Memories and photos from author Dawn Essegian Lajeunesse
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — “I grew up in the 1950s. I had an Armenian last name, and we attended the Armenian church a block away from our home in Troy, NY. But we were different from our Boston cousins. Our father was a first generation Armenian, but he fell in love with and married a ‘country girl’ from a sleepy village, Valley Falls, about a half hour’s drive from Troy. One look at her and you knew she wasn’t Armenian. She described herself at ‘Heinz 57’, meaning she had a little of a lot of nationalities in her blood, none of which were Armenian.”
“Our Boston cousins, however, were 100% Armenian, with our father’s sister, Aunt Hasmik, (Aunt Has, for short). Their lives revolved around their Armenian heritage and culture. Whenever we visited, Aunt Has turned out entire menus of what became our very favorite Armenian foods. She taught our mom how to make Armenian pilaf and sarma (stuffed cabbage), but many of the foods we loved were only available when we visited the Boston cousins. My first awareness of Armenian cheoreg at their house was the fragrance of these aromatic yeast rolls. Aunt Has shaped her dough into braids and round balls and stacked swirls. As they came out of the oven, they looked like yeast rolls, on which she sprinkled sesame seeds or poppy seeds. But it was their unusual aroma that set them apart from ordinary yeast rolls.”
“Fast forward through my school years and forty years of professional jobs into the 21st century,” says Dawn. “Retirement allowed me more time to revisit my love and appreciation of Armenian food and recipes, with my beloved cheoreg was on top of the list. I volunteered at a local Armenian church to assist in the food preparation for their annual church picnic. Although their cheoreg taste didn’t match my memory, they looked the same. I asked about the recipe, and it was shared with me readily. I waded through my Armenian cookbooks to identify the reason the taste was different from what I remembered.”
“One of the cookbooks was a copy that Aunt Has sent to her daughters and her nieces. There, in the recipe in The Art of Armenian Cooking (1971) by Rose Baboian, was the missing ingredient: mahlab. The church recipe was similar but excluded the mahlab. Not sure why. The spice can be hard to find locally, but there are multiple spice sources online that include mahlab. And so, I crossed my fingers and added mahlab to my next batch and…THAT DID IT! I felt like a long-deceased aunt has been hovering over my shoulder and applauding all this time. Our freezer is never without several bags of this cheoreg now. Our family and guests love them and their incredible taste brings back fond memories of past family get-togethers and holiday celebrations. This recipe is one of multiple varieties of gargantak (with added terms cheoreg–correct spelling–and kahke as interchangeable names in the gargantak pages). My recipe is the closest to the recipe that Rose Baboian titles as ‘butter gargantak,’ but not an exact duplicate.”
Rose Baboian (1903-1969) was an Armenian-American cookbook author. She was born in Aintab (present day Gaziantep in Turkey). She was about 17 years old when she left Aintab and for around two years lived in Aleppo before moving to Massachusetts. Mark Zanger, a Boston-based food reporter, wrote that Baboian’s book “stands out as a model of American ethnic food because she recorded so many traditions.” Her book made Turkish Armenian recipes accessible for younger generations of Armenians who spoke only English. She is considered to have anticipated Armenian American fusion cooking with recipes like “chocolate yogurt.”
