Perfectly-spiced lamb and rice, wrapped in salty grape leaves. and cooked slowly in a lemony, garlicky sauce — this dish goes by many names. Most know it as dolma, a stuffed grape leaf dish that originated in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire and spread across the Middle East and Mediterranean. Some know it as mashi, yabra, warak enab, or sarma. For me, it is yebadet.
This word does not come up under Google searches. It does not appear on the internet, and even the recipe book of Armenian-Syrian dishes my mom cooks from calls the dish yabra. But my family, starting with my Armenian great-grandparents, who immigrated to New York from Aleppo in the early 1900s, has always called the dish yebadet.
My sitto (grandma in Arabic, but she’s really my great-grandmother), who came to the U.S. when she was only 19, was a pro in the kitchen. She made a variety of delicious Armenian-Syrian dishes that she passed down first to my grandmother, then my mom, and now to me.
For my 20th birthday last April, I decided I wanted to try making yebadet with my friends in my college apartment. My friends don’t have much exposure to Middle Eastern food (Nashville has almost none), so I wanted to share a bit of my favorite cuisine with them. I asked my mom to send me the yebadet recipe. She sent me no less than three versions. One comes from the cookbook mentioned previously, one was written by my grandmother, who followed sitto around in the kitchen to write down the steps she knew by heart, and one was written by my mom.
Of course, all three recipes were different. Armenians measure with the heart, meaning each version of the recipe was guesswork based on approximate measurements and personal preferences in seasonings. Each one varied in the proportions of ingredients and quantities of spices. I decided to stick mostly with my mom’s version of the recipe, after calling her multiple times to make sure I was using the right one.
The only uncommon ingredient in this dish is grape leaves, which I was able to buy at an Asian grocery store in Nashville. All the other ingredients I found at my local Kroger. After making sure everything was in order, I invited my friends over one Saturday evening, the day after my birthday, to cook.
Of course, I forgot to take the ground lamb out of the freezer to defrost slowly, so I submerged it in a bowl of hot water to defrost it quickly. (I know this is a bad practice, but desperate times call for desperate measures.) Once the meat was soft enough, I started by combining three pounds of lamb, three cups of raw long-grain rice, salt, pepper, and the most important ingredient, allspice. Allspice is the secret ingredient, giving this dish its delicious flavor. It is an integral part of all the Armenian food my family cooks. You could even call it my comfort spice.
As I mixed the meat, rice, and spices by hand (so cold), my friends worked on peeling garlic cloves and juicing a seemingly infinite number of lemons for the sauce. Seriously, the whole kitchen counter was covered in juiced lemon halves. My vegetarian friend was in charge of washing the grape leaves from their salty brine and separating them so that she did not have to touch the meat.
Because this recipe requires mixing the spices directly into the raw meat, there is no way to taste whether it is seasoned well until the dish is fully cooked. You just have to trust that it will turn out well and take a leap of faith.
Once the meat dish was ready, it was time for the most fun part: rolling the grape leaves. This requires a very special technique, where you shape the meat mixture into logs, lay it onto a grape leaf, and roll tightly while tucking in the sides. As a kid, I was not very good at this. My siblings and I would beg my mom to let us help her roll the yebadet. She let us each roll a few, then sent us off once we started getting bored. Once we left the room, she would unroll and redo all the ones we had done, since they looked a mess and they would fall apart while cooking if not rolled tightly.
Since then, I have perfected the technique of rolling yebadet. I explained it to my friends so they could help me roll. However, even with a good explanation, it takes years of experience to be able to feel how much meat is the right amount and if your grape leaf is rolled tight enough. Some of my friends turned out to be very good rollers, while some needed more direction. I kept telling them, “Roll tighter!” “That’s too much meat,” and “Veiny side of the leaf up!”
As we rolled the grape leaves, we joked around, teased each other’s rolling skills, took photos, and blasted music. We took up all the available counter space in the kitchen to roll and stack the yebadet into two large pots. Rolling that many grape leaves would have taken me hours on my own, but with six people working together, we got it done in just 30 minutes.
After all the yebadet were stacked in the pot in a pretty circle and covered with a plate so they would stay in place, it was time to make the sauce that they cook in. We added a bunch of garlic cloves, about a cup of lemon juice to each pot, and some water. The recipes all varied in how much water was supposed to be in the pot, but it appeared to me that the pot was supposed to be one-third full of liquid, which I did. However, just to be sure, I called my mom to check, since it seemed like more liquid than I was used to seeing her add. She told me the liquid should cover one-third of the yebadet, not one-third of the pot. My friends and I carefully poured out most of the liquid, then set the pots to cook on low for an hour.
Turns out this was also wrong. When we checked on the yebadet about 30 minutes into the cooking, we noticed that all the liquid had cooked out and the grape leaves were now burning slightly on the bottom of the pan. We quickly added more water, then squeezed in the rest of the lemons we had. The proportions of water to lemon to garlic were definitely off, but we decided not to worry about that.
After an hour of cooking, I took out a yebadet to taste it. The flavor was solid, but it was rather overcooked. The meat and rice were too mushy, but the slight burn on the grape leaves gave it a crispy texture that was actually quite pleasant.
We took the pots off the heat, then portioned out the grape leaves onto our plates, gathering on the floor of the living room to eat. My friends really liked the dish (at least that’s what they told me), and I got to share a bit of my family’s culture and cuisine with them. Even though they were not perfect, the flavor really was on point. I think my ancestors would be pleasantly surprised at how these turned out.