THE PRAISE OF PORRIDGE THE PRAISE OF PORRIDGE 1. A very particular kind of porridge One of the delights of Armenian church celebrations, and of the win- ter menu of the Armenian people generally, is a dish (whose name is known to Persians and Arabs, too) called herisa. Turcophone Armenians call it also keskek: it is a porridge made of meat (generally the flesh of a young animal, especially a lamb, offered in sacrifice — Arm. mata¥ — but in America herisa made with chicken is common, perhaps because it is somewhat less fattening) and wheat boiled very slowly in a large metal cauldron: where the church has a courtyard, this is generally done overnight, over an open fire. Parishioners and clergy eat the porridge the next day, seasoning it with melted butter and sumaq (not the poison sumac, a weed of the New World, but a crimson powder of crushed ber- ries, with a sharp sweet-and-sour taste: Persians and Turks keep it in peppershakers on the table). This is how I ate it one Sunday in the late Spring of 1994 at the Armenian church of Kayseri (Caesarea). The par- ents of my first teacher of Armenian, Mrs. Maritza Tsaggos (née Boyajian), were survivors of the Armenian Genocide from that town; and she used to cook the dish for me in the wintertime. Only one Arme- nian lived in Kayseri in 1994 — and she was a nonagenarian — so to keep the church open the faithful come once a year or so by bus from Sivas (Sebastia), where there are about four score Armenian souls, or even from faraway Istanbul, to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, baptize their children, and hold a Parish Council meeting. So the meal at Kayseri was as nostalgic as Marcel Proust's madeleine, though sadder1. 1 Here is the recipe of Mrs. Varteni Barsamian, wife of the Rev. Arsen Barsamian of Belmont, MA, Pastor of the Armenian Church of St. James in Watertown, MA, tran- scribed by their daughter, Ms. Lucine Barsamian on 4 Feb. 2001: The night before, take one cup gorgod (cracked wheat) covered with water two inches higher. Bring it to a boil and then let it stand overnight, covered. The next day, shred chicken, lamb, or turkey — as much as you want or have. Boil broth, or use the broth of the cooked meat. Use three cups of broth for every one of cracked wheat. Cook for three hours until mushy, adding water if necessary. Then beat the mixture till creamy. Serve with melted butter, sprinkled with cumin and/or paprika. Another recipe is similar, from Treasured Armenian Recipes, collected by the Detroit Women's Chapter of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, New York, 1949, p. 22: “Keshkeg or Herisah. 1 cup whole grain skinless wheat. 2 cups shredded chicken, turkey, lamb, or beef. 1/8 lb. butter. Paprika, salt, pepper. Cumin op- tional. 1 qt. boiling water. 1 pt. chicken broth. Wash, cook wheat in hot water overnight, keep in warm place. Next day add meat, broth and cook slowly till wheat soft and water 138 J.R. RUSSELL Herisa is famed in Armenian oral epic, also. In Sasna crer, the epic of the Wild (or Crazy — cur means, literally, “crooked”) Men of Sasun, the hero of the third of the four branches (ciw¥) of the text, David, is put to work as a shepherd by his relatives, timid folk anxious to forestall the return of the heroic age by preventing the youth, orphaned at birth, from coming to self-realization and acquiring the magic weapons, strength, and mission of his dead father, Lion Mher. It is high summer, the feast of the Assumption. This holiday falls in mid-August, and is also the name-day for Armenian women named Mariam, “Mary”, and a large number of other names derived from aretalogical epithets of the Blessed Virgin, such as Vardarp‘i (lit. “Rose-Sun[light]”, a complex homology of flower and orb in its own right, but most relevantly, as it happens, the name of my other teacher of Armenian language, Ms. Vardarp‘i Darbi- nean, a survivor of the Genocide from Erzurum — so it was her name day, too). The Holy Mother of God of Marut‘a2, called in dialect Marat‘uk, is the only significant Christian divine personage in the Epic of Sasun. People go on pilgrimage to Her shrine then, offer requiem masses and sacrifices, and cook herisa. David sees the pilgrims below White Rock, leaves his herd, and asks for a cauldron of herisa for his fellow shepherds3. The old women tending the pot tell David to wait till Mass is over, but he and his mates are hungry and his flock is unat- tended, so he slips his staff through the handles of the huge cauldron, takes the herisa, and goes away. The episode illustrates the hero's great physical strength4, his outdoorsy wildness, his care for the needs of the absorbed. Add more water if necessary. Then add salt, pepper, beat with wooden spoon till smooth and mushy. Serving: melt butter and paprika together and pour over keshkeg in the platter. Sprinkle with cumin at will.” On page 2, the editors express the desire that “thus, herisah, shishkebab and the pungent zest of the grapeleaf sarma will not perish from the earth.” Echoes of the Gettysburg Address. 2 The name is that of Marutha, the fifth-century Syrian bishop who transferred the bones of so many martyrs, mainly from Iran, to his home town of Maypherqath (Arabic Mayyafariqin, now Silvan) that it acquired the name Martyropolis. His morbid preoccu- pations cannot have impressed greatly the manly warriors of Sasun, whose response to Islamic oppression was armed resistance. But Martyropolis is not far to the south from Sasun, on the well-travelled road to Amida/Diyarbekir/Tigranakert; so its great aura of holiness might have impressed the Christian Armenians of Sasun. See R. MARCUS, The Armenian Life of Marutha of Maipherkat, in Harvard Theological Review, 25 (1932), pp. 47-71. 3 See A. SHALIAN, trans., David of Sassoun, Athens, OH, 1964, pp. 204-207: the trans- lation is from the composite text ed. by H. ORBELI, Sasunc‘i Davit‘, Erevan, 1961, pp. 174-177. 4 The herisa-cauldrons are massive, very heavy even when empty. I saw one in the garden of the Van Museum, obviously looted (as were Cross-stones and other objects) from destroyed churches and from the homes of murdered Armenians. These precious rel- ics of a vanished life and culture are treated with criminal negligence: the cauldron, ex- posed to the elements, had been fouled by a dog. THE PRAISE OF PORRIDGE 139 poor whom he champions, and his scornful disregard for hypocritical convention, especially when the clergy are involved. The moral of the story is: if you are in need and those who have and can spare will not give, then use your strength and take. It is the ethos, in fine, of Robin Hood. A certain disdain for propriety will be seen to accompany all the servings of herisa we are to consider, a spiritual spice, as it were, to the symbolic dish. There is another, lesser-known folk epic from Armenia, The Heroes of Kast. Its subject is the struggle of the Armenians and Kurds of the Satax (Tk. Catak) region in the mountains south of Lake Van, against the tyr- anny of Tamerlane. The rebellion is led by a family from the small vil- lage of Kast (Kacet is another form of the name of the village), heredi- tary heroes: the whole village are famed for a kind of zany, reckless courage like that of the braves of Sasun — the Kastec‘is acquire it by drinking from a special spring. As the uprising gathers momentum, there is described in the text a feast at the end of autumn at the caravansarai and shrine of the Inn of St. George (Put‘ki surb Georg) on the high pass from the Van basin into Moks, where everyone, heroes and plain folk alike, take turns stirring the herisa in the courtyard: there is flute-play- ing and the performance of lewd kak‘aw “partridge” dances5. Boister- ous, satirical, and semi-obscene entertainments and games are typical of Armenian Carnival, too — as will be seen in the analysis of the poem offered in translation here. In the Epic of Sasun, as we have seen, David's seizure of the herisa is a metaphor for a sort of revolutionary fairness, of everybody getting his rightful share of the earth's bounty — the American expression would be, one's slice of the pie. This image persists, momentously, in Arme- nian history: when the Congress of Berlin in 1878 failed to take mean- ingful steps to ensure security for the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire from the depredations of the Turkish authorities and Kurdish tribesmen 5 See J.R. RUSSELL, tr. & comm., K. SITAL, An Armenian Epic: The Heroes of Kasht (Kasti k‘ajer) (Anatolian and Caucasian Series), Ann Arbor, MI, 2000, pp. 123-137 (hereafter: RUSSELL, An Armenian Epic). Sital, an American-Armenian Communist and native of Kast, strung together the epic from various recitations he had heard in his youth, and presented his narrative in standard literary Eastern Armenian spiced with dialect terms and some Kurdish. More problematic than this to the researcher is Sital's deliberate communization of the story: the Kastec‘is are the proletariat, Tamerlane is a personifica- tion of capitalism and fascism rolled into one, there are bourgeois enemies of the people, etc. It is not possible to tell whether the feast at which herisa is eaten formed an integral part of the narrative or was introduced as a diversion, though one may be certain that the description itself is faithful to such observances as they actually were.