Maral

Appears in

Grand Dishes: Time-perfected recipes and stories from grandmothers of the world

Published 2021

About

Jet-lagged but wide-eyed at all there was to take in in New York, we hopped on the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn to be welcomed into a small apartment by a lady with a big heart. She swung open the door to her home and exclaimed, ‘What beautiful girls,’ before demanding we glug tea (foraged herbs from her native mountain home, including wild mint and dried roses) and guzzle down a lavash she’d just whipped up.

The lavash, a sort of bread pocket filled with herbed meat, which resembles a flattened calzone, is what Maral describes as a ‘snack’ - but we were full after sharing just one. While we ate, she moved. She danced around her teeny kitchen for four hours, chopping up, whizzing up, rubbing in, marinating, bubbling and stirring until we were seated at a table laden with far too much food for three.