[ID: A bowl of soup topped with crushed walnuts, with a braid of dried leaves in the background. End ID]
Ավելուկի ճաշ / Aveluk chash (Armenian wild sorrel soup)
Docks and sorrels in Armenia
Ավելուկ ("aveluk") is one of the local Armenian names of a group of plants in the Rumex genus: curly dock (Rumex crispus), broad-leaved dock (R. obtusifolius), common sorrel (R. acetosa), and possibly patience dock (R. patientia).
Aveluk grows wild in humid areas of Armenia: on riverbanks, on the bases of mountains, on roadsides, and in meadows. It is foraged extensively during the spring, and eaten in large quantities throughout the year by ethnic Armenians, Greek Armenians, and Yazidi Armenians. Amongst Christians, it is especially popular during Lent ("Մեծ Պահք," "mec pahk'," or "great fast")—a forty-day-period of reflection, repentence, and abstention from meat, dairy, and eggs.
To Greek Armenians—mostly descended from Pontic Greeks, who settled in the Pontus region beginning in the 7th century BCE—these docks are called "aveluk," or "avluk."
Yazidis—an ethnoreligious group native to Kurdistan, whose religion has its roots in pre-Zorastrian Iranian paganism—call these plants "tirşo" (from Kurdish "tirş," meaning "sour"). Many Yazidis migrated to current-day Armenia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, due to religious persecution during the reign of Ottoman ruler Abdul Hamid II: today, they form the largest minority group in Armenia.
Common dishes made from this group of plants include a salad of boiled aveluk, garlic, walnuts, and spices; a stir-fry of aveluk and eggs; and a soup (ճաշ, "chash") of aveluk and cracked wheat berries. According to a 2020 survey, this soup is especially common amongst ethnic Armenians and Yazidis, but is also eaten by Greek Armenians. All three of these groups preserve aveluk for eating during the winter by drying it. Yazidis also have a preservation method exclusive to themselves: namely, lacto-fermentation (pickling in brine).
Foraging culture
Braids of aveluk, usually gathered and preserved by women, are sometimes sold in marketplaces. The dock plants themselves, however, are considered as a kind of commons, which anybody can gather as needed. Foraging thus unites concepts of communal ownership, generational knowledge, connection to land, and food sovereignty.
Armenian interdisciplinary performance artist Arpi Balyan writes:
Encouraging the use of Aveluk for nutritional and medicinal purposes is a great example of how food can be sourced without harming nature while preserving local and folk culinary and healing practices, remaining independent from the capitalist market.
By cooking aveluk chash, Balyan hopes to "strengthen our connection with familiar and unfamiliar food and to exchange local knowledge on nourishment and well-being with other communities." Aveluk is a particularly useful starting point for a pedagogical project of this sort, as Rumex plants grow across broad swathes of the Americas, Europe, Asia, North and South Africa, and Australia. Thus—perhaps paradoxically—people in many different parts of the world can experience their own local landscapes in new ways, thanks to engagement with a particular regional cuisine.
Aveluk chash
The aveluk leaves used to make aveluk soup are woven into characteristic long braids, and then dried. The drying process allows the leaves to ferment slightly, changing their strongly bitter flavor into a mildly, pleasantly sour one, with notes of pepper and fruit.
To make the soup, the dried braid is cut apart and rehydrated with boiled water. Cracked wheat berries (ձավար; "javar"), lentils, and potato may be added, in which case they will be boiled alongside the rehydrated aveluk until tender. A temper of fried onion, garlic, black pepper, and paprika (կարմիր պղպեղ, literally "red pepper") is then added and mixed in with the boiled ingredients. (Sometimes a one-pot version is made, in which case the aromatics will be fried in a pot, and then the other ingredients and water will be added.) The finished soup is garnished with chopped or crushed walnuts, and minced garlic.
The result is a hearty bowl of earthy lentils and tart, tender sorrel, rounded off with the slight nutty bitterness of walnuts, and the sharp zestiness of raw garlic.
[ID: A close-up of a dried, coiled aveluk braid. End ID]
Recipe under the cut!
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