Caroline Eden is a travel writer, food writer and literary critic. She has just published her latest book, Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes, a unique blend of travelogue and cookbook which offers fascinating insights into the food, geography, cultures and histories of Armenia and Georgia. It is the final book in Caroline’s “colour trilogy”, following Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia (2020) and Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light (2018).
We spoke to Caroline about her decade of journeys around the Black Sea, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the inspiration and knowledge you can gain from walking, the books which guided her journey, and her favourite dishes from Georgia and Armenia – as well as which ones she would serve at a fantasy dinner party.
We look forward to tonight’s Social at Pushkin House, hosted by Caroline to mark today’s publication of her book!
What are your top five recommended books?
- Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel
- Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford
- An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans
- The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov
- Black Sea by Neil Ascherson
What is a book that inspired you as a young person?
Dervla Murphy's In Ethiopia with a Mule – when I was a bookseller in London I would read it behind the till and it just made me want to go out into the world. It showed me that a woman alone could be perfectly capable, even just with a pack-mule, named Jock, through some of Ethiopia's more remote and potentially hostile regions.
What is a book that takes you back to a specific place or time?
I do have one particularly lovely memory of reading Rory Stewart’s account of walking across Afghanistan, The Places In Between. I was in a yurt in a shepherds' valley not far from the stone caravanserai Tash Rabat in Kyrgyzstan. It was cold and I was drinking tea and feeling that while I was safe and my adventure was no match for the ones unfolding in the pages I was reading, I felt particularly connected to Central Asia and Afghanistan at that moment.
What are you reading at the moment?
The best non-fiction book I’ve read so far this year has been Philip Marsden’s Under a Metal Sky. I absolutely love his books, especially The Crossing Place about Armenia and its scattered diaspora, and The Spirit-Wrestlers which focused on radical Russian sectarians. Both books irrecoverably hooked me, and countless others, on his writing. This new one has a particularly captivating chapter on Svaneti in Georgia, and the panning for gold there, that I enjoyed but the whole book changes how you see – how rocks and minerals have the ability to open up the entire world – which is what good non-fiction does.
Which book are you looking forward to reading?
I’m really looking forward to reading the forthcoming book by journalist, and long-term Central Asia expat, Joanna Lillis. The book is called Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan and it comes out in November. I know it’ll be truly informative, well written and thoroughly researched.
What is your desert island book?
View with a Grain of Sand – the selected poems of Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh). I would never get bored with her poems by my side.
What is a book or poem that cheers you up?
Any poem by Charles Simic who along with Szymborska is my all-time favourite poet. I especially love Butcher Shop which has the most brilliant opening stanza imaginable:
Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel…
What is a book you wish you’d written?
The one I’m trying to cobble together right now!
If you were having a fantasy dinner party, who would you invite? And which dishes would you cook?
Hmm. Plov as a centrepiece for the table, obviously, topped with quail’s eggs. And some good Georgian style meze dishes such as pkhali. Maybe a couple of khachapuri and lobiani, probably some flaky samsa and definitely lots of good Georgian wine, Polish vodka and Armenian brandy.
Assuming that they don’t have to be alive as it’s a fantasy dinner party I’d invite: the founder of the Savitsky museum in Karakalpakstan Igor Savitsky, the filmmaker Satajit Ray, the “Eye of Istanbul” the photographer Ara Guler, the writer Lesley Blanch, the filmmaker and maestro of the Caucasus Sergei Parajanov, the author Rose Macaulay, and Abida Parveen the legendary female qawaali singer from Pakistan.
Can you tell us about your “colour trilogy”?
Green Mountains, my new book, is the final book in my “colour trilogy”, following on from Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes – Through Darkness and Light and Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes Through Central Asia. In Green Mountains the book travels to the lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea – both of which are central to the first two books – and as well as walking and collecting stories and recipes, I reflect on ten years of researching and writing these books, set most recently against the dark backdrop of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The books all feature a really diverse range of characters whose tales I was proud to recount in interviews and essays: from the last fisherwoman in Bulgaria, to the descendants of Turkish bakers who sailed across the Black Sea to learn the craft of cake making in Russia in the 19th century, to the harvesters in the world’s largest walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan and a man who cooked plov at the base camp of Peak Lenin for all the top Soviet-era climbers. They are the stars of the books…
All in all, over 10,000 miles travelled on at least ten forms of transport, I think!
Why are walking and food the two prisms through which you have chosen to explore the countries that you visited?
Two simple reasons: that no feast can beat a post-walk meal and that the green mountains of the Caucasus are capable of transforming just about anyone into a pilgrim.
Slowing down and doing what I could on foot meant time to really think and to see the landscape. As an outsider, by walking, you immediately become part of the scenery. By not shutting yourself away from the world, in the body of a car or bus, you make yourself vulnerable, approachable and more open to encounters. You have to face whatever you walk into, good and bad.
Therefore, walking offers the best chance to relish the smells, sights and tastes, all of the sensory things that make up the fabric of a place. By hopefully stepping out, and by putting my trust in walking, I had faith that a certain human, animal, botanical, and edible portrait of Armenia and Georgia would form.
Why did you choose Armenia and Georgia as the focus of your final book, Green Mountains?
There was a lot of fuss in my mind about the countries and the route. I had hoped to end it in Dagestan but it obviously wasn’t possible to travel there after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
My chosen route also meant leaving out neighbouring Azerbaijan, also a place of emerald-green mountains, fascinating food (a book ought to be written on the wildly varied pilafs alone), convivial villages and compelling stories. I decided on this though as during the course of writing the book, much to the horror of Armenia, Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive triggered the rapid, and traumatic, exodus of almost all ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, ending their centuries-long existence there. Including both countries in one book, for now at least, felt misguided.
Can you talk us through your route in Green Mountains? How do you decide where to go, the people and places to visit along the way, and was there an element of spontaneity? Did you read anything particularly interesting or useful to prepare for the journey?
Beginning in Armenia, moving northwards through Georgia and ending where the trilogy began, at the Black Sea, the plan was to weave together the enchanting geography and the cult of the kitchen that prevails within these two countries. There was definitely some spontaneity – weather decided on routes quite a lot as I walked both in summer and deep winter.
I read a fair amount to prepare but one of the less likely sources was discovering the work of linguist Marjory Scott Wardrop, who is best remembered for making the first translation into English of the Georgian epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin. She was a great explorer and linguist. Also books by Joyce Dunsheath, a quietly intrepid English woman who secured a hard-to-get permit to climb the greatest mountains of the Caucasus during the closed-off Soviet era. She wrote about her adventures too in Guest of the Soviets (1959) and in the Ladies’ Alpine Club Journal.
There has been a tendency of ‘othering’ or fetishing the Caucasus both in Western and Russian literature and travel writing: how do you deal with this in Green Mountains?
Partly by not dwelling too much on books by English mountaineers and Russian writers, such as Lermontov and Tolstoy, but instead bringing in Georgian mountaineers such as Mikhail Khergiani, “the tiger of the cliffs”, and Guram Tikanadze, who are shamefully not celebrated much outside of the South Caucasus. And writing about artists and filmmakers from the region, such as Sergei Parajanov and Niko Pirosmani but also the sisters Mariam and Yeranuhi Aslamazyan, two incredible Armenian artists that very few people seem to know outside of Armenia.
Along the way you meet many people and take in everything from art, history and literature to nature and (of course) food. Is there a meal which is particularly memorable to you? Which other moments or places during the journey were the most memorable to you?
I have to confess that one of the best meals I ate was in Batumi in Georgia, and that was a plate of croquettes, ordered on a whim and eaten in a small restaurant. They were an unexpected smash hit, filled with beans and served on a sharp tomato sauce. As far as places, I was really enraptured by the wooden mosques of Adjara which are often tucked away in tiny villages. It was a great and enjoyable challenge to locate the mosque, then the key holder…
The food and drink you enjoy is rooted in the landscape. How have the ‘green mountains’ influenced Georgian and Armenian cuisine? And what are the other influences on local cuisine?
One unexpected thing for me was just how many ethnic Armenians from Lebanon and Syria, fleeing financial collapse and war, have opened many restaurants in Yerevan and have shaken up the food scene there. Traditional jingalov hats are also important and tell a story – they are stuffed bread (“hats” means bread in Armenian) in the shape of a deflated rugby ball, often served with three bowls containing salt, cumin and paprika. Ingredients for the green filling vary, depending on what herbs are available, but typically this will include dill, coriander, greens (maybe spinach or sorrel) and spring onions. These are breads very closely associated with Nagorno-Karabakh, which for reasons I explained above, matters.
What can we learn from Georgian and Armenian approaches or attitudes to food and food culture?
To enjoy it and take time. As Shota Rustaveli – author of the Georgian epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin – sagely wrote in the 12th century, “Spending on feasting and wine is better than hoarding our substance.” That is the Georgian attitude!
Do you have a favourite dish from each country?
Freshly baked lavash bread from Armenia, the backbone to all mealtimes, is incomparable. I also love gata – the cake which is not too sweet and not too salty, and also eetch, bulgur wheat salad infused with tomato juice. In Georgia, for me it’s all about the wine, the liberal use of herbs, the khinkali (obviously) and Svan salt (which typically combines salt, coriander, blue fenugreek, dried marigold petals, garlic, red pepper and caraway seeds) which I think improves almost all soups and stews, and Kakhetian sunflower oil, which is really good.
Which other food writers or travel writers inspire you?
Food writers I enjoy reading include: Margaret Visser, Zuza Zak, Alissa Tomishkina, Olia Hercules, Mark Diacono and Diana Henry. Travel writers, the list is long! But three of my favourites are: Alexander Frater, Jan Morris and Dervla Murphy.