Roads & Kingdoms -- In order to make building materiel for a nest, a wasp masticates wood, mixing it up with saliva and spitting it out into a pulp. I have never tried making a home that way myself, but that sensation—chewing wood and wanting to spit it out—is what I felt the first time I ate Abkhazian food. I was eating their food in the first place because the Abkhaz, residents of a land of wooded hills between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, are famous for their long lives. Legends tell of people here topping 150 years in the days before chemicals polluted the purity of their diet. I had been interviewing an old lady of 96, and her daughter promised to initiate me into that cuisine. Perhaps, with its help, I too would live long enough to meet my great-great-grandchildren, she said, gesturing round at her many descendants. We sat down to a lunch of corn porridge. My plateful was pale yellow and shaped like a hubcap. I hacked off a lump. I chewed; then I chewed some more.

[Photo credit: Oliver Bullough]

The old lady’s eyes narrowed with amusement. No, she said, you do it like this, reaching for a small dish of deep red sauce on the table between us. She mixed a little of the sauce into the porridge, dabbed on a lump of cheese, and pushed the plate back to me.

It was like the sun had risen in my mouth. Instead of the cold lumpiness of wood pulp, there was a spreading glow of summer: garlic, chilli, salt, and a dozen other spices I could not identify. I looked up in amazement and picked up the little dish of red sauce to smell it. The old woman smiled again.

“That’s adjika,” she said.

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Yet Another Sauce of Glory

By Oliver Bullough

May 29, 2012

I had written about the standoff between Georgia and Abkhazia for the best part of a decade without a hitch. But then I wrote about adjika for Roads & Kingdoms and the conflict caught up with me last.

My praise of Abkhazian adjika, a spicy red condiment of chilli, herbs and garlic, proved uncontroversial, but the same cannot be said for my throwaway remark that “the Georgian version isn’t as nice”.

Georgians wrote in from all over. Often people who object to my articles question my parentage, my sexuality or my personal hygiene; but most of these just remarked with wounded pride that I had been unfair. They said Mingrelians, who live to the southeast of Abkhazia along the Black Sea coast, make adjika at least as well as their neighbours.

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