Megrelian

Step into a Megrelian kitchen and the first thing that hits you is the smell of pounded walnuts with chili, garlic, and a rust-red paste called ajika. This is the spiciest of all the Georgian regional tables — the one that argues with the rest of the country over whose plate has the most heat. You'll find elarji being pulled and stretched at the stove like hot cheese-and-corn taffy, kupati sausages sputtering over coals, and a deep-yellow walnut sauce ladled onto cold chicken until it cools into something almost like custard. Even the bread is more cheese than bread — Megruli khachapuri buries cheese inside the dough AND blankets it on top.

Mingrelia sits in western Georgia, between the foothills of the Caucasus and the marshes near the Black Sea. The damp soil grows corn rather than wheat, so the cornmeal cookery here is older than the rest of the country's — ghomi (white-cornmeal porridge) takes the place rice or pasta might hold elsewhere. The walnut groves give the region its other obsession. Local cooks pound walnuts into pastes for soups, salads, sauces, and stuffings, and the result is a region where almost nothing arrives at the table without a creamy, slightly bitter walnut undertone running beneath the heat.