Ghapama

What ghapama is

The cook cuts a pumpkin open at the stem to make a lid, removes the seeds, and fills it with part-cooked rice mixed with dried fruit, nuts, butter, honey and cinnamon. The lid goes back on, and the pumpkin bakes slowly until the flesh is soft.

It is served whole and opened in front of the people eating it. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival's account of the dish describes the pumpkin being sliced along its natural indentations so that it falls open like the petals of a flower, revealing the filling.

In an Armenian meal it comes towards the end, with the sweet dishes, and not as a main course. Still, the filling is hearty enough that nobody treats it as a light finish.

Its place in Armenian life

Ghapama is made to be seen. It needs a large pumpkin, a long bake and expensive fillings, and it is meant to be revealed at the table, not dished up out of sight in the kitchen. That makes it a natural centrepiece for a celebration.

According to the Smithsonian's account, families reserved it for feasts and festivals precisely because nuts and dried fruit were costly, and it is traditionally associated with Christmas. So its festive status comes from economics as much as from ceremony.

Ghapama is also well known beyond the kitchen, thanks to a folk song about it that is widely sung at Armenian gatherings. The song is familiar enough outside those gatherings that the Smithsonian's account of the dish introduces it by way of the Armenian-American rock band System of a Down.

History: what the sources say

Ghapama is the one dish here with a firm outer limit on its age. Every pumpkin and squash of the genus Cucurbita is a plant of the Americas, and none was grown in the Old World before transatlantic contact. Whatever older habits of filling and baking vegetables came before it, ghapama as it exists today is a fairly modern dish.

This needs saying because ghapama is often described as ancient. Its technique, hollowing out a vegetable and filling it, is old and shared with the dolma family. Pairing that technique with a squash from the New World is not.

Like gata's, its written record is modern: cookbooks, ethnographic collections and, more recently, cultural programmes such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival's Armenia season in 2018. That programme published an account of the dish and of a Goris version made with dried Armenian apricots and foraged cornelian cherries.

Ingredients and preparation

The pumpkin has to be sound and roughly round, big enough to hold the filling but not so thick-skinned that it won't cook through. It is opened at the top, seeded and scraped out.

The rice is part-cooked and mixed with dried apricots, raisins, prunes, walnuts or almonds, butter, honey and cinnamon. Many families add more butter than seems reasonable, because that is what keeps the rice from drying out against the shell.

The filled pumpkin is closed with its lid and baked slowly for a long time. It is ready when a skewer slides easily through the flesh, and it rests before it is carried to the table.

Occasions and traditions

Its ingredients make ghapama a winter dish, and its cost makes it a festive one. It is linked especially with Christmas and New Year tables, and it appears at weddings and other big celebrations that call for a centrepiece.

The cutting is part of the occasion. Because everyone watches the pumpkin being opened, it becomes a small ceremony of its own, and that is usually the moment the song is sung.

Regional variations

The regional version recorded in most detail comes from Goris, in the south. It uses dried Armenian apricots and locally gathered cornelian cherries.

Elsewhere the fruit depends on what a household dries: prunes, raisins, sour plums, apple. The nuts work the same way: walnuts most often, almonds where they are cheaper.

There are meat versions too, where lamb or chicken goes into the rice and the dish moves from the sweet end of the meal to the savoury. In some regions no honey is used at all, and all the sweetness comes from the fruit. All of these are normal, and none is the standard the others must be measured against.