shelby, Cole and Sarah. The batter was rolled out, shaped, and put in the refrigirator to cool off before it was popped into the oven. I was so happy to see how involved the children were in the shaping process; they all wanted to roll out the dough into the cookies. All six of us- Ed, Alice, and children- crowded around the baking sheets and worked together.
And all three children took turns putting the final touch- the powdered sugar- onto the cookies. They looked just as wonderful as the cookies we had bought before at the Armenian festivals… but how would they taste?
To enhance the experience, I found some Armenian music on http://pandora.com and were ready to taste the cookies.
We all took one off of the plate and took a bite. The outsides were soft and powdery, the insides almost cruchy.
They absolutely melted in your mouth, and you could taste every bit of the eight hours it had taken us to get the butter from a box to the finished product.
Ed sat at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and said something that really struck me.
He said with emotion, ” When you cook these dishes, you are cooking for the living. You are cooking for the dead. By cooking, we honor the dead. When you cook, you cook for love”.
I thought about all the family members that had passed. Edward Ovian. Peter Ovian. Leo Ovian. Angel Byrne. Today, we cooked for all of them. And we cooked for our children, who we helped to be proud of their Armenian food heritage. And hopefully, we cook for our children’s children, whom we have not yet met, who someday will experience the joy of a cookie that melts in your mouth, that was made for no reason other than for pure love.
This was a day that I will remember for a long, long time. Sh’norhakal em.
Next weekend… choreg!
