Cuisines of the Caugasus: Armenia

One of the three Caucasian regions considered in this book –see general introduction –Armenian cuisine is one of the most ancient in all of Asia, and its cookery reflects the two-thousand-year history of the Armenian people. As early as the second century bc Armenia was divided between east and west and lost its independence, in turn, to Rome, Persia, Byzantium and Islam; later, in the seventh century ad, it was overrun by the Arabs, the Mongols, the Turks and the Persians. The area was partitioned between Turkey and Persia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. Culinary influences went both ways, and many Turkish recipes, like dolma, are Armenian in origin.