food – Packing List for Immigration

Pack… More Bread

I looked forward to summer the entire school year. Summers were as careless as one could get those days: there was no homework, no need to help dad cut firewood, no need to worry whether my only outfit would dry by Monday morning for me to have something to wear to school (I wouldn’t see a drier until I got to the US), and the sun shone late into the evening, so that we could stay out and play until 9 or 10 pm.

The summer of 1994 will go down in history as the time when I got really good at jumping rope. The girl gang and I had been together for a year now. During this time we had managed to climb and fall out of trees together, adopt a few stray dogs, organize a holiday pageant show and performance, get in trouble for stealing green apricots from a neighbor, and a number of other adventures befitting 10 year olds. But this was the summer that we’d dedicated ourselves to jump rope.

6th grade class field trip to Geghard. I’ve apparently managed to grow out of my pants that year.

We jumped long rope and double dutch: we would ask some of the older girls for their ropes, tie the ropes together, and play into the evening, until we couldn’t see the rope anymore. I had never jumped rope until that summer and I was determined to get at least as good as the others. I’d practice at home by tying one end of the rope to a chair and making my dad spin the other end (my mom would absolutely not get involved in my shenanigans – that was not what chairs were for). The chair would often come crashing down and I’d have to try and dodge it, but I think that just added to my jump roping skills.

Pack… Bread

There is a lot of bread in the standard Armenian diet, and I mean both the amount as well as the variety. We have lavash, of course, first and foremost. It serves as a magical vehicle for all other food: you can make wrap sandwiches with it, use it to eat soup, it dries and keeps rather well. We have the unleavened matnakash, which is our standard daily bread (literally what I visualize if I ever say the Lord’s prayer). We also very commonly eat Georgian puri that’s baked in a tandoor oven and Russian sourdough rye (there is also a great number of types of bread that I simply don’t know the names of). I feel like Armenians would probably be awful at the Atkins diet.

Bread is so ubiquitous for us that instead of asking someone whether they would like to eat, you’d ask whether they would like to eat bread. And this applies to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There is always bread on the table at all hours of the day. At my parents’ house, there was also cheese, greens, like parsley and dill, and onions and garlic. I remember my parents always telling me to eat my meals with bread to make sure I’d filled up (no, I had never heard about stopping eating before feeling full in order to avoid overeating until I got to the States – yes, this is truly a first world problem). And I had literally never seen food being thrown away until coming to the US.

In case you needed a visual of me as a princess.

After the Soviet Union broke up, food (among many other things) was rationed out. Cheese was scarce. There was no meat whatsoever (I think we’d get it once a month and I’d invite my best friend to dinner at my house – it was a big deal). We got an allotment of a kilo of butter per family once a month. But every person was entitled to half a kilo, or about one pound, of bread per day. As I write this, it seems like so much bread to be eating every day – who the heck eats a pound of bread each day? But I think the important piece here is that often there was nothing else to eat other than this bread (and I don’t mean this figuratively). Some days you might have cheese or a can of Spam. Some days you are lucky and you come by salo, salted unrendered pork fat – incredibly yucko but highly caloric and helpful when you’re trying to make sure your family doesn’t starve. And some days the bread is all there is. But at least you could always count on bread.

Pack… Snickers Bars

I grew up in Armenia during a time of severe scarcity. There was no electricity. There were kerosene lamps but no kerosene. There were wood burning stoves but no money to buy wood with. There were candles but no matches to light them with. There were food stamps but no food to use them on. It was a time of creative problem solving and trying to make something out of nothing. Some of the more creative solutions included fueling our stove with anything that would burn. Though, in hindsight, I wonder whether inhaling the smoke from burning old faux leather shoes can explain my adult onset asthma. Another creative approach was utilized in obtaining what at the time passed for chocolate at my house (courtesy of my dad who was a laboratory scientist): you mix clarified butter with sugar and cocoa powder. The result was greasy and grainy as hell but in absence of actual chocolate (and due to the lack of funds to obtain any kind of commercial chocolate product) this was not only an acceptable but a highly lauded alternative. Though I should note that my dad would sometimes get in trouble for his concoction, since according to my mom we needed the clarified butter for “real” food.

Quick aside on the clarified butter (or ghee) situation. Back then we conserved all and any food we could: summer fruit was turned into jams for the winter, unfinished loaves of bread were turned into croutons, and butter (when we got our hands on it) was clarified to prevent spoilage and make sure that it kept even without a refrigerator (no electricity, remember?).

My mom & I out at a New Years event. I’m probably 7 or 8 here.

During this time of weird ghee-based “chocolate,” the 10 year old me had a rampant sweet tooth and came upon a box of real, honest-to-goodness chocolates. You know how in America people get presents for Christmas? When I was growing up for the holidays (we celebrated New Years instead of Jesus’ birthday) you got things like apples and oranges and maybe a quince (it’s a fruit – look it up). Except when really fancy guests showed up and maybe brought you chocolate (and if you were particularly lucky, then it wouldn’t be a box that had been in the regifting cycle since the previous New Years).