The Telavi market, and what to actually buy

Go before ten. Not because a guidebook says mornings are atmospheric, but because the people with the good cheese have driven in from villages, brought what they have, and will go home when it is gone. By noon you are buying from the permanent stalls, which is a different market.

It is ten minutes from our door, by the bus station at the south end of Alazani Avenue. Covered rows down the middle under a curved roof, fruit and vegetables spilling out at the edges, dairy at one end, and a wall of churchkhela you will smell before you see. It runs every day.

Buy these

Spices, which are the best value in Georgia

If you take one thing home from Kakheti, make it a bag of spice. It weighs nothing, costs almost nothing, is legal into every country you might be flying to, and it is the half of Georgian cooking you genuinely cannot reproduce from a supermarket at home.

• Blue fenugreek — utskho suneli, literally “foreign spice”, which it has not been for several hundred years. It is in the walnut sauces, in lobio, in pkhali. It is not the fenugreek you already own; it is a different plant and it tastes of it.
• Dried marigold, sold as Imeretian saffron. Not saffron. Nothing to do with crocus. It is ground marigold petals and it does the colour and a soft bitterness that real saffron does not. If somebody is selling you “saffron” cheaply, this is what it is, and it is what you want anyway.
• Svanuri marili — Svan salt, from the other end of the country: salt ground with garlic, fenugreek, coriander and a little red pepper. Put it on eggs and you will resent every previous egg.
• Adjika, wet or dry. The dry red one keeps forever.

Buy them from the spice stalls where things are in open sacks, ask for a smell, and take twice as much as you think.

Churchkhela, chosen properly

The candle-shaped ones hanging in ropes: walnuts on a string, dipped repeatedly in grape juice thickened with flour and dried. Made at rtveli from the juice that is not going to become wine.

How to pick one:

• Matte, not glossy. A good churchkhela has a slightly dusty bloom on it. High-shine ones have usually been finished with something.
• The colour comes from the grape. Saperavi juice makes the dark red-brown ones, white grapes the pale tan ones. The startlingly bright ones at motorway pull-ins are not always innocent.
• Squeeze it. Autumn ones are soft and almost fudgy. By spring they are chewy and firm, which is not worse, just different, and they will last in a rucksack for a month.
• Walnut is standard. Hazelnut exists and is sweeter.

Cheese, and ask to taste it

You are expected to taste. A knife will come out and you will be handed a corner. This is normal; declining to taste is the odd behaviour, not asking to.

• Sulguni — the springy, salty, faintly squeaky one. The default.
• Imeruli — milder and fresher, and what goes inside khachapuri along with sulguni.
• Guda — sheep’s cheese matured in a sheepskin bag, down from Tusheti. Sharp, dense, properly funky. Not always put out for visitors, so ask for it by name.
• Nadughi — the whey cheese, soft and mild like ricotta, sometimes sold rolled in mint.
• Dambalkhacho — mould-ripened, from Pshavi, and an acquired everything. Try it before you commit to a piece.

Tklapi

Fruit leather in sheets, usually plum, sometimes apple or kiwi. Sour, chewy, weighs nothing, does not melt, does not break. The single best thing to put in a bag before a long day in a car or on the road to Tusheti.

Walnuts and honey

Walnuts are sold in the shell and shelled, by the kilo, and this is walnut country — they are in the salads, the pkhali, the sauces and the churchkhela. Shelled ones that are pale are this year’s; the ones going amber are not.

Honey from the valley, and acacia honey if you see it. Sold in reused jars, which is a good sign.

Whatever is at its peak

The fruit changes every fortnight and this is the real reason to walk down there. Cherries and apricots from late May. Peaches, figs and melons through August. Grapes, quince and persimmon in autumn. In February there is not much and you will be looking at pickles, which is its own answer.

Do not bother with

Wine from a market stall in a plastic bottle. It might be excellent. You have no way of knowing and there are cellars fifteen minutes in every direction where you can taste before you buy.

The hardware and clothing rows. They are for people who live here, which is most of the market’s actual job.

How to buy

Cash, in small notes. Nobody at the market takes cards and nobody has change for a hundred at half past eight in the morning.

Everything is by the kilo. Ask the price before you point at something: ra ghirs? — how much is it. There is enough Georgian for this in about ten minutes of learning.

Prices move weekly, which is why we have not printed any. What a kilo of peaches costs in July and in September are different numbers, and the churchkhela is cheapest in the fortnight after the harvest when everybody has made too much.

Bargaining is for volume, not for one item. Ask for two kilos and there is a conversation. Ask for two peaches and there is not, and trying is faintly rude.

Bring your own bag.

What we buy there

The cheese and the matsoni for breakfast, the fruit that goes into the jam that turns up on the table, and the walnuts. If you are here and want to see how a Georgian kitchen actually gets stocked, come with us — we go most mornings and it takes forty minutes, and it is a better introduction to Kakheti than a lot of things people pay for.

Then come back and eat it. Breakfast is at eight, out of the oven, and everything on the card starts at the market — including the jam, which is whatever was cheap and perfect three weeks ago.