Mtsvadi en plein air

In February, C and I went to Gori, Imereti and Kakheti with Imedi TV to participate in a segment on Georgian hospitality for their Droeba program. The gist of our participation was this: we would, one by one, knock on the doors of strangers and ask for water. We would gage their hospitality by

1. Whether they gave us water;
2. Whether they invited us to stay for wine or a supra;
3. How persistent they were about item 2.

C wrote a very funny essay for Lost Writers about our trip; read that if you want to know more about it. I want to write about the MEAT.

After we'd gone through the "Knock Knock" routine in Kakheti, our mark, a 70-year old kind-faced man named Gurami, made a fire in his yard from dry grapevines. The flames licked the air in six-foot flames, then dwindled to a bed of coals. Just as the fire subsided, seven skewers of meat were set on an iron rack that held the pork a few inches above the shimmering coals. When the meat was pronounced "done," it was put in a bowl, sprinkled with coarse salt, and tossed with rings of raw red onion. We sat at a table in the yard, filled our glasses, drank a toast to hospitality, and dug in.

There may have been silverware on the table, but we ate the mtsvadi with our hands. The grilled meat, fresh off the fire, was warm and slick in my fingers. The thick ropes of fat striating the flesh had turned buttery over the fire. I reached for a piece and a very organic smear of something white and soft from somewhere between bone and tendon—a shmear of hot marrow?—glazed my knuckles. I considered a moment, then licked my fingers.

I've eaten mtsvadi in many restaurants in Tbilisi—they've been best at the Marjanishvili Shemoikhede Genatsvale, and Championebi on Tamarashvili street reportedly has good grilled meat—but nothing so far has come close to equaling melting hot meat fresh off the fire, piled in a huge heaping bowl, eaten en plein air.

Man cannot live off of mtsvadi alone. I realized this in an, er, visceral sense when, in 2003, I went on a camping trip where our guides fed us mtsvadi all weekend. The meat traveled in a vinegar marinade (making it technically basturma, not mtsvadi) and when it came off the fire, our friend Sergo would impress us all by manfully crushing pomegranate seeds over the steaming meat with his bare hands. By the end of our trip, one young woman was sick from eating so much pork (she's a vegetarian now, thanks to that experience) and the rest of us were constipated for a week.

But after Gurami's supra, more grape vines were added to the purple-orange-white bed of coals to freshen the fire for another round of mtsvadi. This round was for Gurami's family, some of whom had missed the first supra. As the camera crew packed away their equipment, my head full of raw white wine, I extended my cold hands towards the quick, dry column of fire, wishing we could stay.

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A recipe for mtsvadi, which seems to have been cribbed rather shamelessly from Darra Goldstein's book The Georgian Feast, is available at About Georgia.