As we negotiated the serpentine highway, a cliff fell away to our right; there were no guardrails. I felt a thrill—whether from vertigo or from my sudden realization that the car had no windshield wipers. When we reached the Gombori Pass, the sky suddenly darkened, and within minutes we were engulfed in an intense alpine snowstorm. What was I doing here?
Halfway around the world from the land of peach-tree blossoms and Coca-Cola lies another, more beguiling, Georgia. Here, at the crossroads of East and West, Jason sought the Golden Fleece and discovered instead the enchanting Medea, with her sorceress’s knowledge of herbs. Here the wine grape was born and fermented into ghvino. And here the rich Georgian soil produces lush meadows for grazing and all manner of tea, spices, vegetables, and fruits, including aromatic feijoas from the Black Sea coast and, yes, even peaches—the golden fruit of Stalin’s hometown, Gori, is especially prized. For more than 2,000 years, this small country has attracted merchants, travelers, and invaders who coveted the wealth of her land.
It’s attracted me, as well. I’ve been coming to Georgia for more than 20 years. But until last winter, I’d never tried to make the journey to Alvani, a remote village known for making the best tushuri—one of the world’s great sheep’s-milk cheeses. Georgians are passionate about their local cheeses, which reflect the country’s wild nature. In Tbilisi, the capital city, peasant women come to the Central Market clad in black, their gold teeth gleaming, to sell rounds of the popular sulguni, a creamy cow’s-milk cheese that finds its way into countless dishes, from khachapuri, Georgia’s signature bread oozing melted butter and cheese, to elarji, hot grits beaten with cheese into a rich, molten mass. In contrast, fierce-looking mountaineers in conical sheepskin hats offer slabs of the sharp tushuri from the highlands, which is best eaten plain with a loaf of bread still warm from the toné, a tandoor-like Georgian oven. And at Tbilisi’s central marketplace, this cheese commands Dean & DeLuca prices. Tasting tushuri at its source had become my own personal quest.
Like the Golden Fleece, tushuri is hard to find, especially in midwinter. Enlisting the aid of my friend Zaliko was the easy part. “No problem,” he said when I called. An archaeologist and avid mountain climber, he loves any chance to escape the city—the farther afield, the better. Right away he agreed to take me to Alvani and, to prepare me for the visit, put me in touch with his old friend Georgi Tsotsanidze, an Alvani native who gave me a crash course in cheese production. We met for lunch at an old-fashioned tavern in Tbilisi and were whisked into a small private room, away from the smoke and the boisterous crowd in the main dining room. Between mouthfuls of spicy beef soup, leek and walnut purée, and kidney beans seasoned with dill, cilantro, and plum sauce, Georgi spoke lyrically of the alpine pastures of Tusheti, the wild blueberries, currants, and raspberries, the field mushrooms, and the aromatic herbs that lend subtle flavor to the sheep’s milk.
He told me how tushuri gets its distinctive mottled texture and sharp, briny taste from the guda, the sheepskin in which it is aged. The guda is prepared by shearing the wool close to the skin, leaving it less than half an inch in length. Then the sheep is slaughtered and its skin removed in one piece. After being washed and then dried in the sun, the neck and three of the leg openings are tied shut with hemp, and the skin is turned inside out so that the wool lines the inside. Next, five or six large canvas bags of freshly made cheese are layered with rock salt inside the skin. The cheesemaker then blows into the remaining leg opening to inflate the guda like a balloon, ties the last opening shut, and leaves the cheese to ripen in salt for three to four weeks. I couldn’t wait to see the process for myself.
A few days later, Zaliko and I set off early in the half-light of a January morning. Tbilisi stood silent and dark—electricity is spotty and sometimes nonexistent. After 70 years of Soviet misrule, Georgia’s infrastructure is a shambles, often quite literally, with walls collapsing and roads caving in. So I wasn’t surprised to see Zaliko drive up with a miner’s lantern strapped to his forehead.
We stopped at a roadside stand to buy provisions: loaves of hot bread, church-khela (sausage-shaped confections of grape juice and nuts), and chacha (Georgian moonshine made from grapes). I would have preferred some of the local Kakhetian wine, made by fermenting grape juice, skins, stems, and seeds for several months in large red clay amphoras. The result is an aromatic amber wine so rich in vitamins that Georgians swear by its curative properties. But chacha won the day. Zaliko was in high spirits. He poured the moonshine from the seller’s jug into recycled plastic liter bottles he’d had the foresight to bring along.
Like Jason himself, my friend Zaliko is not easily daunted. “No problem,” he told me as I pored over a road map, hesitant about navigating the Caucasus Mountains in mid-January, especially with the war in Chechnya only 100 miles away. The temperature dropped as we climbed the highway north from Tbilisi, but the presence of fresh, homemade provisions reassured me.
Then, on the gombori pass, the snowstorm began. The car began to skid—no snow tires. “No problem,” said Zaliko, continuing his hair-raising account of one of his Pamir expeditions. I reminded myself that it is precisely this devil-may-care attitude that keeps me returning to Georgia, but as the car failed to gain traction on the incline and slowly slid to the very edge of the roadside, Georgian capriciousness no longer seemed so charming. A gaggle of schoolboys materialized from the swirling snow and, gleeful at our misadventure, pushed the car back onto the crumbling road. So we inched along, determined to reach Alvani. But four hours and three spinouts later, even the intrepid Zaliko had to admit defeat. I returned to Tbilisi without my Golden Fleece and decided in stead to seek out my own Medea with a sorceress’s knowledge of herbs. I went to see my old friend Gulisa.
I first met Gulisa in Khobi, the small town in western Georgia where she grew up. Trained as a pharmacist, Gulisa knows all the secrets of Georgia’s wild edibles and works wonders in the kitchen, coaxing amazing flavors from all of the produce that comes under her spell. Her ajika, the fiery Georgian salsa made from herbs and chiles, is dark and complex, the heat of the peppers bolstering—never overwhelming—the fragrant spices she grinds with her mortar and pestle, her steady circular motion conjuring images of medieval alchemy. Even though Gulisa has lived in Tbilisi for a decade, I picture her standing amid hundreds of roses in the courtyard of her beautiful house in Khobi, tending the fire in a toné, then hurrying off to pick sweet white cherries and apricots for an afternoon snack. After civil war broke out following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the family fled to Tbilisi, where they opened a small guesthouse. Ever resourceful, Gulisa discovered new markets and purveyors, and now she spends hours tracking down the finest cheeses, the most pungent peppers, the most aromatic herbs.
As always, I found Gulisa in one of the kitchens at the back of her guesthouse. She has two: one very rustic, the other a Western-style kitchen with built-in cabinets, laminated countertops, a full-size refrigerator, a stainless-steel sink, and a streamlined cooktop. I’ve never seen Gulisa use this modern kitchen, which appears sterile, devoid of magic. But beyond, through an unheated passageway, lies the rudimentary kitchen where the real wizardry takes place. A small, unheated room, it has two old-fashioned gas stoves with tightly spaced burners, a chipped ceramic sink, open shelves, and a small table covered with oilcloth. When I arrived, Gulisa was busy with mortar and pestle, pounding walnuts into a paste with garlic and salt. She sat me at the table and presented a salad of poached chicken, walnuts, pomegranate seeds, and cilantro, with just a hint of earthy shafran, ground dried marigold. Her arm moving rhythmically, she insisted that I also try some freshly made gomi, white corn ground to the consistency of grits and boiled in water until thick. Gulisa stirred the bubbling grits with a large wooden paddle, then piled a steaming mound onto my plate. It wasn’t until after I’d eaten some gozinaki (chewy diamonds of honey and walnuts) with spoonfuls of dusky quince and green walnut preserves that she deemed me properly welcomed.
After this impromptu meal we set out for the small village of Tsodoreti, in the foothills west of Tbilisi. The roads were still messy as we bumped over ruts and potholes, swerving to avoid stray dogs in the roadway, until we reached a tidy farmstead, at the edge of the village, where Shala, Gulisa’s favorite cheesemaker, lives. Shala, who supplies a small number of Tbilisi connoisseurs with sulguni and matsoni (yogurt), greeted us in the yard and sent us inside to meet his family while he trudged off to the barn for the evening milking. His wife, Nino, and sister-in-law Lamara stood by a blazing woodstove as one-year-old Maria practiced her new walking skills, nimble despite the layers of thick woolen clothes swaddling her. Shala soon appeared with frothy milk still steaming from the cows and strained it through cheesecloth into a pot. Then Lamara took over. After stirring rennet into the milk, she covered the pot, wrapped it in warm towels and a heavy blanket, and set the bundle down by the stove.
While the milk rested, Nino treated us to homegrown winter squash, roasted and cut into wedges, sprinkled with sugar, and served hot with strong Turkish coffee. Soon the milk was thick. Lamara stirred the curds with her hands and then left the developing cheese to rest for another 15 minutes. Meanwhile, we tasted the matsoni for which Shala’s family is rightly known. When the cheese was ready, Shala gathered it into a mass, squeezed it free of liquid, then put it in a small bowl. We hurried back down the mountain to Gulisa’s kitchen, where the real work began.
Sulguni is usually salted for longer keeping. Held at room temperature, its flavor intensifies and small holes develop. Sometimes the cheese is smoked over an open fire for a month—30 minutes each day—until it turns almost russet in color. But there is nothing like freshly made sulguni that is still buttery and pliant, and Gulisa had to caution me not to nibble too much of Shala’s masterpiece on the drive home—we needed plenty of cheese to make some of the most glorious dishes in all of Georgian cuisine: elarji (the previously mentioned grits with cheese), gadazelili khveli (sulguni flavored with mint), and chvish-tari (sulguni and cornmeal cakes). Back at the guesthouse, Gulisa set about making the gadazelili khveli. She placed half the cheese round in boiling water, stirred until it melted, and then turned the mass out onto the table and kneaded in some chopped fresh mint. The kitchen smelled like a summer meadow. Gulisa broke off small pieces of the softened cheese and tied them into knots, then lowered them into a pot of hot milk into which she mixed nadugi (fresh curd cheese), more mint, the water from melting the cheese, and salt. The gadazelili khveli was now ready, and we ate it as our appetizer.
Next, gulisa turned to the cornmeal cakes. She coarsely grated half of the remaining cheese and mixed it in equal proportions with fine white cornmeal, adding a little water to make a stiff dough. After kneading in a bit of salt, she heated some olive oil in a skillet and shaped the dough into oval cakes, chvishtari, which she slowly fried in the hot oil. By this time, I could hardly wait for the decadently rich elarji, usually reserved for feasts because it is so expensive and laborious to prepare. But Gulisa had other intentions. She didn’t want to serve the chvishtari plain, considering them better suited for mopping flavorful liquid from a soup or a stew. So, abracadabra, she produced a suckling pig that she’d boiled earlier in the day. Using only a small paring knife, she deftly cut the meat into tiny pieces, which she tossed into a pot along with plenty of the fat and dried summer savory that she had pounded with garlic and salt. She added a finely chopped red onion, dried marigold, coriander, fenugreek, and enough olive oil to moisten the mixture. She covered the pot and set the stew to simmer while we prepared the elarji.
Plenty of cooked gomi was left over from my afternoon meal. Gulisa heated it gently, then handed the heavy wooden paddle to me to begin beating cheese into the grits. Periodically dipping the paddle into hot water to keep the mixture from sticking, I stirred and stirred until the grits had absorbed roughly three times their weight in cheese. Finally Gulisa allowed me a break and covered the pot to help the cheese melt. From time to time she lifted the cover and peered in, anxious to catch the elarji at just the right moment, when the grits form a stringy union with the cheese but are still pliable.
Perfectly judging the time she had left, Gulisa quickly chopped some cilantro to add to the pork stew along with pomegranate seeds and a spoonful of her famous ajika. She served us each a helping of pork stew and chvishtari, then tossed some salt into the elarji and immediately spooned it out onto hot plates. Nearly enveloped in steam, we sat down at the tiny kitchen table and commenced our feast, laughing as we tried to maneuver the strings of cheese-laden grits politely into our mouths, then just giving up and digging in, utterly happy, oblivious to everything but the wonderful intensity of our friendship, this place, and the cheese.
Art For Soup’s Sake
Niko Pirosmani was born in 1862 in the eastern Georgian wine region of Kakheti. After moving to Tbilisi, he worked variously as a signboard painter, as a brakeman for the Transcaucasian Railroad, and as a purveyor of dairy products—which he sold from a small shop that he had embellished with pictures of cows. With a better visual than business sense, Pirosmani soon closed his shop and became an itinerant painter, decorating signboards for the bakeries, taverns, wine shops, and grocery stores located near the railroad yards, all in exchange for food and shelter. The Zdanevich brothers, prominent members of the Russian avant-garde, discovered Pirosmani’s work in 1912 and arranged for it to be exhibited in Moscow. But Pirosmani preferred the obscurity of his Tbilisi life to celebrity and continued to paint for food and drink until his death in 1918.