My mother wasn't an expert in her adopted cuisine, but she had Armenian friends who were: Sally, our neighbor, and her sister Ruby. Each autumn after the grape harvest, the three women would gather in Ruby's kitchen to make large batches of kufta, a stuffed meatball. It took two days to chop, cook, knead and assemble all the ingredients. Fine-grained bulgur was mixed with ground beef or lamb to make its outer covering.
A year or two after my mother died, I was visiting my dad and in the kitchen, I spotted four stainless-steel cylindrical containers covered with tight lids, old-fashioned bandage holders she had probably recycled from the surgical suite where she worked. I lifted a lid and saw that the canister was half full of golden-brown bulgur. In addition to kufta, my mother had used the grain to make a nutty-flavored Armenian pilaf.
Making that pilaf was a breeze for me. Maybe it was time I learned to make kufta. I took one lesson from a friend, then fumbled my way through yearly improvements. If I prepare the filling the day before, it still takes me four hours to put together 75 meatballs.
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