Spices in Georgian cooking

Recorded against hazelnut as the nearest entity SpiceHQ holds; the Georgian pairing is with walnut, which the cuisine is built on. Blue fenugreek’s mild maple sweetness against a ground-nut paste is the flavour at the centre of satsivi and of the walnut sauces that run through the whole repertoire, and it works because the nut is fatty and quiet and the spice is sweet and quiet.

How: In satsivi, the walnut and chicken sauce; Through a walnut paste for stuffed aubergine

Add alongside: Marigold, Coriander seed, Garlic

• The entity here is a stand-in. SpiceHQ holds no walnut record, and recording the pairing against the nearest nut is more honest than not recording it.

Georgian chicken dishes are yellow, and marigold is why. It contributes a mild resinous aroma and a great deal of colour to a cuisine that reaches for neither saffron nor turmeric, and chicken — mild, pale and taking on whatever seasons it — is where the colour shows most.

How: In satsivi; In a chicken and walnut sauce; Through khmeli suneli in a stew

Add alongside: Blue fenugreek, Coriander seed, Garlic

• The pigments are fat-soluble, so it colours a sauce with fat in it far better than a broth.

The two spices that between them make a dish taste and look Georgian, and they are almost always used together because khmeli suneli contains both. Blue fenugreek supplies a mild sweetness and marigold supplies colour and a faint resin, and neither would carry a dish alone.

How: Together in khmeli suneli; In satsivi and walnut sauces

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Savory, Garlic

• Both are hard to buy outside Georgia, and a blend missing either is missing what makes it specific.

Both are khmeli suneli components and both are legumes-and-herbs rather than seeds or barks. Savory supplies a peppery sharpness that blue fenugreek entirely lacks, and the combination is why the Georgian blend reads as savoury rather than sweet despite being built on a fenugreek.

How: Together in khmeli suneli; In lobio and other bean dishes

Add alongside: Marigold, Coriander seed

Coriander is usually the largest component of khmeli suneli by volume and marigold the most visible, and the pairing is the base of the blend. Coriander’s citric sweetness sits comfortably under marigold’s faint resin, and neither competes.

How: Together in khmeli suneli; In kharcho and Georgian stews

Add alongside: Blue fenugreek, Savory, Garlic

The pair that makes a Georgian dish taste Georgian. Blue fenugreek is nutty and faintly bitter with none of the burnt-sugar heaviness of common fenugreek, and ground coriander seed supplies the citric top note it lacks; together they are the base of khmeli suneli, of satsivi and of most Georgian walnut sauces. Neither carries the flavour alone — blue fenugreek by itself reads as dusty, and coriander seed by itself as thin.

How: Ground together into khmeli suneli; In satsivi walnut sauce

Add alongside: Marigold, Savory

• Common fenugreek is not a substitute here; it is stronger, more bitter and more maple-like, and will dominate

Georgian cooking uses dried basil in a way most European kitchens do not — as a warm, slightly aniseed background rather than a fresh green top note — and that dried character is what lets it sit under blue fenugreek instead of competing with it. The combination is standard in khmeli suneli and in the herb mixtures rubbed into pkhali.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Marigold

• Fresh basil behaves differently and will read as Italian rather than Georgian

Both are sweet-aromatic rather than pungent, and they overlap enough in the citrus register to reinforce rather than argue. Georgian and Thai cooking arrive at the combination independently, which is reasonable evidence it is the ingredients rather than one tradition.

How: Dried basil with ground coriander in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Blue fenugreek

A quiet combination rather than a striking one. Bay is a slow background note released by long cooking and basil is volatile and short-lived, so they occupy different parts of a dish in time rather than blending — bay from the start, basil at the end or, in the Georgian dried form, ground in with everything else. Useful, and not a partnership either ingredient depends on.

How: Bay in the braise, basil finishing it

Add alongside: Thyme

• Adding basil early wastes it; adding bay late wastes it too

Basil is sweet and volatile and chilli is pungent and non-volatile, so neither obscures the other — the heat sits underneath the aroma rather than in front of it. Georgian ajika is built on exactly this, as is Thai phat kaphrao at the other end of the world.

How: In ajika; Basil stirred through at the end of a chilli-hot dish

Add alongside: Garlic

• Chilli content in khmeli suneli varies by maker and is not universal

Defensible in Georgian cooking and not much beyond it. Blue fenugreek is a subtle ingredient whose whole value is a nutty bitterness that heat readily buries, so the combination works at the low chilli levels Georgian mixtures use and stops working above them. This is a verdict about proportion rather than about the pair.

How: In the chilli-bearing versions of khmeli suneli, and in ajika

Add alongside: Coriander seed

• Many khmeli suneli recipes contain no chilli at all
• At the heat levels of a curry powder the blue fenugreek is undetectable

Dill supplies the fresh, grassy anise note and blue fenugreek the roasted-nut depth beneath it, which is close to the whole architecture of Georgian herb seasoning: something bright on top of something dusty. Both are used dried, which is unusual for dill and is what makes the pairing hold together rather than the dill flying off on its own.

How: Dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Savory

• Fresh dill is a different ingredient here and does not substitute

Mint's menthol cools the palate and blue fenugreek's bitterness lingers on it, so the two are felt in sequence rather than together — which is why Georgian mixtures can carry both without either dominating. A small amount of mint goes a long way against an ingredient this quiet.

How: Dried mint in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Savory, Parsley

• Mint at Middle Eastern proportions will erase the blue fenugreek entirely

One of the most widely used herb pairs in the world and almost never thought about, because parsley is doing a structural job rather than a flavouring one: it supplies green, slightly bitter bulk that gives dill something to sit on. Georgian, Persian, Levantine, Russian and Scandinavian cooking all rely on it, most visibly in the Persian herb stews and in Georgian pkhali.

How: Both fresh and chopped, in enormous quantity; Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Mint, Coriander leaf

Two cooling herbs that cool differently — dill through a soft anise sweetness, mint through menthol, which acts on the trigeminal nerve rather than on taste. Because the mechanisms differ the effect stacks rather than duplicating, which is why the pair is standard in yoghurt preparations from Georgia through Turkey to the Levant.

How: Stirred into yoghurt with garlic; Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Garlic, Parsley

Savory is peppery and slightly resinous — it carries carvacrol, the compound that makes oregano pungent — and dill is sweet and volatile, so savory provides a bite dill does not have. The combination is Georgian and Balkan rather than Western European, where savory has largely fallen out of use.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli; With beans, where savory is traditional

Add alongside: Blue fenugreek

Marigold petal — imeretian saffron — is used in Georgia for a warm, slightly resinous aroma and for colour, and it is one of very few ingredients that gives dried dill a background without covering it. The two are near-inseparable in Georgian mixtures and essentially unknown together anywhere else, which makes this a genuinely regional judgement rather than a general one.

How: Ground together into khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Coriander seed, Blue fenugreek

• Marigold is not saffron and contributes no crocin-derived flavour

Marigold is warm and faintly resinous and mint is cold and sharp, so the pair works by contrast rather than by blending. It is a supporting combination inside Georgian mixtures rather than one that stands on its own — nobody seasons a dish with only these two.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Coriander seed

Parsley gives marigold something green to colour and marigold gives parsley a warmth it does not have. As with most parsley pairings the useful observation is that parsley is the one doing the yielding: it is present in quantity and rarely the flavour anyone identifies.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Dill

Both are Lamiaceae and both carry monoterpenes, but the ones they carry differ enough — menthol against carvacrol and thymol — that the pair reads as cool-then-peppery rather than as a single herb. It is a combination of the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus; western European cooking pairs savory with thyme instead.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli; With pulses

Add alongside: Parsley

Savory is assertive enough to need diluting and parsley is the herb that dilutes without arguing, which is the entire relationship. This is a workmanlike pairing rather than an interesting one, and it is included because it is real rather than because it is exciting.

How: Both dried, in khmeli suneli

Add alongside: Mint

The Georgian direction, and the one most cooks have never met. Tkemali is a sour plum sauce seasoned with coriander, blue fenugreek and garlic and eaten with meat — savoury rather than sweet, and built on the plum's acid rather than its sugar.

How: In tkemali, with garlic and blue fenugreek