Georgia
Cheese-boat breads, soup dumplings and 8,000 years of clay-jar wine — a Caucasus table built for the toast-led feast.
Get invited to a Georgian supra and you surrender the evening: a tamada, the toastmaster, leads round after round of toasts while the table disappears under plates. At the centre sits khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread that comes, in the Adjarian version, as an open boat of molten cheese crowned with a raw egg and butter you stir in yourself. Georgia has been cooking like this at the crossroads of Europe and Asia for millennia.
You eat khinkali — fat, twisted soup dumplings — by hand, gripping the topknot, biting a hole and drinking the broth before it runs down your wrist. Walnuts thicken everything from cold satsivi to green pkhali pâtés; strings of churchkhela hang in the markets like candles. And the wine is the oldest story of all: 8,000 years of it, still fermented amber in buried clay qvevri, a method the world now copies.
- Khachapuri (cheese-filled bread; egg-boat Adjarian)
- Khinkali (soup dumplings)
- Mtsvadi (charcoal meat skewers)
- Pkhali (walnut-herb vegetable pâté)
- Satsivi (cold poultry in walnut sauce)
- Churchkhela (nut-and-grape sweet)
- Qvevri wine (clay-jar wine)
