Tushetian Cooking

Laliskuri (Lalis Quri) Darejani Itchirauli

Appears in
Tasting Georgia: A Food and Wine Journey in the Caucasus
Tasting Georgia

By Carla Capalbo

Published 2017

  • About
Darejani Itchirauli is a lovely Tushetian woman who spent a morning with me cooking traditional recipes in her valley kitchen. From universal ingredients – flour, butter, cheese, potatoes – she created food that spoke of a different terroir and way of life.

“These are my grandmother’s highland recipes,” she says, kneading the dough for potato-filled khinkali. “We’re from the Chagma-Tush branch of Tushetians, and we speak the local Georgian dialect.” Darejani worked in California and also speaks some English. “Some ancestors came down from the mountains in the early 1800s, to land that had been awarded to the Tushetians in the 17th-century in return for their fearless fighting against the Persians in the 1659 Battle of Bakhtrioni.” Many Tushetians still return to the high mountains in summer, keeping the ancient traditions alive.