[ID: A bowl of soup topped with crushed walnuts, with a braid of dried leaves in the background. End ID]

Ավելուկի ճաշ / Aveluk chash (Armenian wild sorrel soup)

Docks and sorrels in Armenia

Ավելուկ ("aveluk") is one of the local Armenian names of a group of plants in the Rumex genus: curly dock (Rumex crispus), broad-leaved dock (R. obtusifolius), common sorrel (R. acetosa), and possibly patience dock (R. patientia).

Aveluk grows wild in humid areas of Armenia: on riverbanks, on the bases of mountains, on roadsides, and in meadows. It is foraged extensively during the spring, and eaten in large quantities throughout the year by ethnic Armenians, Greek Armenians, and Yazidi Armenians. Amongst Christians, it is especially popular during Lent ("Մեծ Պահք," "mec pahk'," or "great fast")—a forty-day-period of reflection, repentence, and abstention from meat, dairy, and eggs.

To Greek Armenians—mostly descended from Pontic Greeks, who settled in the Pontus region beginning in the 7th century BCE—these docks are called "aveluk," or "avluk."

Yazidis—an ethnoreligious group native to Kurdistan, whose religion has its roots in pre-Zorastrian Iranian paganism—call these plants "tirşo" (from Kurdish "tirş," meaning "sour"). Many Yazidis migrated to current-day Armenia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, due to religious persecution during the reign of Ottoman ruler Abdul Hamid II: today, they form the largest minority group in Armenia.

Common dishes made from this group of plants include a salad of boiled aveluk, garlic, walnuts, and spices; a stir-fry of aveluk and eggs; and a soup (ճաշ, "chash") of aveluk and cracked wheat berries. According to a 2020 survey, this soup is especially common amongst ethnic Armenians and Yazidis, but is also eaten by Greek Armenians. All three of these groups preserve aveluk for eating during the winter by drying it. Yazidis also have a preservation method exclusive to themselves: namely, lacto-fermentation (pickling in brine).

Foraging culture

Braids of aveluk, usually gathered and preserved by women, are sometimes sold in marketplaces. The dock plants themselves, however, are considered as a kind of commons, which anybody can gather as needed. Foraging thus unites concepts of communal ownership, generational knowledge, connection to land, and food sovereignty.

Armenian interdisciplinary performance artist Arpi Balyan writes:

Encouraging the use of Aveluk for nutritional and medicinal purposes is a great example of how food can be sourced without harming nature while preserving local and folk culinary and healing practices, remaining independent from the capitalist market.

By cooking aveluk chash, Balyan hopes to "strengthen our connection with familiar and unfamiliar food and to exchange local knowledge on nourishment and well-being with other communities." Aveluk is a particularly useful starting point for a pedagogical project of this sort, as Rumex plants grow across broad swathes of the Americas, Europe, Asia, North and South Africa, and Australia. Thus—perhaps paradoxically—people in many different parts of the world can experience their own local landscapes in new ways, thanks to engagement with a particular regional cuisine.

Aveluk chash

The aveluk leaves used to make aveluk soup are woven into characteristic long braids, and then dried. The drying process allows the leaves to ferment slightly, changing their strongly bitter flavor into a mildly, pleasantly sour one, with notes of pepper and fruit.

To make the soup, the dried braid is cut apart and rehydrated with boiled water. Cracked wheat berries (ձավար; "javar"), lentils, and potato may be added, in which case they will be boiled alongside the rehydrated aveluk until tender. A temper of fried onion, garlic, black pepper, and paprika (կարմիր պղպեղ, literally "red pepper") is then added and mixed in with the boiled ingredients. (Sometimes a one-pot version is made, in which case the aromatics will be fried in a pot, and then the other ingredients and water will be added.) The finished soup is garnished with chopped or crushed walnuts, and minced garlic.

The result is a hearty bowl of earthy lentils and tart, tender sorrel, rounded off with the slight nutty bitterness of walnuts, and the sharp zestiness of raw garlic.

[ID: A close-up of a dried, coiled aveluk braid. End ID]

Recipe under the cut!

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(For the January beautiful soup swap)

Armenian aveluk soup, is a dried sorrel soup made with dried and braided dock (another member of the Rumex family). I based mine on several recipes, but probably closest to that at forager chef. I plan on making two soups for the January Beautiful Soup Swap that I’m hosting because I know that most people probably don’t have dried sheep sorrel on hand. I do have suggestions for substitutions below, and I saw a few places on line to order aveluk.

I chose to make this soup today because I had just wtitten my 2025 master sheep sorrel post this morning, but also because I wanted to make a ritual soup using one of my Johnmas/Midsummer Night/Kupala plants—one of nine magical and healing plants gathered and preserved that night—to bring warmth to what is our coldest weekend so far this year; we haven’t had temperatures as cold as what is predicted this weekend since 2021.

Ingredients to feed one hungry person, or two as a starter

1/2 ounce dried sheep sorrel or other sorrel such as aveluk

1/2 yellow onion

2 tsp minced garlic

3 cups chicken broth

1 smallish russet potatoes cut into small cubes

1 Arbol chili pepper, crushed

1 TB tomato paste

Salt to taste

Freshly cracked black pepper to taste

Drizzle of olive oil

2 tsp vinegar (I used vinegar from my Michaelmas pickled plums)

Optional toppings: crumbled bacon, thinly sliced green onion tops, chopped pickled plum (or other sour plum), chopped nuts (I used pecans I had on hand, but traditional aveluk calls for walnuts).

Directions:

Soak rinsed, dried sorrel in 2-3 cups hot water for 1 hour to remove bitterness that accumulates in dried sorrel

Sauté onions and garlic until softened

Add potatoes, broth, arbol pepper, tomato paste and simmer

Drain sorrel and purée in blender with some of the soup broth

Add to the soup and cook until potatoes are tender

Add salt and pepper

Right before serving add vinegar and drizzle with olive oil

Add toppings as desired to individual bowls

Substitutions for dried sheep sorrel:

Spinach or Chard + Lemon Juice: Use fresh spinach or Swiss chard for texture, combined with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice for the necessary sour tang.

Use roughly three times the amount of fresh greens as you would dried.

For every 5 ounces of spinach, 1 tsp lemon teaspoons vinegar to mimic the natural oxalic acid flavor of sorrel.

So for this recipe I would use 1.5 ounces spinach and 1/2 tsp lemon juice or vinegar to start and add to your taste.

Aveluk is a type of native Armenian wild or mountain sorrel with a slightly sour flavor. It is a traditional ingredient typical of authentic Armenian cuisine that finds wide usage in dishes such as aveluk soup and aveluk salad. The leaves of aveluk are typically collected during the spring season, and they are then made into braids, which are either used fresh or hung to dry in a windy place, away from direct sunlight.