In our February/March 2017 issue, Jessica Soffer wrote movingly about her Baghdad-born father’s battle with cancer, and how she coped by nursing his ailing potted lemon tree, named Marilyn, back to life. Fruit from a revived Marilyn informed these cookies, based on Middle Eastern sweets Soffer’s dad, Sasson, enjoyed as a boy. While it’s fine to top these cookies with store-bought candied lemon peel, all you need to make your own is a few lemons, a cup of sugar, and a little planning to dry them properly. Check out our best cookies to bake for the holidays here.

Featured in: “My Life With Marilyn, the Family Lemon Tree.”

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This cakelike pudding from Frédéric Morin and David McMillan, co-owners of Montreal’s Joe Beef, rides the line between side dish and dessert. For an easy caramel sauce and squash topping, double or triple the quantities of delicata and granulated sugar; if you want to emphasize this dish’s savory nature, skip the caramel for grated cheddar when serving.

Featured in: “The Joe Beef Guide to Open-Fire Feasting.”

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All tea is made from Camellia sinensis, but to be pu-erh, the leaves must be from the large-leaf C. sinensis var. assamica, grown in Yunnan Province, and processed to encourage oxidation and microbial fermentation.

You’ll find pu-erh bushes densely packed on plantations, but many obsessives go after tea made from old-arbor trees in wild, spread-out forest groves. Ancient trees—some centuries old—draw more complex nutrients from the soil for a tea with richer character.

First, the leaves are picked by hand, then laid out on long beds indoors to wither.

The withered leaves are then tossed in massive woks by hand. This “kill green” step drives out moisture from the leaves and moderates enzymes that would cause excessive oxidation.

The leaves are then rolled and kneaded to develop flavor and aroma while driving off additional moisture. Finally, they’re sun-dried.

Most pu-erh is then compressed into dense cakes with heavy stones or hydraulic presses. People originally pressed the tea to make it easier to transport over long distances. Now they continue the practice to facilitate better storage and aging.

An alternative to this “raw”-style pu-erh is “ripe” pu-erh, made from leaves that compost in big, humid piles for a few months, which accelerates the aging process to mimic the taste of vintage tea. It’s generally less expensive than raw but also less complex.

The Many Shapes of Pu-Erh

mushroom = jin cha
cake = cha bing
brick = cha zhuan
bowl = tuo cha

The tea can be pressed into a number of shapes, and the degree of compression also impacts how the tea will age. The tighter a cake is compressed, the slower it ages.

Now the tea is ready for its journey across the world for drinking or aging. A pu-erh’s storage climate influences how it ages: A cake stored for 10 years in Hong Kong will taste different from one in Seattle. Naturally, pu-erh nerds obsess about where and how their tea was stored as much as how it was grown

What’s in a Label?

Pu-erh labels often offer frustratingly little information, and what they do share is often inaccurate. There’s no regulation about origins, age statements, even what brand produced a tea.

You might see a sequence of four numbers on a cake, like 7542. Pu-erh people call these codes recipes, which refer to specific factory blends. The first two digits correspond to the year the blend was introduced (not the year the cake was pressed)—in this case, 1975. The third digit corresponds to the size of the leaves (graded 1–9). The fourth refers to the factory; 2 is the Menghai Tea Factory, and 7542 is their most prestigious recipe.

But a recipe is far from a guarantee. Quality varies by year and season; it even depends on where the tea is aged. So the best way to read a label? Ignore it and taste the tea on its own terms.

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Your mom was right—it’s important to eat a good breakfast. And there may be no better breakfast than mi xian.

In Xishuangbanna Prefecture in southern Yunnan, the savory, spicy noodle soup is the typical way to start the day. In big cities and small towns, locals pack bare-bones noodle shops by midmorning, hunching over knee-high tables to slurp tender rice noodles and a rich pork broth fortified with ground pork.

The Pu-Erh Brokers of Yunnan Province , Max Falkowitz

An order of soup arrives with some assembly required: It’s up to each customer to season their own bowl to their liking with the dozen-plus condiments at a nearby table. At the best shops, these include homemade roasted chile pastes, local mountain herbs, and an array of pickled vegetables.

Because those condiments take the lead, the broth is intentionally simple; resist the urge to complicate it. Instead, simmer the broth in giant batches, then customize individual bowls with these toppings. Here’s how to make the perfect bowl for you.

Mi Xian Mix-Ins

Yunnan-Style Breakfast Noodle Soup (Mi Xian)

Pickled chiles: Pickled Thai bird chiles add tanginess to what would otherwise be straight heat.

Chile oil: Store-bought is good; homemade is better.

Garlic chives: Also called Chinese chives, these lend oniony flavor and crunch.

MSG: Monosodium glutamate is as common as table salt in Yunnan, and a little punches up the complexity of the broth.

Mint: Loads and loads of mint add a welcome astringency and note of freshness.

Pork: Boiling ground pork results in meat that is tender and not at all greasy.

Scallions: Thinly sliced raw scallions add bite and a burst of color.

Sesame seeds: Sprinkle on top for texture and a subtle nutty flavor.

Spicy pork: The best-outfitted noodle shops in Yunnan will also slide some chile-spiced fatty pork into your bowl.

Black vinegar: Sour ingredients are essential to Yunnan cuisine, represented here with mild—and mildly sweet—Chinese black vinegar.

Chile paste: Use one with a short ingredient list like sambal oelek, made with chiles, salt, and vinegar for the cleanest flavor.

Yunnan-Style Breakfast Noodle Soup (Mi Xian)

The post Yes, You Want This Spicy Chinese Noodle Soup for Breakfast appeared first on Saveur.

This popular breakfast in China’s Yunnan Province starts with fresh rice noodles and ground meat in a bare-bones pork broth, then gets customized with as many as a dozen condiments. Yunnan mi xian noodles (round and spaghettilike) or mi gan (flat and wide) are traditional, but any size rice noodle works, and dried varieties are fine in a pinch. Find fresh rice noodles in the refrigerated section at most Asian markets.

Go make mi xian, the savory soup with myriad mix-ins that’s the go-to morning meal in China’s Yunnan Province

What You Will Need

• Stockpot
• Slotted Spoon
• Fine-Mesh Strainer
• Medium Saucepan
• Medium Bowl
• Tongs

The post Yunnan-Style Breakfast Noodle Soup (Mi Xian) appeared first on Saveur.

My father had a lemon tree named Marilyn. She was a gift from my husband, Alex, who gave her to my father 11 years ago, when Alex was still my boyfriend and my father was still well. His sense of smell was his strongest tie to his childhood in Baghdad, where lemons fragranced the streets and were essential components of okra or meat dishes or phyllo walnut rolls, and their oily skin was burned over open flames as incense, the scent both invigorating and comforting.

For the first three seasons Marilyn refused to fruit for my father—though not for any lack of effort on his part. Fastidiously, he sprayed her with rose water and sang to her in Arabic. He gave her prime real estate in my parents’ apartment: in the sun always and next to him at the dinner table, where my father often sat for hours, well after the plates had been cleared, reminiscing about his youth.

But then, things changed. My father got sick with cancer—and then, sicker and sicker and sicker. And because of doctors’ appointments and hospital visits and everything else, we all forgot about the lemon tree except for my husband, who one day found her, moments from dead, and almost ended our relationship. How could you? It was our first big fight.

After that, he made Marilyn our responsibility. He brought her to our apartment, moved her from the fire escape in summer to the bathtub in winter to the windowsill in the shoulder seasons and around and around we go. We played jazz to her in the mornings and lavished her with praise. When we brought her inside well before the first frost, we sponged down her leaves with delicate soap and cloths as if she were a small child. Of course, it wasn’t just about Marilyn. In lucid moments, my father would ask, “How is she doing?” “Great!” we’d say. We hoped that it might bolster him for a little while. In a way, it was the least and the most that we could do.

Two months after my father passed away, Marilyn had her first big bloom. Three whole lemons. We couldn’t believe it. We cheered. We arranged them on the counter like found robin’s eggs, and tended them as if they might hatch. When a friend came over and asked if she could use one to remove a garlic smell from her palms, we nearly kicked her out. But then, of course, we did have to use them, somehow. Produce is produce.

The pressure was on. We’d waited years. And my father. And everything. We couldn’t possibly use a squeeze here, some zest there. We had to be deliberate, careful, reverent. And so, we were. Or so we thought. We planned to preserve them in olive oil. All three. The recipe was at once reminiscent of my father and appreciative of Marilyn’s hard work. And simple. That was key. And so we tried. And we failed. Somehow, we added double the salt and rendered the poor little lemons inedible. They made our mouths pucker and smack. Worse, there was nothing we could do, and we tried everything: more acid, more liquid, rinsing them off. We supplemented with lemons from the bodega down the street, apologizing all the while, but it did no good. Nothing worked. And we were so, so sorry.

Still, not everything was lost. Marilyn must have forgiven us. The next year, she produced five perfect lemons. We were even more careful this time. We used two for a simple roasted chicken (my father’s mother used to make a whole chicken on Fridays, cooking it over open flames outside and then smothering it in a pillow afterward to trap the juices and keep the moisture from escaping, either an Iraqi technique or just a my-grandma technique, I’m not sure) and three for a bourbon, maple, and mint cocktail that was as good as any I’d ever tasted. It’s hard to say if it was the best citrus we’d ever had, or if it just felt like that. But it did feel like that. Taste, after all, is really only one small component of taste.

In the years that followed, Marilyn continued to be good to us. Every winter she produced just a handful of lemons. And every time, the same pressure. Some years, we made tarts—and they were the best tarts. Other years, we made marmalade with vanilla and cardamom—and never loved a spread more. Always, always, only the people we loved the most were beneficiaries of Marilyn’s bounty. Once, we got our friends drunk on lemon margaritas and midway through, when I told them, These are Marilyn’s lemons! everyone stopped mid-sip, unsure whether to drink up or stop drinking altogether.

Three years ago, we bought Marilyn a life partner (a lime tree that we named JFK), and she began to fruit twice and then three times per year. Soon, we were inundated with citrus and had to become more inventive because still, we refused to use her lemons for daily activities, for any sort of supporting role. And so we made lemon bars and cherry-and-lemon salsa and pasta with roasted zest. I asked my father’s sister for recipes that she remembered from Baghdad (she was in her 90s by then)—and we riffed on her cardamom cookies, adding thick curls of preserved lemon on top. We thought about how to do right by Marilyn.

One morning, not long ago, when I made the warm apple cider vinegar, Manuka honey, and lemon concoction that I drink every day, I wondered why it tasted so good. Turns out: Marilyn. Her lemons had gotten mixed up with the others. And it seemed clear then that reverence to Marilyn, and thereby to my father, didn’t need to be so grave, so ceremonious. We didn’t need to make a thing of it. And every day, or whenever the time was right or the mood was right, her fruit could come in, brightening things, lightening things, as only good lemons can do.

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Mehriban Kazimova, the 69-year-old mother of my Baku friend Zulya, is sticking long iron nails of the hardware variety into a pomegranate the size of a baby’s head. She then lowers her spiky work into a pot bubbling with a slurry of ground walnuts and pomegranate molasses. Then she heats a horseshoe over a burner. A horseshoe. Grabbing oven mitts, she screams an incantation in Azeri and drops the red-hot horseshoe—splosh! clunk!—into the pot, leaving the whole fairy-tale brew to simmer just short of forever, until it’s time to strain out the metal.

And that, dear comrades, is how you concoct fisinjan, the Azeri version of a chicken, pomegranate, and walnut stew of Persian origin that hereabouts comes black as the blackest Oaxacan moles and just as layered and rich. “Screaming scares the stew into blackening,” Mehriban explains matter-of-factly. And if it doesn’t do the job, why, oxidation from the horseshoe and nails will.

Welcome to Azerbaijan, a onetime Soviet republic, where you’ll dine on fisinjan and other saucy (though un-nailed) stews called khurush, along with ethereal pilafs bejeweled with dried fruits, nuts, and barberries. Where the table is always laden with lavish sprays of whole opal basil and tarragon. Where you’ll wrap briny village cheeses in flatbreads, dab tart homemade yogurt on fluffy omelettes called kükü, and savor lamb so flavorful it doesn’t need salt. Then, over quince compote (or vodka), you’ll gossip (surely) about another Mehriban—Mehriban Aliyeva, the current first lady of Azerbaijan, who looks like Gina Lollobrigida and loves launching eye-popping new cultural projects.

The tarragon, the saffron-stained rices, the sexy accents of unripe plums and verjus, the gigantic stuffed meatballs bobbing in broth—they are one reason my boyfriend, Barry, and I have returned for the second time in a year to Baku, the windy capital of this Caspian country of close to 10 million people wedged in between Iran and Russia in the easternmost corner of Europe. This most fascinating of places has a Turkic language, heavy Russian cultural baggage from its years attached to czarist and then Soviet empires—and the world’s last great undiscovered cuisine, mostly indebted to sophisticated Persian palace cooking but with enticing inflections of Georgia, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey.

As a former Muscovite born in the USSR, I’ve brought my own family baggage to Baku. During World War II, my grandfather Naum, then a dashing Soviet intelligence chief, was stationed here to help prepare for the Tehran Conference—the first meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, held south across the Caspian Sea. His family, including my 7-year-old mother, joined him here.

Mom still describes Baku as an Orientalist mirage amid the devastation and hunger of wartime. Fishing in the Caspian was Naum’s spy cover. His aides, she recalls, would haul in a sturgeon the size of a sailor, split open its stomach, and scoop out the caviar. To this day, she can’t look at fish eggs without feeling guilt at her family’s luck while the rest of our ravaged country was starving. Equally vividly, my mother remembers Baku’s stench of petroleum.

Oil. It was why Hitler veered calamitously toward Baku, but his Luftwaffe held off bombing. The Führer wanted the city’s vast energy reserves intact. Since ancient days, oil and natural gas have fueled the unexpiring flames of Azerbaijan’s Zoroastrian cults, and now they underwrite post-Soviet Baku’s futuristic high-rises, malls, and Dubai-worthy starchitect showstoppers—while the city’s ornate fin de siècle facades testify to the late 19th-century heyday when Azerbaijan pumped half the world’s crude and local peasants turned overnight into oil barons. On my previous trip here I’d ogled the fantastical architecture, toured a Zoroastrian fire temple, and filled a plastic bottle, amazed, from black oil pools oozing in the arid moonscape outside Baku. And then I met Zulya, cousin of an Azeri friend in New York and such a fiercely formidable cook that the trip turned into my own Ottolenghi-esque mirage of charred eggplants, yogurt swirls, and dried rose blossoms.

So now I’m back, to pry out Zulya’s and her mom’s kitchen secrets. In between dolmas and pickles and syrup-drenched sweets, I’ll try to untangle Baku’s complicated cultural layers.

Mehriban, Zulya’s mother, lives between Burberry and Dolce & Gabbana boutiques in a graceful 19th-century quarter—not the kind of hood, you’d think, where folks ritually scream at their pots. Entering her building, Barry noted the tomato-red Maserati parked across the street outside Z-style, a chic takeout food shop Zulya owns with her husband, Rufat. Mehriban belongs to a caste of old Soviet-educated elites. A former engineer, she’s married to Azerbaijan’s retired traffic-police chief. I prod her now about the horseshoe in the simmering fisinjan stew. She shrugs. “It’s how they do it in Lankaran,” she informs me, “my birth city of amazing cooks down on the Iranian border.” Soviet times, though, were very different, annotates Zulya. “Then Mom mostly cooked borscht and stroganoff. My parents vacationed in Moscow.” But the folkloric foodways held fast in Azeri DNA—and I’m now primed for Mehriban’s plov, or pilaf.

Anyone familiar with Iranian cooking will recognize the basic pilaf technique: Dump aromatic basmati rice in a huge pot of water. Drain when half done. Steam again long and slow under a towel-swaddled lid until each grain is as eloquent as an Omar Khayyam quatrain. Most crucially, line the pot with lavash or a layer of rice mixed with butter and yogurt to create that addictively crunchy bottom crust called kazmag (tahdig to Iranians).

“In Azerbaijan we have perhaps 200 plovs,” proclaims Mehriban. “I know at least 50.” For now, she’s showing off the borani pilaf, steamed with pumpkin cubes drizzled with sweet condensed milk and eaten with smoked kutum, a Caspian whitefish. The funky contrast of sweet pumpkin, buttery rice, and salty shreds of kutum is reason enough to fly to Baku. Ditto the stuffed cabbage Zulya supplies, not the leaden Slavic variety but delicate pouches elegantly filled with meat, dried fruit, chestnuts, and herbs.

As I watch Mehriban reach for enormous jars of preserves—white cherries, rose petals, and feijoa, the intoxicatingly fragrant pineapple guava—to accompany our sage tea, I try to unpack the Azeri obsession with preserves and compotes: Ottoman influence or Soviet-era fixation with putting up everything dictated by shortages? Mehriban’s household is its own cultural mash-up. Turkish soap operas blare on her Azeri-channeled TV, while beyond a flimsy partition, her husband, the ex-traffic-police chief, watches old Soviet films on his own TV.

The next morning Barry and I survey Baku’s architectural mix from our 18th-floor window at the Marriott Absheron, our glossy high-rise hotel near the Bay of Baku. The Government House, a Soviet-Gothic relic of Stalinist gigantomania, hulks right below. In the distance, the Flame Towers, a trio of wavy 2012 glass-and-steel skyscrapers, loom like friendly earthworm monsters from a Miyazaki film. Closer, Beaux-Arts oil-boom mansions line Baku Bulvar, the leafy promenade running along the crescent-shaped Caspian waterside. Just inland, the UNESCO-protected walled medieval Persian Old City has been pristinely restored, a stage set of honeyed-sandstone hammams, caravansaries, and carpet shops. Its highlight is the squat Maiden Tower, a marvel of 12th-century brickwork that looks uncannily art deco.

Then again, not even an architect could tell which layer is which, because recently the whole city center has been sandblasted, refaced, and melodramatically lit to resemble Haussmann’s Paris—by way of Vegas—at the whim of first lady Mehriban, a 24-karat Francophile. And yet Baku isn’t an artificial desert folly like Dubai. The history behind its faux-French facades is real and resonant.

Zulya now swings by in her praline-colored Mercedes to whisk us to Yal Bazar, her favorite market. Tanned, coiffed, and sporting torn skinny jeans over Gucci wedges—a vision of Baku by way of Beverly Hills—Zulya had never planned to become the city’s premiere food diva. She trained as a concert pianist. But as a teenager, she says, she was more seduced by the frilly Soviet tortes baked by Valya, their Russian neighbor, than by sonatas and nocturnes. She begged Valya for recipes, surprised her parents with perfect éclairs, pestered Mehriban to recall old Lankaran dishes. In 2000, on a whim, she opened Z-style in her father’s former garage space. “On opening day I stood mortified,” she recalls. “Customers swiped every last piroshki from my lovingly arranged display!” That night an earthquake shook Baku—but the next day Z-style was even more mobbed. Now with five Z-style shops, a thriving catering business, and a new Caspian-side restaurant about to open, Zulya aspires to be Baku’s Ottolenghi (her hero).

Like everything in Baku, the Yal market is extremely clean, more boutique than souk. Black and white mulberries are arranged in precise checkerboard patterns; pretty baskets overflow with fava beans and thin wild asparagus. In a spice row Zulya sifts bejeweled fingers through artful pyramids of plump, tart zirinc (dried barberries) and sumac in every shade of purple and burgundy.

Eggplant and Walnut Frittata (Badimjan Kükü)

“What decadence!” she gasps in the preserves and pickles shop, where for one jam they stuff each yellow cherry with walnuts. Farther on a lady is selling fig vinegar, abgora (verjus), homemade rose water, and narsharab (pomegranate molasses) under a portrait of Lenin. At each stall Zulya schools me in Azerbaijan’s fruity-tart-herbaceous seasonings. “These flavor levenghi, the walnut paste for stuffing chicken or fish,” she says of the sundried fruit leathers that shine like sheets of edible fabric in flavors such as cornelian cherry. These plums? Puckery green alycha brings zing to herbed stews; amber dried albukhara commingles with chestnuts in a khurush called turshu govurma, or fills giant soup meatballs that Zulya plans to prepare. We stop at the verdant sabzi (greens) counters loaded with some 20 species of herbs.

“Herbs are essential to our Azeri table, as palate teasers by themselves,” says Zulya, “and as elements in our dishes.” Here’s tarragon for chopping into dovga, a refreshing cold yogurt soup, and kever (garlic chives) and cilantro for a green stew called sabzi govurma. “Ours is the world’s greenest cuisine!” Zulya declares. A strange thought, given that Baku sits on a diabolically parched, dusty peninsula.

After the market comes a quickstep food crawl: some gutabi to start, floppy filled flatbreads singed on convex griddles inside the Old City; then a whole Caspian fish, crisp-fried then braised in a luscious sour plum sauce at a waterside fish restaurant on the southern edge of town; then a pastry high at Zulya’s nearby catering kitchen—where smiling white-coated dames brush syrup over 14 layers of pakhlava, stencil elaborate herringbone patterns on pastries called shekerbura, and shape mutaki (dainty sweet rolls) around cardamom-scented walnuts.

Heading back, we stop at the Bibi-Heybat Mosque, perched above a hauntingly ugly-beautiful graveyard of rusting old oil derricks and tankers. The mosque is a venerated 13th-century shrine that was destroyed by Soviet atheists in 1936, then resurrected with showy sleekness in the ’90s with the blessing of Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s monumental ruler, now dead and succeeded by Ilham, his (less monumental) son. Azerbaijan is a paradox: a predominantly Shiite country whose citizens love Russian vodka. Another paradox: Heydar Aliyev, who was an atheist, communist KGB chief before he started blessing mosques.

In Baku, Aliyev père is immortalized not by a somber stone mausoleum but by a swooping, quasi-extraterrestrial fantasia of white curves that, from some angles, resembles whipped cream piped in from the cosmos. I mean the Heydar Aliyev Center, one of Zaha Hadid’s most breathtaking buildings. Here in this white apparition conjured by power and petro-fortune, we behold Heydar Aliyev’s vintage cars, Heydar Aliyev’s many medals, Heydar Aliyev’s manifold gifts from other world leaders. (Putin gave a macho rifle; Romania’s president, an old-ladyish tea set.) There’s some space for international art exhibitions, too, and a pretty swell ethnographic museum.

“At least someone’s willing to spend a country’s billions for global cachet,” Barry quips the next day, as Zulya’s husband, Rufat, threads sweet nuggets of sheep’s tail fat onto skewers. We’re gathered at Mehriban’s dacha, a short drive east of Baku, for a multigenerational family feast to celebrate Azerbaijan’s Independence Day. By late afternoon, Mehriban’s airy bourgeois kitchen is a green, aromatic blur of parsley and chives sautéed for the sabzi govurma, of dill bouquets snipped for the herbaceous pahla plov, a delicate pilaf studded with fava beans. Eggplant whirs in the food processor for the baked kükü omelette textured seductively with walnuts and barberries. Mehriban is stuffing softball-size meat orbs with dried fruit. These will be floated in saffron broth with chickpeas and chestnuts in küfta bozbash, a soup garnished with a zesty flourish of sumac-dusted onions.

Because one pilaf is never enough, Zulya now brings her celebratory rice tour de force out of the oven. It’s called khan (also shah or something else royal) plov, and it’s rice baked inside a golden lavash pastry case bathed with a truly indecent amount of butter. Whoosh! Zulya inverts the royal pilaf onto a platter. Crunch! She slices open its casing. And a fragrant cargo of saffron rice, barberries, candied lemon peel, dried fruit, chicken, and nuts—Zulya’s modernized take on the classic—cascades out of the pastry. Toasts ascend to the sky. I marvel at the bright bowls of trompe l’oeil cherries and grapes decorating the table; they look fresh but are actually pickled. As a Muscovite with homes in New York and Istanbul, I feel as if all my life I’ve belonged at this generous Turco-Russian-Persian table. Rufat refills our glasses with vodka. I think of the complicated Soviet past we all share, of my small mom finding a brief wartime paradise in Baku, of the natural resources and geopolitical forces that have separated our former “fraternity” of Soviet republics into the haves and have-nots…of all the Azeri dishes I still haven’t savored.

Zulya taps my shoulder, as if reading my mind. “Anya…Anyechka,” she cajoles. “Next time you come to Baku, we’ll make you a whole huge Caspian fish stuffed with walnuts!”

Get Whisked Away to Baku

Almond-Cardamom Pakhlava

Eggplant and Walnut Frittata (Badimjan Kükü)

The post The World’s Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine appeared first on Saveur.

Like many rice pilafs from the region, this one is spattered with saffron-infused water to create patches of fragrant yellow rice. The whole pilaf is wrapped in butter-saturated lavash to create a crispy, golden-brown casing that’s cracker thin. Any shape of lavash will work—just trim the pieces as needed into strips, rectangles, or ovals to fit the pot.

The World’s Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine , Anya von Bremzen

The post Chicken Pilaf in a Lavash Crust (Khan Plov) appeared first on Saveur.

Garlic chives, which taste similar to scallions but with a faintly spicy raw garlic flavor, are common in Azeri stews. In this one, the butter-stewed greens feature as prominently as the lamb, if not more so. A bit of verjus (unripened grape juice) or lemon juice brings lift and acidity to the stew’s deep flavors.

The post Sabzi Govurma (Herbed Lamb Stew) appeared first on Saveur.

This hearty Azeri egg dish—which can be served in small pieces as an appetizer or side, or cut into larger wedges as a main—is loaded with ground walnuts, onions, and eggplant, giving it a nutty, meaty consistency and color. Dried barberries, with their slightly sour tang, and fresh, cool pomegranate seeds add delicious, colorful contrast.

The World’s Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine , Anya von Bremzen

The post Eggplant and Walnut Frittata (Badimjan Kükü) appeared first on Saveur.

These raisin-and-nut-filled cookies bear similarities to rugelach, but the dough is finer, crumblier, and shortbreadlike. They are great right out of the oven, but even better the next day. For the most intense, perfumy spice, use freshly ground cardamom.

The World’s Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine , Anya von Bremzen

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