Liana Aghajanian
At the turn of the 20th century, long
before “Kardashian” entered the vernacular, Americans knew one thing
about Armenians: They were very hungry.
Mothers in kitchens across America
warned their children to clean their plates and remember “the starving
Armenians”—and soon the phrase began to make appearances in newspapers
and magazines.
As refrigerators came into popular
use in the 1920s and ’30s, General Electric ran an inelegant ad touting
the storage benefits and time-saving benefits of the appliance. “Work
your menus up a week in advance, then proceed to make the items that
will keep and store them in your electric refrigerator until it is time
for them to appear in the limelight, for confiscation by your ‘hungry
Armenians.’”
The term also appeared in an 1934
op-ed in a Pennsylvania paper about the changing diets of children. “At
four o’clock, we tore home like starving Armenians,” the writer laments
of her own childhood in comparison to the children of the 1930s. “Into
the kitchen pantry we raced.”
This bizarrely casual idiom began
about 100 years before the current global refugee crisis, when America
made its first collective display of international humanitarian aid,
spearheaded by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief
(now known as the Near East Foundation).
“You won’t let me starve, will you?”
read a 1918 poster soliciting donations for refugee relief. It featured a
cherubic young girl with dark hair and piercing brown eyes. “I am
little Shushan, from Armenia. My home has been destroyed. Father was
taken away. Mother has starved because she gave me all the food.”
The campaign, which has been all but
forgotten today, was in response to the Armenian and Assyrian genocides
of 1915, where over 1.5 million people were slaughtered in the Ottoman
Empire and hundreds of thousands of children were left orphaned. Those
who survived were exiled and dispersed across the world. The Near East
Foundation’s fund-raising efforts saved the lives of a million refugees,
sending food and other forms of aid to the “starving Armenians.”
This is how America largely came to
know a population that had been indigenous to the area now known as
eastern Turkey for thousands of years. When the campaign ended, the
catchphrase stuck. It morphed from a call for international relief into a
euphemism for hunger.
Even in the 1980s, it was a phrase
that Christine Jerian Kharmandalian, a first-generation
Armenian-American who comes from a family of genocide survivors,
frequently heard growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. Her visits to a
neighbor’s house always began with her friend’s dad turning to his wife
and saying, “The starving Armenians are here! Make them a bologna
sandwich.”
“I remember going home to ask my mom,
‘What does this mean?’” she says. For Kharmandalian, it was a confusing
characterization. Far from buying processed slices of meat, and far
from starving, her mother, both a home cook and a caterer, was preparing
time-consuming delicacies from scratch, like basterma, a heavily spiced
and air-cured beef Armenians were famed for in the “old country.”
“We made everything at home,” she
says. “My mom was selling homemade basterma for $15 a pound, and because
Chicago was so cold, we could hang it outside, but we had to hang it
high enough so the raccoons wouldn’t get to it because sometimes there
would be bite marks in the beef.”
What Americans didn’t know was that
despite the moniker, Armenian families like Kharmandalian’s had a rich
food tradition that had been cultivated for eons and shared amongst
various people of the area now known as the Middle East. And along with
the thousands of survivors who came to the U.S. as some of the country’s
first refugees, they brought these traditions and foodways with them.
In a new and unfamiliar country, they
continued making cracked wheat and lamb meatballs called kufte with
various spices, grew grape leaves in their gardens with which to make
dolma, strained Armenian madzoon, or yogurt, in their homes, and rolled
out fresh phyllo dough for dozens of syrup-laden pastries.
Having lost property, cultural
heritage, and identity in addition to the millions who were killed, food
became the most transportable cultural marker that could be made
tangible with the right ingredients, as Armenians were forced to migrate
across the world.
“There’s nothing that I can carry
from anywhere to give me those memories,” recalls Kharmandalian. “All of
those other things related to your family memories you have to leave
behind, but the recipes and flavors you could take with you.”
These culinary traditions, however,
did not stay contained within their homes. Instead, they spread across
America, and like so many other traditions that immigrant communities
have brought to the U.S., they changed the country’s landscape of food.
“Considering all the talk after the
war about the ‘starving Armenians’ it seems sort of incongruous now to
learn that the Armenians are considered among the no. 1 gourmets of New
York’s foreign colonies,” wrote Mark Barron in the Montana Butte Standard in 1934. A 1939 column touted them as “gastronomic Armenians” and asked “whoever nicknamed them the starving Armenians?”
“Like any other persecuted minority
that immigrated to this country, we brought with us our food and
traditions—but as Armenians, regardless of wealth or social standing,
food, along with our hospitality, is the introduction to our culture,”
says Seta Dakessian, an Armenian-American chef and owner of Seta’s Cafe
in Belmont, Massachusetts. “It was the safest way for people to accept
us, and because of this, we were able to bring our rich traditions and
culture to the U.S., slowly educating people and diminishing the thought
‘starving Armenians.’”
Through the likes of genocide
survivor George Mardikian’s famous Omar Khayyam’s restaurant in San
Francisco, who pioneered the introduction of Middle Eastern food like
shish kebab to the public as early as the 1930s, American diners got a
taste of “exotic” and “foreign” Near East delicacies, like seasoned
lentil soup, baked eggplant, lavash, paklava, and rose-petal jam.
In California’s San Joaquin Valley,
Armenians were essential in the cultivation of the agricultural
industry, growing grapes, inventing new varieties of melon, and creating
the foundations of the fig industry in America—a fruit that had been
previously fed just to pigs. On the other side of the country, in
Andover, Massachusetts, Armenian immigrants Rose and Sarkis Colombossian
founded Colombo Yogurt in 1929. Based on traditional Armenian cooking
methods, it was the first commercially produced yogurt in the U.S. It
was one of several Armenian-inspired foods that were produced in the
U.S.: The famous “San Francisco” treat, Rice-A-Roni, was based on an
Armenian pilaf recipe given to the wife of one of the founders of the
Golden Grain Macaroni Company by Armenian genocide survivor Pailadzo
Captanian.
Soon, the recipes that had been orally passed down for generations were published in cookbooks, one of the most popular being Treasured Armenian Recipes,
published in 1949 by the Detroit Women’s Chapter of the Armenian
General Benevolent Union, a prominent Armenian nonprofit organization.
Because Detroit was a major landing
place for survivors, it made sense for the most widely distributed
cookbook to emerge out of the city, which attracted immigrants,
refugees, and black migrants from the South thanks to abundant work in
factories fueled by Henry Ford’s $5 workday. Settling largely on the
city’s southwest side, Armenians opened grocery stores and coffee houses
where they would serve the thick, pungent coffee drunk across the
Middle East.
“Our preoccupation with food is
probably directly connected to our past, when people starved to death,”
says Yerchanig Joy Callan, a former Armenian-American restaurateur and
culinary educator who was born and raised in Detroit. “You don’t
consciously think about it, but you do carry your past. For us, as a
small group, we care about our past a lot.” Though she’s been a member
of the Women’s Guild of St. John’s Armenian Church in Southfield,
Michigan, since 1999, for the last 5 years, Callan has been an essential
organizer for the four month-long bake sales done by the guild in
preparation for a much anticipated and popular annual festival held
there.
Like Callan, Seta Dakessian, a
descendent of genocide survivors who were adept in working with dough
(her grandfather came from one of two families who owned a bakery in the
Armenian quarter of Jerusalem), is attempting to preserve these
culinary traditions. At Seta’s Cafe, she offers simple but hearty
fare—the same foods she grew up with: stuffed grape leaves called
yalanchi dolma, lentil and bulgur pilaf, and open-faced meat pies made
with ground beef and spices called lahmejun.
A special item that makes a seasonal
appearance is choreg, a sweet bread often made during Easter whose key
ingredient is an aromatic spice called mahlab, the ground-up pit of sour
cherries. More than any other food item, choreg is the most enduring
icon of Armenian culinary cuisine—and by extension identity—in America.
“It’s a common denominator,” says Dakessian. For many, the intoxicating
smell of the mahlab brings recollections of parents and grandparents
mixing. It survives as both a connection to past hunger and as a living,
palpable sign that the future is full.
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