Kharcho Period COrigin theory BVerified

Kharcho is a rich soup of beef simmered slowly and dressed with walnuts and the spice blend khmeli suneli. The name means 'meat soup' in Mingrelian (the language of Megrelia), and in full it is dzrokhis khortsis kharcho, 'cow's-meat kharcho'. What fills the bowl is, first, beef, over which the spices and the sourness of plum are layered.

The beef at its centre is a long-established local food. The Caucasus has been a land of stock-raising since the Neolithic, with cattle here from the sixth millennium BCE; grape cultivation too goes back some eight thousand years, so the farming layer runs deep. The earthenware pot and open flame used for the simmering have been in every household since before modern times, and the ingredients and tools the cook reaches for were on hand early.

The flavour was built up in stages. First came a meat dish set off by walnuts; then rice was added as a secondary ingredient; and in time the sourness of plum (tkemali) became the keynote of the bowl. The rice reached the Caucasus in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries through contact with Persia and the Ottomans, and the home Megrelian version in fact leaves the rice out, thickening the soup into a stew served over ghomi. Served in both home and feast, it was carried down as an indigenous dish of western Georgia across every social rank, and later, in the Soviet period, it spread across the whole country. No source has yet come to light describing when beef, walnuts and sour plum came together in this shape. By 1939 at the latest, kharcho had its own entry in print.

That kharcho means a tomato soup is a widespread impression today. But the age of the dish itself and the newness of the ingredient that makes its sourness are two different matters.

The traditional sourness came from tkemali — a sauce made from sour plum (tkemali, tklapi). The beef at the centre and the walnuts at its core are foods that had been in the Caucasus since the Neolithic, and Georgian farming reaches back to the sixth millennium BCE (Darra Goldstein, The Georgian Feast; the Georgian ethnobotany survey). Rice was no more than a secondary ingredient added through Persian and Ottoman influence in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the home Megrelian version leaves even the rice out. This is the original form of kharcho.

The tomato entered this bowl far later. The New World tomato spread through the Caucasus only in the nineteenth century, around 1850, much the same moment it took hold in the Middle East and North Africa, in the Levant and in Ukraine. Until the tomato reached this land, kharcho had no way of holding it. Today's tomato version is a modern alteration laid on after that spread; the original sourness rests, as ever, with tkemali.

No early cookbook that writes the name kharcho down has come to light. In print, what can be followed reaches back to the first edition of the Soviet cookbook The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food (1939), which gives kharcho an entry of its own. That, though, is the dish's first appearance in type rather than the year it was born: beef, walnuts and sour plum had all been in this land since the Neolithic, and in Megrelia the pot was on the fire long before the printed page.