A Tray of Habit: Kechejian Family Mezze

Words and Photos By: Christine Lenahan

Lou loved the color yellow, or so I’m told. Louise Boyajian was my grandmother’s best friend: their kids went to school together, they shopped at the same grocery store, Arax market, and attended the same church, at the same mass, at the same time as they had since they were both newlyweds living in Brockton, Mass. Lou bought the tray for my grandmother as a housewarming gift, a bright yellow platter divided into four sections. Each section edge rounded into a four leaf clover formation, and with a gentle push, rotated on a small wheel at the bottom for easy access to all four of its quadrants. Lou didn’t know what legacy the tray would hold, or the place of honor it would command on Rita’s counter top.

Her castle of brick and light blue paneled wood stood proud atop a small hill on Fairview avenue in Brockton. Silence was unheard of in the hub of life that was her bustling kitchen.

The scurry of footsteps as grandchildren played games of duk’ da yek’ (tag) and the bursts of laughter as uncles celebrated a victory in backgammon, created a sweet and familiar cacophony.

While her home erupted with joys, I stood beside her along the kitchen counter. The kitchen was not only her work space, but an operating table when my grandfather, Nishan, then a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, stitched up a gnarly wound from a fish hook in my cousin Peter’s leg. The countertop was gambling grounds, as grandkids played go fish or war, trading plastic silly straws and rainbow jelly beans. The place where grown ups made bets on the Red Soxs and Pats, depending on the season, always claiming that “Boston is gonna win it this time.” It was a courtroom, as my sister Grace claimed that my cousin Sarah most definitely stole her iPod (and she most definitely did). Uncle Greg served as the judge, dealing out punishments while the rest of the cousins sat on the jury behind the bar. But, at age seven, I barely peered over the wooden countertop without the help of a shiny oak stool taken from my grandfather’s study. Creaky and slightly wobbly, the stool was my lookout tower as I stared in a trance, enchanted by her artistry in the kitchen. From the fundamentals of basic hummus to the proper technique of rolling grape leaves, I watched my grandmother, Rita Kechejian, teach Armenian culture through cuisine.

The tray itself was a creature of habit, used by the habitual creatures that occupied 50 Fairview Ave. Nishan was old school Armenian and his pride in his Yerevan roots was reflected in this tray. It has been rumored that my grandfather could hover his right hand, calloused and wrinkled, over the tray and know exactly what item was held in each section, and do it all with his eyes closed.

Habits. Rita liked them too. In preparation for a family gathering, Friday night football, or an afternoon snack, her dainty fingers, the color dark sand and skin smooth and shining with olive oil, would begin to dismantle the Talbaner. Armenian string cheese, or as my sisters and I called it “grandma’s cheese” thinking that only she could produce this tangy, stringy goat’s milk cheese speckled with black caraway seeds, comes wrapped in a tight knot. The seeds, sev semer in Armenian, would be wound up in this twisted cheese that with an unfathomable amount of patience, was pulled apart into hairlike threads, creating small snowy mountains tart cheesy goodness.

On the tray and to the left of the Talbaner was my personal favorite, and one of the most difficult parts of my vegetarianism to date, sojuk. Like a christmas garland of garlic and spices, these hung small bags of cheese cloth were strung along the clothesline. The screened-in side porch was an extension of her kitchen, where inside those bags were thin strips of aging meat. This was not your gas station beef

jerky but a savory morsel tended to by Rita every night for three months. In the winter, the meat would cure in the cold Massachusetts temperatures and once her seven children, and eventually her eleven grandchildren, were off to bed, Rita would bring the parcels, sometimes thirty of them or more, out onto her wooden countertop. Taking the okalvu, or rolling pin, she’d press each bang until the meat inside was nearly paper thin. Immensely flavorful, garlicky and slightly spicy, soujk and often tablaner replaced turkey and cheese sandwiches for lunch during my childhood and held a place of honor on the tray.

Tangy, acidic, and sometimes spicy if you got a pink peppercorn mixed in with your bite, torshi, or pickled vegetables, was their third component of this pie. Nishan built a bookshelf of sorts into the screened in porch, per Rita’s request. If you limboed under the clothesline of soujk, you’d see them stacked proudly on the shelves. Like

fish swimming around in a tank, these vegetables would sit in their glass jars with shiny white plastic lids, each with a tiny vent to let acidic bubbles of the fermentation process out into the fresh air. Labeled with tan scotch tape, written in sharpie, my grandmothers scrawling handwriting announced each jar as torshi. Carrots, cauliflower, radishes, each vegetable grown in her backyard garden, a fertile jungle of produce and wonder, was stuffed into the jar doused in vinegar, salt, the tiniest bit of sugar, and little gems of pink peppercorns (or “peppachorns” as it rolled off my grandmother’s tongue, combining both Armenian and Brockton accents into a language only those who knew her could understand).

Blackened globes of olives tumbled into the final section of the tray. The darkness of the olives made the yellow tray glow brighter than before. Kalamata only, as habit demanded. Although sometimes Rita, rebel that she was, would stick a green olive buried under the mountain of black ones. As Nishan played just one more chess match, he’d each to pop another salty and smooth morsel in his mouth, but when the shine of the green met his deep brown eyes, he’d glance over at Rita, smirking at him from behind the countertop. He’d flash her a smile and pop it in his mouth too. Habits. Perhaps they are made to be broken.

Lou loved the color yellow, or so I’m told. I’m also told that her father, escaping the Turkish Ottoman Empire around 1918 was captured in the and burned alive. He was one of millions of Armenians. She sits beside my grandmother, as Rita tells of her family’s escape from the Armenian genocide. Lou, Rita, and Nishan weren’t alive on September 24th, 2021, when the United States officially recognized the mass murder of Armenians as genocide. They died at a time when the nation deemed the deaths of our ancestors to be a hoax. But they were alive to tell their stories to those who’d remember, to those who’d sit around the bar with hands diving into the pockets of the yellow tray, to those enveloped in their own world of tradition and family. In those moments I learned not only how to prepare food to be shared with the people I love, but how to uncover the patience and resilience ingrained in my genes, derived from a family of fighters and survivors.