As a first timer to Georgia I was surprised to see homemade candles being sold in the street. Well they seemed like candles but also looked like they might be food. Maybe they were some type of salami. I hadn't thought before that there was much of an intersection between homemade candles and salami but that intersection was being sold by every vendor on the streets of Tbilisi.
I saw strings hanging bundles of these burgundy, amber and even green sausages all over the place. Many even had a white, floury powder on the exterior, similar to the white mould I'd have expected over the casing of an aged Italian meat product. If not for the pointy tip at the end, I would have walked passed thinking they were salami and nothing more. This is why I was convinced that they were some kind of homemade candle.
But were Georgians so obsessed with a primordial lighting solution? In Georgia, had the hipster regression to the vinyl record and the mason jar gone so far as to abandon the electric light as well?
Georgians seemed quite familiar with electricity so I suspected it was something else. The only way I could find out was getting one myself. Eventually I bought one. I didn't try to light the wick but, pretty quickly, I realised what I had purchased was food.
Churchkhela is a traditional Georgian snack. It's sweet, but not too sweet, it stores well for months and you get a lot of energy from a small quantity. It's made of nuts and grape juice fortified with flour. That's why you can find everyone selling it, from confectionary shops to wine cellars to bakeries. To make it, producers load about a foot's length of walnuts onto a string and dip the nuts into a mixture of grape juice and flour. In the world's oldest wine-producing region, it was unsurprising to see a staple snack made from the byproduct of wine production.
Eating it, I found the snack less exciting than I thought it would be. I thought it would be some sort of 'sweet salami' but it had quite a soft outer texture and very few nuts inside. The grape juice and flour mixture had about as much flour as was possible to mix into a liquid so it was a little like eating sweet, uncooked dough. I'd guess that there was about a bread loaf or two's quantity of flour mixed into a single snack.
But then again, churchkhela was eaten as a high-energy snack during times of hardship or war. And who knows, worse comes to worse, you could maybe even light the string and use it as a candle.
