Amber alert: Alice Zaslavsky’s Georgian-spiced carrot, sweet potato and lentil soup. Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Amber alert: Alice Zaslavsky’s Georgian-spiced carrot, sweet potato and lentil soup. Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian You've got this Vegetarian food and drink Alice Zaslavsky’s Georgian-spiced carrot, sweet potato and lentil soup – recipe Georgian spices can be hard to come by, but Alice Zaslavsky has some seasoned substitutes for her cosy soup
Alice Zaslavsky Tue 4 Aug 2026 17.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 5 Aug 2026 04.46 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I n one of my favourite recent releases by a Georgian-born author, Leo Vardiashvili’s Hard by a Great Forest , the protagonist is told that meeting a Georgian outside Georgia is so rare it’s akin to winning the lottery. “Because the odds of winning the lotto are much better. You could have been a millionaire, my friend. Instead, you met me.”
There are fewer than 6 million Georgians in the world, with a third scattered across the diaspora. Australia’s Georgian-born population now sits just under a thousand, of which my family makes up 0.8%.
Read more Luckily for anyone who’s ever met a Georgian or travelled there, what we lack in numbers, or lottery wins, is made up for in hospitality, with 6,000 years of culinary and vinting (winemaking) wisdom to create vast feasts. These are known as Supras, featuring peasant-style, veg-laden dishes and cheesy breads . With Georgia at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, and a key stopover on the spice trail, Georgian spicing is mildly Middle Eastern, more so Central Asian, the fresh and dried herbs are abundant, and did I mention there’s a lot of cheese?
Matching aromas to available ingredients is one of the challenges of transposing a lesser-known cuisine to the other side of the planet. Spices such as utskho suneli (blue fenugreek), Imeretian saffron (ground dried marigold) and Svanetian salt come in colourful piles at markets in Tbilisi, but in much of the world, they’re a hard-to-find specialty.
View image in fullscreen ‘This recipe is a spin on a midweek soup Mum’s made since for ever. Instead of red kidney beans used for lobio in Georgia, it has midweek-friendly red lentils.’ Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘If you can find khmeli suneli, swap out the curry powder, ground coriander, fenugreek and turmeric for one heaped tablespoon – you lucky duck.’ Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian While they come by mail order now, in the 90s, émigrés like my mum had to learn to transpose flavours of home into an Australian pantry. Her solution for Georgia’s staple spice mix, khmeli suneli, was Keen’s curry powder – or mild Madras if she could find it – with extra ground coriander.
In a way, her innovation works out better for my professional purposes, because home cooks can try new taste sensations without committing to too many new jars. This permissive playfulness has informed a lot of the liberties in my third-culture recipes, such as swapping in mild chilli flakes and paprika for Svanetian salt, using non-blue fenugreek (quantities halved if grinding fresh), and ground turmeric as a dupe for dried marigold’s golden glow.
This recipe is a spin on a soup Mum’s made since for ever. Instead of red kidney beans used for lobio in Georgia, it has midweek-friendly red lentils, an ingredient introduced to her by her PhD students from the subcontinent.
I’…