A Georgian supra for beginners

If dinner night has a patron saint, it is the Georgian supra. A supra is a feast — the word means "tablecloth" — with a structure that has been refined over centuries: a toastmaster, a sequence of toasts, and a table laid so densely that plates stack on plates. You do not need to do all of it. You need to borrow three ideas.

Idea one: the tamada

Every supra has a tamada, a toastmaster, who proposes the toasts and keeps the evening moving. At a family table the job rotates, and a nine-year-old tamada is a serious tamada. The toasts in a traditional supra follow a loose order: to God or to peace, to the country, to the dead, to parents, to children, to the guests. Ours are shorter — to the cook, to the person who picked the country, to whoever set the table — but the principle holds: you raise a glass for something, and everyone listens.

For the grown-ups, Georgia is one of the oldest wine cultures in the world; qvevri wines (fermented in buried clay vessels) are the thing to try if a wine shop near you carries them. For everyone, the zero-proof drink on our Georgia page is a tarragon lemonade in the spirit of the bright green Georgian soda.

Idea two: the table never empties

At a supra, new dishes arrive before old ones are cleared. You are not going to do that on a Tuesday. But the feeling — abundance, choice, no single plated portion — is easy to fake with a few cold dishes that sit on the table from the start:

• Pkhali: vegetable pâtés (spinach, beet or green bean) bound with ground walnuts, garlic and herbs. Store-bought hummus is a cheat that works.
• Tomato and cucumber salad with walnut dressing or just good oil and salt.
• Pickles: cucumbers, peppers, whatever the jar holds. Georgians pickle everything up to and including jonjoli (bladdernut flowers).
• Bread, warm, in quantity.

Then the hot dish arrives into that landscape, which is exactly what happens with our adjaruli khachapuri: a boat of bread filled with melted cheese, a raw yolk and a pat of butter dropped in at the table and stirred into the cheese. Tear off the pointed ends and dip.

Idea three: a sweet that is also a story

Georgia's traditional sweets come from grape must — the pressed juice from winemaking. Churchkhela are strings of walnuts dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice until they look like candles; they hang in every market. Pelamushi, the dessert on our Georgia page, is the same thickened juice set soft in a bowl. Either one is a lesson in "this country has made wine for eight thousand years" that a child will actually remember.

Scaling it to one evening

A beginner's supra for a family, in order:

1. The day before, buy pizza dough, mozzarella, feta, walnuts, tarragon and a jar of pickles. (The full list is on the Georgia page.)
2. At 5:30, put out the pickles, a tomato-cucumber salad and the pkhali-or-hummus.
3. Shape and bake the khachapuri (about 20 minutes prep, under 20 in the oven).
4. Appoint a tamada. First toast as the boats come out of the oven.
5. Stir the egg and butter into the cheese at the table. Dip. Second toast.
6. Pelamushi or a few churchkhela for dessert. Final toast to the cook.

Where to go next

Georgia sits at a crossroads, and its neighbors cook like relatives. Our Armenian khorovats tray bake is the grilled-meat tradition next door; Turkish menemen and Iranian joojeh kabab share the herbs, the yogurt and the bread. A month of Caucasus and Black Sea dinner nights is a very good month.