Ghapama

What ghapama is

A pumpkin is cut open at the stem to make a lid, seeded, and filled with rice that has been partly cooked and mixed with dried fruit, nuts, butter, honey and cinnamon. The lid goes back on and the whole thing is baked slowly until the flesh gives.

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 the order of an Armenian meal it belongs with the sweet dishes, towards the end, rather than as a main course — although the filling is substantial enough that it is not treated as a light finish.

Its place in Armenian life

Ghapama is a dish of display. It requires a large pumpkin, a long bake and expensive fillings, and it is designed to be revealed rather than served out of sight in the kitchen. That makes it a natural centrepiece for a table set for a celebration.

The Smithsonian's account notes that families reserved it for feasts and festivals precisely because nuts and dried fruit were costly, and that it is traditionally associated with Christmas. Its festive character is therefore economic in origin as much as ceremonial.

It is also unusually well known outside kitchens, because of a folk song about ghapama that is widely sung at Armenian gatherings — familiar enough beyond them that the Smithsonian's account of the dish introduces it by way of the Armenian-American rock band System of a Down.

Documented background

Ghapama is the one dish here that can be given an outer limit. 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 traditions of filling and baking vegetables preceded it, the dish as it now exists is therefore a comparatively modern one.

That is worth stating plainly, because ghapama is often described as ancient. The technique it uses — hollowing a vegetable and filling it — is old and is shared with the dolma family; the specific combination of that technique with a New World squash is not.

Its documentation, like gata's, is modern: cookbooks, ethnographic collection and, more recently, institutional programmes such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival's Armenia season in 2018, which 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, roughly spherical and large enough to hold the filling without being so thick-skinned that it will not cook through. It is opened at the top, seeded and scraped.

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

The filled pumpkin is closed with its lid and baked slowly for a long time. It is done when a skewer passes easily through the flesh, and it is left to settle before being carried to the table.

Occasions and traditions

Ghapama is a winter dish by ingredient and a festive one by cost. It is associated in particular with Christmas and New Year tables, and appears at weddings and other large celebrations where a centrepiece is wanted.

The cutting is part of the occasion. Because the dish is opened in front of everyone, it functions as a small ceremony of its own, and the song about it is commonly sung at exactly that point.

Regional variations

The most-documented regional version is that of Goris, in the south, which uses dried Armenian apricots and cornelian cherries gathered locally.

Elsewhere the fruit follows what a household dries: prunes, raisins, sour plums, apple. The nuts follow the same logic — walnuts most often, almonds where they are cheaper.

Meat versions exist, in which the rice is mixed with lamb or chicken and the dish moves from the sweet end of the meal to the savoury. In some regions no honey is used at all and the sweetness comes only from the fruit. All of these are ordinary; none is the standard against which the others should be measured.