Georgian Chefs Start Digging Deep for Recipes

As we all know, nobody makes chakhokhbili (that would be an old-school Georgian dish of chicken stewed in tomatoes, fresh herbs and hazelnuts) the way they used to. But some Georgian chefs, along with the Georgian government, are trying to recover some of the country's lost dishes. From an AFP report:

In the kitchen of one of the most fashionable restaurants in Tbilisi, the chef is cooking up hearty peasant food using recipes long forgotten by most of his countrymen.
"Nobody cooks a bird like this these days," said chef Malkhaz Maisashvili, raising his carving knife to sweep slices of chicken into a pot. "I discovered the recipe in a small village."
Keen to assert itself as an attractive destination for culinary tourists, ex-Soviet Georgia is rediscovering some of the ancient traditions of its unique cuisine.
On a country-wide gastronomic expedition, Maisashvili visited remote regions of Georgia in search of little-known recipes that had only managed to survive in isolated mountain villages.
The chef said that the "banalisation of gastronomy" during the Soviet era and the consequences of globalisation were to blame for the loss of a culinary heritage that he is now trying to revive.
"Some traditional agricultural crops were supplanted by more profitable foreign ones. This led to the disappearance of a number of dishes," he said.