In My Father's Kitchen: Part 1

Making sarma with my dad + his recipe

“Guess what I’m doing,” my dad says to me. I’m driving my daughter home from daycare and we’re making our customary phone call to Medzbaba (grandpa, in Armenian), who listens with rapt attention as Sasha screams the name of whatever snack she’s eating that day and says, “Hi, Medzbaba!” over and over again in the background while my dad and I chat. 

“What?” I ask, knowing the possibilities are not so endless. The answer is usually eating something, or cooking something, or sometimes, when it’s Friday and Vons has a special on fried chicken, eating said fried chicken in his car before heading home. If not those three, then watching tennis.

“I’m picking grape leaves,” he says with delight. “For us to make sarma.” I sigh. Last week, when I saw that my father’s unkempt backyard grapevine – which stands about 12 feet tall thanks to the tree it’s wound its way around – was overflowing with leaves, I suggested we make sarma, or stuffed grape leaves, together. He agreed excitedly, and then I asked him to please not pick any grape leaves or start making the filling before I arrived. I told him that I wanted to make it together from start to finish. I want to write down the recipe. But before the words even left my mouth, I knew the leaves would be picked when I arrived. 

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My dad’s backyard. Pomegranate tree on the left, grapevine almost as tall as a palm tree on the right.

When I was growing up, my dad was not the cook in the family. The kitchen was my mother’s domain. 

That’s not to say he never cooked. Like many fathers, he had his signature dishes that were treated like treats, and we would be overjoyed to hear that dad was grilling kebabs for dinner, or making a big omelet for breakfast on Sunday, or whipping up hummus and tabbouleh.

Over the years, as he became more familiar with American food, he began to add new dishes to his repertoire – things like a very juicy take on sloppy joe (which boasts no resemblance to Hungry Man and was never served on a bun), a very dry take on spaghetti (just pasta, ground beef, and jarred sauce, baked till crispy), and lasagna (Stouffer’s, cooked a little longer than the packaging suggests to achieve a nice char). 

But the Armenian foods that make up the bulk of my formative culinary memory – and are the ones that have had the biggest influence on my cooking today – were always made by the women in my life: my mother, who learned these foreign dishes out of love, and the women she learned them from, my aunts and grandmother. 

About a decade ago, when my parents got divorced, my dad made a point of also learning to make these dishes. Perhaps it was because, newly single at nearly 80, he was, all of a sudden, in charge of dinner. Or maybe he wanted to be able to cook the foods that tasted like a hug when he needed that hug. When my aunt became sick, I think he had a fear of her recipes – and the stories that accompanied them – dying along with her. Whatever the reason, he learned to cook dolma, sini kufteh, eech, and sarma, among other dishes.

And for different reasons – because I like to bring my daughter to see her grandfather once a week, because I needed to get out of the house, or, perhaps, because I also have a fear of recipes and the stories that go along with them disappearing, I find myself in my father’s kitchen at 10:30 in the morning. The leaves are picked. We’re ready to make sarma. 

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My father’s kitchen is my childhood kitchen. Like many others, it’s the heart of the home – and it has the baggage to prove it. Stacks of empty yogurt containers waiting to be turned into vessels for leftover food have taken up permanent residence on the countertops. Grocery bags stuffed with more grocery bags are stuffed under the kitchen table, and on top of it, you’ll find Costco-sized containers of chips and cookies and croissants. His spices occupy a prime spot next to a toaster oven that’s probably never been used and an array of half-drunk wine bottles boasting vintages that would make your eyebrows furrow – most perplexing, considering the only resident here does not drink. 

It’s not that there isn’t room to put all of this stuff away. It’s just that at almost 90 years old, energy is like a long-lost friend to my dad rather than a constant companion. On good days, he’ll do a little cleaning, go for a walk, and cook from his roster of dishes that feature a mishmash of Middle Eastern fare and American classics done his way. On days when stamina eludes him, he’ll pick up chicken from Vons, pizza from Costco, lahmajun from the Armenian bakery. Easy things that taste good and are not foreign to him – or, at least, not foreign anymore. 

Baba – let’s call him Baba, because I do – grew up in Syria, the son of a blacksmith and homemaker from Aintab who escaped the Armenian Genocide and landed in Aleppo. Fried chicken and pizza were most definitely not on the menu back then. I wonder if he could have ever imagined back then the life he’d have now. That, more than half a century later, he’d be standing in a kitchen halfway across the world, making the same food for me that his mom once cooked for him. 

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Getting a recipe out of my dad proved to be harder than anticipated. He quickly consulted his dog-eared, oil-splattered cookbook to confirm the necessary ingredients before grabbing a 1-cup measuring cup and haphazardly throwing three somewhat full (though not quite full) cups of rice into a bowl without even a rinse. How many cups was that? He didn’t know. “A little more than three,” he guessed. 

Next came the meat, which he noted was not as much as he’d usually use with this much rice but would do for today. This was followed by a quick succession of unevenly-sized spoonfuls (not measuring spoons, mind you, just regular teaspoons) of various spices, including allspice, chili powder, salt, and pepper. How many of that spice did you use? “Keech muh.” A little.

Lemon juice was added, along with about half of a can of tomato sauce. And that was that. A quick mix, and it was time to blanch the leaves and roll.

The leaves hit the boiling water and morphed from verdant, lively, springtime green to moody moss, their unmistakable scent filled the air: grassy and dank, like after a summer rain. As my dad quickly replaced one batch with another, I snapped photos and he told stories. An anecdote about a cousin who loved sarma so much that he’d stuff as many in his pockets as he did in his mouth, leaving my aunt befuddled and laughing. A memory of how his mother would make a little extra filling sometimes, and he and his siblings would gather around and eat it cold and raw.

As we sat down at the kitchen table to roll our sarma, we realized we had both seen the same video (me on Instagram, him on Youtube) of someone using a knife and Ziploc baggie to wrap sarma. More alike than I sometimes care to admit, we were both excited to show it to each other and give it a whirl. We grabbed two knives and two baggies, laughing at how quick and efficient and easy it was.

Soon, we had a pile of sarma. We arranged them in a pot, adding lots of whole cloves of garlic between the layers, and topped them with a tangy mixture of tomato sauce, lemon juice, salt, and water. Soon, the house smelled earthy and warm and familiar. Lunch was served. 

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Below you’ll find a sort-of-recipe for sarma as my dad makes it. Like most family recipes, this one is always measured with the heart and the amounts should be taken as guidelines rather than stipulations. Use less meat, omit the chili powder, throw in something extra. Or up the lemon, as my dad always does. There are lots of recipes for stuffed grape leaves out there, and each is a little different. Baba figured out how to make this recipe his, and you can decide how to make it yours, too. 

• 1 jar grape leaves, or around 50 fresh 

• 1.5 pounds ground beef 

• 2.5 cups short-grain rice, rinsed

• ½ of an 8-oz can of tomato sauce 

• 3 tablespoons lemon juice 

• 1 teaspoon allspice 

• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder 

• ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper 

• 1.5 teaspoons salt 

• For the cooking liquid

• ½ of an 8-oz can of tomato sauce 

• 3 tablespoons lemon juice 

• 1 tsp salt 

• 12 cloves of peeled garlic 

Remove the stems from the leaves. If using fresh grape leaves, quickly blanch in boiling water just until the leaves change color. If using jarred, rinse under warm water a few times to remove the smell.

Mix together the beef, rice, tomato sauce, lemon juice, spices and salt. Place about a tablespoon on your grape leaf, fold in the sides, and wrap. (Or, you can use this handy-dandy technique). Place a couple grape leaves at the bottom of your pot, then arrange your sarma. Add garlic cloves between each layer. Top with more grape leaves, then place a plate over the sarma along with something heavy, like a clean stone, to keep the sarma in place while they cook. Bring to a boil then cover and simmer for around 30 minutes until rice is cooked (you’ll need to remove a sarma to test the texture of the rice). Serve with pita bread and garlic yogurt. If there’s enough cooking liquid left, we usually eat it on the side like soup.