FEBRUARY 2021 93S 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 culi-
nary 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 topour 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 genera-
tions before arriving in the United States.
“Nobody knows how to do this,” she recalls thinking. “Even if I never
make it in my life, at least I’ll have it written down.” But as it turns out, the
opposite happened. A lifelong cook, she hasn’t been able to stop making
the dishes she wrote down.
Descended from a family of Armenian Genocide survivors, Roberta was
born in Detroit. It was there that her grandparents found refuge, after leav-
ing their homeland in present-day Turkey, and where they established a
tiny restaurant that helped fill the bellies of hungry factory workers coming
off their shifts during Detroit’s car-manufacturing heyday. While one set
of grandparents was serving food to the masses, Roberta would sit in her
paternal grandmother’s kitchen and watch her cook all day, learning the
essentials of Armenian cookery.
I first met Roberta when I moved from Los Angeles, where I grew up,
to the Midwest. As a member of the women’s guild at St. John Armenian
Church, she was one of a dozen people who graciously welcomed me
into their space as I sought to do what Roberta had done decades before:
chronicle Armenian recipes and techniques—and the stories that go along
with them—before they are lost to history forever. “I almost feel like they’re
museum pieces,” Roberta says of the dishes. “We’ve just preserved a way
of life from 1915.”
For several years, I have been cooking, baking, and documenting the
rituals of the guild as they have prepared for their annual bazaar, an event
that draws large crowds who spare no time in eating and buying the food
lovingly made by volunteer members over the course of several months.
Roberta has been a big part of that process. In her, I have found an auntie,
a cooking confidante, and a guide. She has shared her expert knowledge
with me, passing on, like so many members of the guild, an edible heritage
that I continue to treasure. With my family far away, every conversation or
cooking session with Roberta brought me closer to feeling comfortable in
a new city and finding home again.
Many of the food items made by the guild
have also been collected in a cookbook called
Treasured Armenian Recipes. One of them is
Roberta’s recipe for bourma, a phyllo-based
dish filled with walnuts that is baked and then
doused with sugar syrup.
When working with phyllo, Roberta says, it’s
important to keep the dough from drying out.
For her bourma, she clarifies her own butter,
an essential part of many Armenian pastries,
after she toasts the nuts. The most critical part
of the process is wrinkling the dough with a
thin dowel, an heirloom often passed down in
Armenian families.
The action is so automatic for Roberta that
when she teaches it, she has to spend time
deconstructing the entire process to figure out
the minute details of what she’s doing. Making
bourma and teaching someone how to make
bourma are two different things, she says, but
it’s the continued practice of dishes like this
that gives Armenian identity an opportunity
to continue existing.
“If we have to keep together with our food, if
that’s what’s going to keep us together, then so
be it,” Roberta says. She will continue to cook,
to preserve, and, most importantly, to teach.The
Historian
A
Journalist Liana
Aghajanian’s auntie
Roberta Kochakian at
her Detroit home.
OPPOSITE: Kochakian’s
Bourma, walnut-
stuffed phyllo in sugar
syrup (recipe p. 103)BY LIANA AGHAJANIAN