The 1990s and Ada’s Gyumri Gata

2026-01-25 - 21:06

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. “And then I saw a squirrel. I felt saved, like it was a sign that everything would get better,” recalls Anahit Hakobyan, or as friends have called her for over 40 years, Ada. It’s a small memory from one special day decades ago, shared while pouring me tea. Ada studied engineering and later worked as a teacher before turning to baking in the 1990s to help her family survive those hard years. She was born in Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city, which had been battered by an earthquake and economic collapse, and later relocated to Yerevan. She is one of the rare people who speaks of the 1990s without bitterness. Instead, she remembers the period with quiet clarity. “It made you more grateful for small things,” she says, then pauses. “Or maybe you stop thinking in terms of big and small altogether. You just notice them.” She drifts back to a memory of that time, a day she spotted a squirrel with her children. It was nearly winter. Buses and trams were scarce, so she had to walk about nine kilometers from her home in the 16th Kvartal, to the city center just to take her children to school and deliver the box of baked goods she’d been preparing all night. “That was such a tough day,” she says. “It felt like if I live through it, I can live through anything.” She remembers walking for more than two hours with her children through cold, half-empty streets. When they finally neared the school and reached the park, Ada stumbled and almost dropped the box. It survived, but she realized she felt herself on the verge of tears and didn’t want her children to see. That’s when she saw a squirrel running through the trees, an uncommon sight in the 1990s. “In those years, our lives narrowed down to essentials. And this little animal was like a reminder that there’s another world out there, where life still goes on,” she says, explaining how that “reminder” helped her redirect her children’s attention away from her tears and toward something else. By then, she had already reached for her handwritten cookbook, leafing through its pages in search of the dish I had come for. “Children don’t react to reality,” she adds quietly. “They react to your reactions to it. If you say all is well, they’ll take it.” When they finally reached the school, her children happily shared their experience of encountering the squirrel with the other children. “They were all so excited and asked the teacher if they could go to the park to see it. I don’t remember what happened—did they go, or it was too cold? Though I couldn’t say the classrooms were super warm either,” she jokes. While she carefully flips through the pages of her handwritten recipes to find that special one, something buried surfaces in my own memory, sending chills down my spine. A classroom filled with children from different grades, all crammed into a single room, because there were only a few working heaters in the school. We were grouped together to simply stay warm. I have no idea what we learned that way, taking our first lessons alongside children four years older than us—perhaps nothing more than how to coexist. “By the way,” Ada says, bringing me back to the present, still holding her cookbook. “I don’t like calling those years mut u tsurt. Yes it was hard, but there were things besides the darkness and cold. Life was still going on, you know?” She pauses. It looks like she found the recipe she was looking for. “For me, those years revealed a lot,” she continues. “They showed me that I can handle anything, that I can find my way out of disaster using what I once thought were just basic skills.” She smiles. “After I baked a birthday cake shaped like a little sheep, I stopped doubting myself altogether.” She had never done anything like it before, she explains, but a customer had asked for a sheep-shaped cake for her son, his favorite animal. Ada agreed. She needed the money, yes, but she was also curious. She asked her children to draw a sheep, then sketched one herself. Using those drawings as a guide, she cut the dough into shape. “In the end, I nailed it,” she says, smiling. “The sheep was so cute, it even had a little piece of grass in its mouth, like it was chewing.” She closes the cookbook and hands it to me. “I sold my first cookies for 7 AMD each—which is about 15 cents today. My first client was my aunt, who had just opened a cafe and needed baked goods. Her cafe was where the Dalan Art Cafe, at Abovyan 12, is now. That was pretty motivating for me because I was earning money from home just doing things I usually did for my kids,” Ada recalls. She says she also regularly delivered pastries to Sayat Nova, then known as a commission store. Then she asks me to open the folded page. “This was one of my most reliable recipes,” Ada shares. “When electricity kept cutting out, there were few things you could safely bake. I started with eclairs, but you know, their dough has a specific character.” She continues, explaining how choux pastry hates interruptions and can be easily destroyed, while this one could withstand many challenges. Here it is—the recipe I came after. Her beautiful handwriting reveals the name: “Gyumrva Gata”. Recipe Ingredients For the Dough: 500 g flour 200 g butter or margarine 100 g matsun (plain yogurt) 100 g sour cream 1 egg 1 tsp baking soda (dissolved in matsun) 1 tbsp sugar A pinch of salt For the Filling: 200 g flour 150 g sugar 100 g butter 1 tsp vanilla sugar For Decoration: 1 egg (for a glossy surface) Preparation Sift the flour into a deep bowl. Rub in the cold butter by hand until the mixture loosens into crumbs. In a separate bowl, mix matsun and sour cream with an egg, a little sugar, and salt. Dissolve the baking soda carefully, then combine everything. Knead until the dough becomes soft and elastic, then let it rest in the cold for half an hour. The filling is simpler: flour, sugar, and butter, melted and stirred until it reaches a texture somewhere between sand and clay. Vanilla sugar or cinnamon can be added. Divide the dough into two or three pieces, roll each one out, spread the filling evenly, and roll it back into itself. Shape it into a square or a log. Score the top lightly—not just for beauty but to let the heat move through it. Before baking, brush it with egg. Set the oven to a steady heat—30 minutes, sometimes 35—enough to turn the surface golden. After baking, cover the gata with a damp cloth to soften it. Ada says it’s an old habit, learned from her mom and granny. There are variations. You can add dry fruits or walnuts. Ada now bakes different versions, but back then she stuck to the original family recipe. “We usually put a coin in the filling for luck, but in the 1990s having a solid filling with butter was already luck, so I skipped that detail,” she smiles. Comment Cover photo by Roubina Margossian. LIFESTYLE Charge As SALT marks its first anniversary, we wrap up 2025 by reflecting on tradition while looking ahead. With 2026 shaping up to be a charged election year, SALT will be there to offer a refreshing space for pause, perspective and inspiration beyond the political noise. 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