ARMENIA: St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church

We’re thrilled this year to have discovered and been able to take advantage of all the festivals in this area. We’ve already been to a Russian bazaar this fall and had a great time there. When we saw that St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church in Friendship Heights was having their fall food festival, we knew we had to go. We didn’t know much about Armenian food, but we were excited by the variety and options at the festival, all at an affordable price.

Armenian food has a lot of elements that might already be familiar to many from other Ottoman cuisines. Items featured at the festival included lamb and chicken kebab (served in platters off the skewer at the festival, these kebabs were prepared in bite-sized chunks), hummus, cheese pies, dolmas, and baklava.

Advantour describes one key element of Armenian food: the importance of meat and diary:

Armenian Cuisine is as ancient as its history, as the land it is standing on. Armenian

culinary traditions are over 2000 years old. The abundance of meat on Armenian tables is the result of the most ancient development of cattle breeding in Armenian uplands which led to such a variety of livestock and poultry. Cattle breeding was also the source of various dairy products – basically brine-ripened cheeses as well as sour-milk products which serve as the basis for traditional Armenian dishes and beverages.

We ordered stuffed peppers (stuffed with ground beef, rice, vegetables, herbs, and spices), tepsi boreg (baked pastry made of phyllo dough filled with feta cheese and shredded mozzarella), khadayif (dessert made with shredded phyllo, sweet cheese, and simple syrup), and kurabiya (four-based cookie shaped like a diamond or the letter “S”). They also offered eech (bulgur salad), kebab, hummus, yalanchi (stuffed grape leaves), Armenian style green beans, and more.

Stuffing is apparently a feature of Armenian food, according to Armenian Cuisine on Wikipedia, which notes:

In addition to grape leaves, Armenians also stuff cabbage leaves, Swiss chard leaves, eggplants, zucchini or squash, tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, various meats (particularly organ meats), whole fish, apples, quince, and even cantaloupe.

We really enjoyed the tepsi boreg, which also seems to be common in Turkey since we found a lot of Turkish sites referring to it. This is a cheese pie filled with feta, but the pastry is also soft and almost lasagna-like in the middle. It was cut as a rectangle. Our other cheese pie, the triangle boreg, was filled with muenster and had a crispy phyllo crust. We probably have never met a cheese pie we don’t like.

The food festival had an impressive spread of desserts. Since one of us has a prohibitive nut allergy, we ended up only getting those desserts that did not contain nuts. This included choreg, which is brioche-like bread that was filled with cheese. It wasn’t sweet, but was more savory. This was also available in a twisted variety and this bread is common in the Ottoman Empire countries and is often served at Easter. We sampled a cookie called kurabiya, a sweet and simple cookie which reminded us a lot of Greek kourambiethes and other Middle Eastern cookies we’ve come across. Finally, we also tried khadayif (or kanafeh), which we’ve also seen in the Middle East (especially during the end of fasting at Ramadan). This one had cheese in it and was soaked in syrup and topped with vermicelli noodles. We would have liked to try some of the other desserts, which looked very interesting and unique, but were prohibited by their nut content.

The festival ends on Saturday, Oct. 22, so we recommend going to St. Mary’s, if possible, because this might be the only place to sample Armenian food in the area.

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