Nettles Bread and the Fall of the USSR

Text and Images by Misha Nishnianidze

Nettles bread.

An old friend suddenly called on us on a windy and drizzly evening of January. Mzia, my wife, had almost finished cooking our dinner—red bean lobio, a Georgian bean dish, seasoned with tkemali sour wild plum sauce—and was adding the last touch, chopped cilantro, onions and a clove of garlic, before turning off the gas burner. The appetizing smell of the fresh ingredients mixed up with the red bean steam was tickling in my nose tearing me away from my laptop.  

The ringing doorbell left us in dismay that we might have to delay our dinner. Trying to guess who it might be, I opened the door and few seconds passed before I could utter welcoming words, at the same time feeling spontaneous joy following the appearance of our friend. We hadn’t seen him for a long while. He had not been to this place of ours since we moved back into it from the suburbs, vacating that apartment for our son and his wife. Now, we were back in this small apartment in an old three-storied brick house downtown where, after the hard times of the 1990s, my parents, me, my wife and our little son, Giorgi, had found refuge.

Mzia cheered and hugged him, and without much ado we served the dinner. Georgian cuisine allows for flexibility; dishes are served to be shared and not as individual portions. Each tablemate is free to create a unique composition out of available components and combinations can vary with every bite.

This time, we had the pot of lobio, a crescent shaped Georgian bread, shoti, with two brown horns not sliced but broken into large pieces, a small plateful of white, flat, holey cheese slices, bright purple pickled beets, cabbage and greens—parsley, garden-cress, leeks—along with frosty amber wine from our balcony locker.

Our friend hadn’t come for any particular purpose. He had just followed a nostalgic urge while passing by our house on his way home. He came in the same haphazard fashion which most of us had practiced in old days, before there were cell phones.

Around the table, we started with a quick exchange of news while all of us concentrated on the food. After the hunger was broken and the wine had its effect, our words became more fluent, poetic and even philosophical. We talked about our dear ones, family and friends, and we remembered those who have passed away by spilling a little wine on a piece of bread, a Georgian tradition.

The loosely furnished living room where we were sitting was recently repainted in a peculiar fashion designed by our architect son, Giorgi. A deep velvet blue wall juxtaposed against a triptych of whitewashed walls glowing with a slight warm ivory touch. The home improvement had erased the old looks, leaving just few signs of bygone days: a couple of dull burns on a honey-gold oak wood parquet by the balcony door, where the woodstove had been set up in 1990s, along with another set of burned spots by the kitchen door, from my mother’s childhood woodstove during World War II.

Our friend was sitting facing the blue wall. Its velvet shade was broken into a gentle meshwork by the crystal chandelier hanging over his head which gave his cragged face a mysterious hint. His deep-set, thoughtful eyes, the slightly curved thin nose, the thin moustache over thin pale lips and his small protruding chin all bore the same expression as they had many years ago. An introvert by nature he cherished the rare bright moments with the people who were dear to him.

But it wasn’t just people, our old place allured him too. In his low stumbling voice he spoke to us about familiar things.

 “This house has seen a lot, I trust at some point scientists will find a way to make the inanimate objects talk to us,” he said.

To the accompaniment of the squeaking floor and echo from the high ceiling, the memories of foods of the past started floating up from the depths of our minds, accentuated by the smell of lobio, the colorful greens and pickles, and the amber orange wine, our luxury meal from some 30 years ago.

Our culinary practices in the time of shortages used to be our most vivid experience.

The Hard Times Cooking

Back in mid-1980s, nobody in USSR and probably not worldwide either could have anticipated that the dizzying emancipation of the Perestroika, a reformatory process orchestrated by Gorbachev, the then-Communist Party boss, would lead to the collapse of the Communist Union and eventual exodus of its member republics.

“Remember, how dreamy we felt?” said Mzia leaning forward. “We had been dating for a few months when the whole turmoil started. For me it was both romance and boundlessness.”

Most of us, the young people in the USSR, were taking it for granted and savoring the unprecedented freedom: reading and watching formerly restricted books and movies we heard about only by hearsay; hanging out and philosophizing with people we hardly knew, or even total strangers.

The individual liberties eventually grew into the liberation movements in the soviet republics. Georgia had its first independent elections and the first elected President in the country’s history. “But after a while we ousted and eventually killed him” Our Friend said. He had been always skeptical about the short-tempered Georgians.

Then, we had to live through a slow disruption of infrastructure and trade followed by an abrupt collapse. It was harder to buy bread.

“Giorgi was just one year old and I had to take him with me to stand in line for bread,” Mzia said.  “At first it was fun, but later it was depressing; people became assaultive, apparently some of them were thinking I was just using my baby to skip the line. I felt so humiliated.” Mzia said.

Breadlines were growing longer and eventually standing in line for almost 12 hours became routine. After a while, that wait wasn’t necessarily rewarding. Electric power interruptions affected most of the bakeries, and they started to offer bread dough, which people could bake at their homes.

The real bad time came in 1993. The blackouts began in November when the natural gas supply from Russia was cut because of Georgia’s insolvency to pay its bills. The breadlines’ crowds swelled and looked not like a regular line anymore, but a disorderly ravaging horde.

I learned about it two weeks prior before it actually happened. My student’s mother told me. At that time, we still were thinking that the bad things were temporary. I remember someone said that it was against UN policy to deprive innocent people of heating in winter time and we naively believed it and kept retelling this rumor to everyone until they eventually cut off the gas supply exactly in two weeks.

Our country didn’t even have its own currency. In a relatively short time we, proud Georgians found ourselves living hunger-stricken in cold and darkness.

I had been working at a small newspaper published by a state-owned mining company, but like many other people, I lost my job. For a couple of months, I taught English to a group of wool factory workers until they could no longer afford to pay me. Mzia, who previously gave English lessons at home, also lost her students. Anyway, we were better off staying home because walking after dark became dangerous, with the streets at the mercy of all sorts of criminals and paramilitary gunmen.

“I was scared to death, when you were late one evening. And then you finally showed up all drunk I was so glad that I even didn’t scold you” Mzia said.

Mzia’s parents lived in the countryside in Kakheti, the easternmost part of Georgia, famous for its wine. They started sending us some wine and food as they could spare it: beans, pork or pork fat, sunflower seed oil and few eggs. We saved whatever scarce amounts of sugar and milk powder that we could afford buying for our 1-year-old son while trying to survive on the miserable food ration sporadically distributed by the government.

Our wasted bodies lacked energy, greedily seeking anything fatty or sweet. While we used to throw out our leftovers, now we had none.

Stray dogs unable to find trashed food in garbage started hunting for cats.

“Once we saw two hungry dogs in the street wildly chasing a cat. The cat ran for its life and finally made it to the top of a tree. It was so terrifying. People were telling terrible stories about dogs having killed an old woman who went to empty her garbage bin in the evening dark.” Mzia said.

With the autumnal cold, heating became an additional issue for the starving people. It wasn’t unusual to see poorly clothed ghostly individuals walking by with blank eyes.

I had to set up a woodstove by the balcony door, burning the dry branches I collected from the nearby river grove. It wasn’t a real woodstove but rather a tin box with a smokestack. My parents moved into our small apartment because, along with other hardships like malnutrition and no heat, they didn’t even have running water on the 15th floor where they lived.

My father, Giorgi Nishnianidze, was a translator of English poetry. His translations of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wilde, Byron, Emily Dickinson and Walt Wittman had made him famous but not wealthy. We didn’t have valuable items to sell like some people did in those hard times. It was easier to survive keeping together.

Eventually I found a small English-teaching job, just one student who paid me $12 a month. In the hierarchy of different currencies circulating in Georgia at that time, the U.S. dollar was on the highest pedestal, much above Russian ruble, which in turn was much above the miserable Georgian coupon, an interim pseudo-currency. One had to be ingenious to stretch $12 dollars for a month.

“Why don’t we make vinaigrette?!” My mother suggested.  By vinaigrette she meant the Russian variety of a French salad, her favorite in the past:

Dice boiled potatoes, carrots, beetroots, add boiled red beans, mix with pickled green tomatoes, or cucumbers, or cabbage, add chopped green onion sprigs, dill and cilantro. Sprinkle with finely minced parsley; add sunflower oil.

Kakhetian oil, thick, with roasted flavor, accentuated sour-sweet pickled vegetables, as well as onions and herbs that made the salad taste delicious, though its sourness made our starved stomachs feel hunger even more, since we didn’t have enough bread to chase.

We used to sit together in one room in the long lightless winter evenings. Conversing was the only way to entertain. My father and I set up an improvised puppet theater for Giorgi, which was fun for all of us. Giorgi’s two teddy bears were playing, one a schoolteacher and the other a naughty student, the bigger and the smaller bear respectively. Giorgi himself was a diligent student in this play.

Our neighbors started coming at evening one-by-one to flock around our woodstove. As they warmed, people cheered up and became talkative, discussing mostly different foods from the past.

Potato chaqapuli.

“I don’t remember whose idea it was to prepare potato chaqapuli,” Mzia said, remembering a thick stew normally cooked with lamb meat, herbs and tkemali. “It might have been a joint invention.”

1 kilo of peeled potatoes cut into cubes and boiled to softness but not mashed. The juice thickens into starchy stew with chunks of potato cubes. Add some sunflower oil to the stew. Then add chopped green onions and other greens: cilantro, tarragon; a handful of tkemali berries. The hot steam from the pot bears flavors of greens, berries, onion and potato. It’s quite nutritious. Sometimes to make it more nourishing we boiled potatoes together with thinly sliced beef tallow.

“Hot meals were what we most needed to return us to humanity during that cold winter,” she continued.

Eventually, spring came, bringing warmth, light and some hope for the future. In early June, the three of us—Mzia, Giorgi and I—went to the village where her parents lived. Life wasn’t as hard there as in the city. My wife’s father, Valiko, had a plot of land adjacent to the house where he grew some vegetables: onions, garlic, beans, pumpkin, tomatoes and potatoes. They also kept some chickens laying eggs. On the other hand, there was no running water, no natural gas supply and no electric power most of the time. All of that infrastructure had been abandoned and eventually looted for scrap metal. We had to carry drinking water from a spring a quarter of a mile away.   

Bread remained the biggest issue. The bakeries were still working, but bread was getting more expensive and harder to obtain. The villagers started to bake their own bread in tones, a kind of a Georgian tandoori that’s a clay cylinder of approximately 1 meter in diameter, half buried in the earth. My wife’s family also had one in the yard unused for a long time because nobody in the family could bake.

“Baking bread for the family had customarily been a women’s job, apparently, because women are so much better at baking.” Mzia told our friend about Kakhetian baking rites.

Even the baking vocabulary was linked to women. For instance, a variety of Geogian bread was called dedas puri, which means mother’s bread. Bakers maintained special rites and habits, such as making a cross on the dough with a knife before cutting it to pieces. Tone was considered a sacred place by the family. They believed that deceased souls gather by tone during baking. To appease the dead, the living burned a beeswax candle and dipped large pieces of hot bread into a bowl with chopped onions and salted white wine vinegar and water. Sometimes they entertained themselves with eggplants baked in the tone on dying embers, sprinkled with freshly squeezed pomegranate juice and crushed garlic.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t have the baking skills because I spent most of my adult life in the city.” Mzia added, “My mother, Lola, knew how to do it but she was disabled by some unknown disease constraining her movements.”

“It was Valiko who eventually bailed us out.” I said. “He was industrious and cheerful by his nature and made up his mind to learn. And he made it without any rituals, so we started to have our own bread, warm and tasty, which brought us not only physical satiety, but also moral satisfaction.”

In my imagination, I pictured freshly baked bread. I remembered that my landlady in the village where I worked in my youth as a schoolteacher used to help me to hot shoti bread with cheese.

Shoti baking in a tone.

Shoti is a variety of the Georgian bread, long and curved like half-moon, and its inner edge is made thinner and crispier. According to some theories these breads were “holy offerings” to the pre-Christian God of Moon, which explains their shape. It is traditionally leavened with sourdough. Sourdough is left over after each baking and kept in a small clay pot in a cool place. It’s the best leavening, but since we didn’t have it, we had to use Turkish made dry yeast instead.

Dissolve a package of yeast approx. ¼ ounce in a mug of warm water and add a pinch of sugar and wait for about 10 minutes until it gets foamy, then mix the solution with flour in a big wooden dough trough. Continue mixing, adding warm salty water and flour. The salty water is prepared ahead by leaving big rocks of salt to soak in warm water; don’t be afraid to oversalt the water. It gets just enough. The mixture is sticky in the beginning; add more flour to start kneading until the dough gets elastic then cover it with a blanket and leave to rest in a warm place for several hours. The dough raises and grows in volume and then it is ready for baking. The ‘tone’ is preheated usually half an hour before. Small branches, grape prunings burn fast and yield much heat. The tone walls slowly change their colors from the heat and eventually turn lighter until looking whitish hot. Excessive heat is tempered by sweeping walls with a rag (old sack-cloth) soaked in salty water. The ‘tone’ is ready. The dough cut in regular pieces and shaped like half-moon is bedewed with salt water and slapped to stick to the hot walls. 25-30 breads at a time bake for half an hour. One heating is enough for two bakings.

We enjoyed freshly baked hot bread with crispy horns and edges. It was appetizing by itself. Though hot shoti with guda, Georgian salty sheep cheese, was incomparably tastier. Shotis stayed soft for few days, inevitably getting stale later.

We talked with our friend about all of our tricks to resuscitate stale shoti: placing it on top of the boiling kettle or sprinkling it with warm water, which made it palatable but mushy, no longer like bread.

I preferred the dishes cooked from the stale bread. In particular the one with nettles.” I explained to our Friend.

Nettles bread recipe:

Gather a bunch of green sprigs of nettles. Pluck foliage off, leaving top few younger leaves. Succulent stems are dipped into the hot water and boiled for 15 minutes. Put bright green stems into a strainer to drip-dry. Braise chopped onions in sunflower oil to crispy texture and golden-brown color, and then add the nettles stems to braise for a few more minutes. Boil pieces of stale bread in the nettles broth until soft but not mashy. Take out the bread on a platter and garnish with nettles and onion. Be cautious with salt because nettles contain many minerals and naturally taste a little salty.

Nettles bread was a very satisfying dish even for our wasted bodies. Especially with good Kakhetian amber wine.

Georgian wine is made in qvevris, egg-shaped earthenware vessels buried in the earth and stored in maranis, houses of wine. This tradition of qvevri wine was somewhat forgotten though never discontinued and is experiencing its renaissance now and gaining popularity outside Georgia.

Georgians love to say that wine saved them during numerous wars. It was the source of their endurance; their adversaries knew that and cut down vineyards whenever they could. But grapevines were robust like their masters. Next year the grapes grew new shoots from the vine stumps.

***

Our conversation came to a natural pause, Mzia was sitting with her elbows on the table staring at the red-green-and-white still-life of the leftovers of our dinner. I was chasing my wine with small nips of salty cheese. Our Friend maintained his upright rigid stance, he was not a big eater and just loved retrospections.

All three of us were contemplating what we had just discussed, the things that used to be so meaningful back in the day. However entertaining the conversation, the existential impossibility of re-experiencing the past left a bittersweet aftertaste. We still used to cook nettles bread in spring when nettles were fresh, but it tasted different now; maybe lacking its essential ingredient—the famine that brought its unique sensation to the palate. For me, the food no longer tasted the same. Inexplicably, that evening, only the sharp smell and tart taste of the wine were bonding me to those days.

It was already over midnight and our friend got ready to leave. I called him a cab. We exchanged our farewell hugs. He went downstairs and stepped out into our shadowy yard looking behind to wave his hand to us.

“Thank you for making our evening. It was a day of sweet memories for all of us,” I told him.

“It’s just a beginning. Remember, one day these silent objects will talk to us,” he said before disappearing in the dark of the night.