[Continued from Part 1: Forming Team Lavash]

Words: Kate Leahy / Photos: Raffi Youredjian & Various iPhones

After the three of us connected over various Skype calls, we met in person in an unlikely place—Louisville, Kentucky, where we attended the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) conference. At this point, we had a book proposal in the works, but we still didn't have any deadlines or a publisher who wanted to work with us. So we brainstormed and strategized.

THE TITLE

At one point, we thought—what if we call our project ARMENIA, the cookbook? We then had a wake-up call: no editor would bite on that book, especially since many people don't know where Armenia is. (Publishers are habitually risk adverse, and we had yet to show how supportive the global Armenian community would be for our book.) Then we pitched Bread, Bones, and Barbecue, thinking about Ara's love for khash (a calves-foot broth), the popularity of khorovats (Armenian grilling), and John's stories of eating what he called "earth shattering lavash" in a village outside of Yerevan. No matter what, it always came back to lavash. Finally, at a pow-wow session in the conference hotel lobby, our agent looked at the three of us. "Why don't you call it Lavash?" she said.

At last, we had a title.

Writing the proposal took more time, but having the name helped the story fall in to place. We'd start with a chapter on bread, then we'd branch out to the food we encountered while traveling in Armenia and interviewing chefs and home cooks. The problem was, we still weren't quite sure what all of these recipes would be yet. I, for one, was the only author on the team that still hadn't visited Armenia. Ara had a list of questions that he still wanted to sort out. We had a lot of work to do. So we created a recipe list that was an approximation.

Several months later, when we had our book deal with Chronicle Books, we knew the first thing we had to do was book our first team research trip to Armenia and set that recipe list for good.

THE RESEARCH TRIPS

We arrived late in the evening at Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan, the country’s capital. Getting there was a whole other adventure story for another time, but suffice to say there's no direct way to get to Armenia. Immediately, we started getting the lay of the land, with John remembering the route to Cascade where we grabbed a late-night meal—basturma, lavash, Armenian cheeses, and beer. Pegor Papazian, the chief development officer of TUMO Creative Technologies (the free after-school digital meeting center for Armenian youth that brought Ara and John to Armenia to teach workshops), met us to welcome us to the city, and from there we sketched out a plan for the following day.

That was probably the most easy-going moment of the trip. Afterwards, we had the amazing fortune to spend the next week following Marie Lou Papazian—TUMO's director and fearless leader—and the staff and students of TUMO as we did a deep-dive into the culinary roots of Armenia. We spent a couple of hours at the cafe in Lovers Park making a list of all the things we needed to consider to create the book, from translation work to editing our recipe list. From there, we started making the rounds, visiting as many people as we could.

We met the lavash bakers of Argel, whose story formed the introduction to the book, as well as the butcher who gave his his recipe for tjvjik (a dish of liver/offal and onions pronounced in a way that sounds like a knife hitting a cutting board—"tij-vij-jik"). Did we know about harissa, a porridge made of wheat berries and meat? Or khashlama, a mild, rustic beef or lamb stew? We toured GUM, the the big market in Yerevan that sells everything from sweet soujuk (walnuts strung on a thread and dipped in thickened fruit juice) and sour lavash (fruit leathers) to every single ingredient you need for Ara's beloved khash. We crashed a family's private party at Gayanei Mot, a restaurant held in the home of the late restaurateur Gayane, who often was seated at the piano during dinners, and met Halle Butvin of the Smithsonian, who was working on bringing Armenian heritage to Washington, D.C., for the annual Folklife Festival. We even got to see what a wine incubator looks like after meeting Vahe Keushguerian and his daughter, Aimee, who are grappling with how to use little-known indigenous grapes in wine.

Once we had gone all over Yerevan, Marie Lou took us on a road trip that, in one day, hit Areni, Armenia's best-known wine-growing region; Goris, a town in the southern border known for growing some of the best beans in Armenia; and Stepanakert, the capital of the Republic of Artsakh. There, in this ethnically Armenian republic that is still not recognized as independent by much of the world (Google Maps tagged us as being in Azerbaijan), we encountered jingalov hats, a flatbread filled with herbs and greens. It's a signature of the area, and it's a tradition for many Yerevantsis (people from Yerevan) who visit Stepanakert to buy up a box of jingalov hats to bring home. Marie Lou gave us everything she could—and seemingly more—to ensure we got started on the right foot, and it's hard to even think about how difficult this book would be without her

Our first trip was about seeing as much as possible so we could start writing the book in ernest. But what often happens on trips like this is that they show you how much you still need to know. When we returned in the spring—this time for a much longer stay—we revisited some of the same places, but we also explored more of the country. While there, we also witnessed a country at a political turning point, and we will never forget the celebrations that broke out in the streets when it became clear that the favorite politician of the Armenian people—Nikol Pashinyan— would become prime minister. (On the first day of our trip, this was far from certain. He was arrested during a protest, and John witnessed it all in a way he will never forget.)

On that trip, we not only headed back to Artsakh on the same punishingly bumpy road, but we also drove from there to Dilijan through barricades thanks to country-wide protests from Nikol supporters in an effort to force the ruling party's. We then looped up close to the Georgian border, stopping in Alaverdi to meet a champion khorovats chef and to Gyumri, a historic city with graceful architecture and a recently tragic history.

THE TEAM

Team Lavash at Odzun Church in Armenia’s Lori region.

Along the way, we worked. Days were as long as we could make them. John toted photography gear and Ara brought along his food styling kit. Any time a cook began demonstrating a recipe, Ara and I took notes by hand in our notebooks while John went to town shooting. The thee of us would often pull out our phones to take more photos and snapshots to enhance our note taking. Raffi, a friend of Ara's from childhood, came with us on the road during our second trip, acting as an unofficial fixer, while Christine, a Yerevan native, came along as our translator. Together, we took in ancient caves of Areni that were believed to comprise the first winery in the world, weathered the odd Airbnb experience (a guy kept coming in to access his overstuffed refrigerator, even though we had paid to rent the whole apartment), endured endless jokes and Game of Thrones reenactments, and faced literal roadblocks.

To say all of this was unforgettable somehow feels so I'll just finish with this: Lavash is not a book by one, or two, or three people. It is the result of the efforts by many people who helped simply because they wanted to or because we asked.