Chakhokhbili Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Chakhokhbili is a Georgian home and outing dish: chicken fried in oil with onions, then braised with tomato and finished with herbs such as coriander. The name goes back to khokhobi, the Georgian word for pheasant, still telling us that this was once a dish of birds taken in the hunt. Chicken and herbs have long been on Caucasian tables, and braising a game bird was itself rooted in the land.

What defines today's chakhokhbili is the acidity and sweetness of tomatoes cooked down red. Tomatoes are native to the New World, and they were being eaten in Georgia by 1800 at the latest. When they first arrived there has not been established. Once the tomato had settled into life there, the braise built around it appeared—and readily available chicken took over the leading role from the pheasant a hunter had to bring down. The method Georgian kitchens follow today, chicken fried in oil and then simmered with onion and tomato purée, reaches print later still, in the 1952 edition of the Soviet household cookbook Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food).

Before the tomato, the dish's forerunner is thought to have been a game-bird braise: pheasant dry-fried without oil and simmered with a native sourness such as narsharab, a reduction of pomegranate juice. Under the same name, the source of the acidity shifted from pomegranate to tomato—and in that shift lies the dish's modern turning point.

Chakhokhbili has long carried a tale of Vakhtang Gorgasali, the fifth-century king who founded Tbilisi. The story goes that a pheasant the king had hunted fell into a hot spring and cooked, and that this was the beginning of the dish. Bound up with the legend of Tbilisi's founding, the tale pushes the dish's pedigree back fifteen hundred years.

But this legend cannot simply be read as the founding date of chakhokhbili as we know it. That a genre of braised game birds is old is one thing; that today's chicken-and-tomato braise is old is another. The tomato is a New World crop, and a braise built around that fruit could not have existed in Georgia before the tomato reached it. Nor is there any contemporary, independent record to support the claim of a fifth-century date.

Georgia's national tourism office explains that the dish was originally a pheasant dish, that it was sometimes served in narsharab (reduced pomegranate) rather than tomatoes, and that tomatoes only started to appear in Georgian cuisine from the nineteenth century. Separately, a description of the Russian Empire that Johann Gottlieb Georgi published in 1800 records tomatoes as common in Georgian gardens, their ripe fruit pickled with vinegar and chili pepper and eaten, so they were being eaten in Georgia by 1800 at the latest.

The year the tomato entered Georgian gardens and the year the chicken-and-tomato braise reached print are not the same. In Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche, the Soviet household cookbook, the first edition of 1939 lists chakhokhbili by name among canned national dishes and goes no further; the working recipe—chicken cut small and fried in oil, then simmered with onion, tomato purée, vinegar and wine—appears in the 1952 edition. The tomato was already growing in Georgian gardens by 1800, but the printed recipe caught up with it only in the middle of the twentieth century.

The dish's original form as a game-bird dish, which the name preserves, is genuine; the chicken-and-tomato form is a modern one. The king's legend folded together the age of the genre and the making of the present dish. An old origin tale about a bird of the hunt, and the view that today's form settled only after the tomato became available, are two things to be read apart.