Introduction

While foraging is defined in behavioral ecology as an animal’s search for wild food resources, in human ecology it is considered an adaptive strategy, which concerns both hunter-gatherer societies and, to a lesser extent, horticulturalist and especially pastoralist communities (Sutton and Anderson 2004). Although foraging includes both wild animal and plant resources, most of the gathered/foraged items in the world, apart from insects and gastropods, are vegetable items.

Gathering and consuming wild food plants are traditional practices still followed in many areas of the world and their role in fostering food security has been increasingly discussed in recent years (Bharucha and Pretty 2010; Neudeck et al. 2012; Nolan and Pieroni 2014; Ong and Kim 2017; Shaheen et al. 2017; Shumsky et al. 2014).

Although the diversification of diets and their traditional ingredients (underutilized and orphan crops, wild plants, wild crop relatives, and wild meat) is considered a key issue in combating malnutrition and hunger (Heywood 2013), there is a remarkable lack of knowledge concerning the diverse aspects and scales of foraging and its effect on local communities in many areas of the world.

In Europe, especially in its southern and eastern regions, where these practices are still alive, traditional food plant gathering has been under threat since the 1960s as a result of the industrialization of local food systems, the changed social role of women within the household, and the abandonment of small-scale agro-pastoral activities (Cucinotta and Pieroni 2018; Łuczaj et al. 2012; Pieroni 2003).

On the other hand, a remarkable resilience of traditional foraging has often been described in those communities in which minor wild plant ingredients are considered crucial for shaping local cultural identities and/or for preserving health and well-being (Cucinotta and Pieroni 2018; Reyes-García et al. 2015). Additionally, these two aspects may represent not only factors that slow the decline of traditional foraging, but also, together with the new trend of eating wild foods sometimes spread by star chefs and the “return to nature” effect, real potent drivers for the resurgence of these practices (Łuczaj et al. 2012; Reyes-García et al. 2015).

The Caucasus region of Eastern Europe and, in particular, its post-communist period, have been the focus of only a few, mainly sporadic, wild food ethnobotanical studies, such as those recently conducted in Georgia (Bussmann et al. 2016, 2017; Łuczaj et al. 2017), Armenia (Hovsepyan et al. 2016), and Dagestan (Kaliszewska and Kołodziejska-Degórska 2015).

We decided to focus on Azerbaijan and its traditional wild food plant gathering primarily for three reasons: (a) the traditional gathering of wild food plants has not been systematically investigated in the country in the last few decades; (b) the country is home to remarkable linguistic and religious diversity along the Greater Caucasus Range and wild food gathering as part of the local gastronomic heritage is complex and diverse at cultural (religious/ethnic) edges (Pieroni et al. 2018); (c) the country has the lowest Global Food Security Index in Europe (GFSI 2018) and neglected food plant resources could play a role in shaping culturally appropriate food sovereignty-driven policies, which may be particularly important within the community of internal refugees (approx. one tenth of the population), who, as a consequence of the (ongoing) “frozen” war with Armenia, are particularly vulnerable in terms of food security.

The objectives of this study were therefore: (a) to record the traditional plant foraging among four linguistic, ethnic and religious communities living along the Greater Caucasus Range; (b) to compare the data among the four communities in order to point out possible differences and food plant cultural markers (sensu Pieroni et al. 2015: plants used and mentioned exclusively by one cultural group), as well as to compare the same data with the food ethnobotany of neighboring regions (Arab, Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish areas), and to formulate hypotheses to explain possible differences.

Materials and methods

Study area and communities

Figure 1 shows the visited villages on the southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus Range (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Study area and visited villages

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Southern slopes of the Greater Caucasus Range

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Table 1 presents the characteristics of the selected groups. Three of the selected communities (Azeris, Tats, Udis) have been living in the study areas for many Centuries, while the Molokans arrived in the nineteenth century from Russia and the Azeri refugees from Karabakh reached the present territory approximately 30 years ago.

Table 1 Characteristics of the study participants
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Field study

The field study was conducted during the spring of 2018 and the study participants were mainly selected among middle-aged and elderly local farmers and shepherds, who we identified as possible local knowledge holders.

Verbal consent was always obtained before each interview and the Code of Ethics of the International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE 2008) was followed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Russian by the second author or sometimes—especially with middle-aged and younger community members—in the Azeri language with the help of an interpreter. The interviews focused on gathered and consumed non-cultivated vegetables; wild plants used as starters in baking or yogurt making, as rennet, for preparing sarma (leaves rolled around a filling made from rice, aromatic herbs, and possibly meat or vegetables), or in home-made fermented products; wild fruits and other wild plants used in sweet preserves and/or liquors; wild plants used for recreational herbal teas; and mushrooms. We made note of a few unusual uses of cultivated plants as well. For each of the free-listed plant items, local names and exact details of gathering and culinary preparations were recorded.

Plants were identified using the Flora of Azerbaijan (Karjagin 1950–1961; Əsgərov 2016), while the nomenclature follows The Plant List database (2013) and family assignments are consistent with the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website (Stevens 2017). The collected voucher specimens are deposited at the Herbarium of the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics, and Statistics of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy (UVV, bearing herbarium numbers UVV.EB.AZ01–73). Dried plant samples were also accepted if offered by the interviewees (deposited with numbers UVV.EB.AZD01-21).

All local plant names were transcribed using the rules of the Azerbaijani (for Azeri, Tat, and Udis folk names) and Russian (for Molokan folk names) languages. We reported all Russian folk names in the Latin alphabet, using transliteration according to ISO standards (ISO 1995).

Data analysis

Data were compared with the important worldwide wild food plant reviews (Facciola 1990; Hedrick 1919; Tanaka 1976) as well as the wild food ethnobotanical studies conducted in the last three decades in the Caucasus (see aforementioned literature) and neighboring areas: Iraqi (Pieroni et al. 2017, 2018) and Turkish (Çakır 2017; Kaval et al. 2015; Polat et al. 2015, 2017) Kurdistan, Lebanon (Marouf et al. 2015), Syria (Abdalla 2004), and Western Iran (Maassoumi and Bobrov 2004).

Results

Wild plant foods in the study area

Table 2 shows the wild food plants traditionally gathered and consumed in the study area.

Table 2 Non-cultivated food plants recorded among the studied communities and their local culinary uses (table also includes six cultivated plants, whose recorded culinary uses are unusual)
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For each folk taxon, we reported the botanical species and family, its folk names, the plant parts used, the exact details of its culinary preparations, and the frequency of quotation.

A small portion of the cited plants are gathered during the spring months in the vicinity of the villages (this is the case for synanthropic weeds esp. among Udis and, to less extent, Molokans), while most of the plant items are collected in pastures and mountainous areas more distant from the house. Wild vegetables are gathered by both female (rather exclusively for weeds) and male (especially for species growing further from the villages) community members, while unripe wild fruits are predominately gathered and consumed on the spot by young community members.

Considering the most extensive worldwide reviews on wild food plants and the pre-existing ethnobotanical studies conducted in the Caucasus and neighboring areas (see aforementioned literature), it is worth mentioning the following wild plant uses, since they have rarely been quoted in the scientific literature:

  • Bunium paucifolium L. roots, presenting a hazelnut-chestnut-like taste, which are consumed raw as a snack—similar to what was done in the past in most of Western Europe with its congeneric species B. bulbocastanum L.;

  • Calepina irregularis, presenting a cabbage/rocket-like, pungent-sweetish taste, whose young aerial parts are consumed raw or mainly cooked;

  • Chaerophyllum bulbosum L. roots, presenting an aromatic, carrot-like taste, cooked—this taxon was wildely used in Central and Eastern Europe in the past;

  • Fagus orientalis Lipsky leaves, having a slight astringent taste, used for prearing sarma—this is a very specific Caucasian custom, and the resulting sarma is delightfully astringent (and also umami as the result of the meat-based filling and being cooked in broth);

  • Falcaria vulgaris Bernh. (Fig. 3), which has a very aromatic taste, whose young aerial parts are consumed cooked—its use in the kitchen is still present in Eastern Turkey;

    Fig. 3
    figure 3

    Falcaria vulgaris leaves gathered in the village of Kürdüvan

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  • Heracleum trachyloma Fisch. stems, slightly aromatic, lacto-fermented (Fig. 4) or consumed raw—a very widespread Azeri custom, which we also recored as common among Tats and Molokans, that may have ties to the Persian tradition of using this plant, particularly the dried fruits (golper), widely used in the Iranian cuisine as a seasoning (Duguid 2016);

    Fig. 4
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    Lacto-fermented Prangos and Heracleum spp. stems prepared in an Azeri refugees’ household of Pirdinar

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  • Humulus lupulus L. female inflorescences, mixed with bran (Fig. 5), as home-made yeast for bread (only among Molokans); this use of hops was recorded in the nineteenth century in some areas of Eastern Europe (Maurizio 1927) and until the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Romania (Pieroni et al. 2012);

    Fig. 5
    figure 5

    Bread “yeast” made with a decoction of Humulus lupulus inflorescences and bran in a Molokan household of Xilmilli

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  • Pimpinella aromatica M.Bieb. fruits, very aromatic, resembling anise and caraway, used as seasoning by Tats;

  • Polygonum cognatum Meisn. leaves, presenting a neutral taste, cooked;

  • Prangos ferulacea (L.) Lindl. shoots, having a very aromatic taste vaguely resembling that of sea fennel (Crithmum maritimum L.), lacto-fermented in brine (Fig. 4) exclusively among Azeri refugees from Karabakh;

  • Smyrnium perfoliatum L. stems, aromatic, lacto-fermented among Azeri refugees—the plant is also very commonly used in Kurdistan;

  • Primula woronowii Losinsk. leaves, whose taste is neutral, used raw in salads exclusively by Molokans, although according to our interviewees this use seems to have been only recently established.

Most of the plants are exclusively used within households, while a few of them (see Table 2, most notably Asparagus and Silybum spp., Fig. 6) are also sold in markets or along the main roads during the spring, while others are preserved (mainly lacto-fermented in brine or in sweet preserves) and sold in local markets (taxa indicated by MA in Table 2). Although a quantitative analysis of the economic impact of foraging was not the main aim of our study, our observations suggest that the small-scale market of these wild vegetables can generate income, which may be crucial in disadvantaged households.

Fig. 6
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Silybum marianum stems sold along a main road close to the town of Şamaxı

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All the visited communities, especially those inhabiting the most remote mountain villages, consider gathering and consuming wild plants an important cultural custom and these practices still represent a daily routine during the spring, and, to a lesser extent, the summer (for a few wild fruits only) and the first part of autumn. The study participants often promote the advantages of consuming wild food ingredients via a narrative that includes two main arguments. First is their widespread availability, which in spring would precede that of cultivate plants thus ensuring them a food supply during a critical period, when it could be difficult to find alternatives, considering the distance of a few mountain villages to the nearest towns having a market or supermarket (up to 3 h drive with off-road vehicles). The second is the perceived health-promoting effects of their consumption.

The knowledge in the most remote villages is also shared by the youngest community members, while in villages that are closer to towns, wild food plant knowledge holders are elderly people only.

While Table 2 reports also a few cultivated taxa (Cydonia, Mentha, Morus, Phaseulus, Triticum and Vitis spp.) used in “unconventional” ways, which diverge from usual, regional or “globalized” food utilizations, it is worth to mention that we could observe in a few home-gardens the incipient domestication of Heracleum trachyloma, whose stems are highly appreciated as lacto-fermented pickles among Azeris and Tats.

Comparison among the studied communities

Figures 7 and 8 present two Venn diagrams showing the overlap among the four studied communities (number of cited folk taxa and most commonly quoted genera/taxa only, respectively).

Fig. 7
figure 7

Venn diagram showing the overlap among the four studied communities for the recorded wild food plants

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Fig. 8
figure 8

Venn diagram showing the overlap of the recorded wild food plant genera/species among the four studied communities for the most commonly quoted taxa only. The figure does not show Eleagnus, which represents the overlap between Tats and Molokans

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Udis seem to have a restricted use of wild food plants in comparison with the other groups, possibly due to the fact that they live in a plain area, where living conditions are less difficult and food security in spring less problematic. Moreover, they commonly use synanthropic, post-Neolithic weedy food plants such as Chenopodium and Portulaca spp., which seem to be ignored by the other communities.

The most divergent ethnobotany, however, is shown by the Tats (12 folk taxa exclusively used by them, of which only two are commonly used, see Figs. 8 and 9), which may be related to their cultural and geographical isolation. In fact, this community was endogamic until only a few decades ago, despite the fact that they have partially shared the same religious faith with the dominant group (Azeri), although they have retained a completely different language (Iranic Tat vs. Turkic Azeri). Moreover, in our study area Tats live in the most remote mountain villages, which could have historically enhanced isolation and the permanence of ancient local knowledge regarding wild food plants.

Fig. 9
figure 9

Sensory fingerprint of the wild plant foods quoted by the studied communities (SW sweet taste, HE herbaceous/neutral taste, AC acidic taste, BI bitter taste, GP garlic-like pungent taste, RP rocket-like pungent taste, AS astringent taste, AR aromatic taste, CR crunchy texture)

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With regard to the plant reports (i.e. food uses of the different species), Azeris and Molokans also show important divergences, which is exemplified by the latter group, which retains eight species, commonly used only by them, that we may define as plant cultural markers (sensu Pieroni et al. 2015). This could be attributed to the historical ethno-religious trajectory of Molokans, who were historically endogamic and lived fully separated from the other groups, although during Communists times mixed marriages among different ethnic/religious groups were not uncommon in the study area, as atheism was the norm in the public sphere. However, Molokans have the most in common with Azeris despite differences in both faith and language, which may be due to the inevitable azerization process that all ethnic and linguistic minorities in Azerbaijan have experienced for centuries. The reasons for this process may be diverse: (a) the Azeri language acted as a lingua-franca in the Eastern Caucasus from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (Trubetzkoy 2000); (b) Azeri culture/language was dominant in the school system and the media in the study area during the last century (former Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan from 1936 to 1991, and since then independent Azerbaijan); (c) no pure Molokan villages still exist in the study area, rather Molokan families are spread across villages mainly inhabited by Azeri families—this does not happen for Udis and, to a lesser extent, Tats, which still live in separate, mono-ethnic villages.

While a remarkable number of wild food plants (six) are shared by Tats and Azeris, the Azeri plant cultural markers are mainly retained by Azeri refugees from Karabakh, which have a fairly different ethnobotany from that of the autochthonous, local Azeri population. This may be due to the different regional customs from their place of origin (Karabakh high mountains vs. the present area where they live in Central Azerbaijan), their complex ethnic roots (they were originally mainly Sunni Kurds, strongly azerized in the course of history), and especially their current economic and social marginalization, which has forced them to live at the edge of the communities we visited, with very limited socio-economic resources.

Green culinary fingerprints

Figure 9 illustrates the sensory fingerprints concerning the taste of the recorded wild food plants consumed in each community. The diagram was created using the sensory characteristics of all recorded wild plant parts (as described by the interviewees), as well as their quotation indexes. Moreover, the fingerprints were designed by considering nine sensory categories:

  1. 1.

    sweet taste (exemplar: ripe strawberries, Fragaria vesca L., Rosaceae; code SW);

  2. 2.

    herbaceous/neutral taste (exemplar: fat hen, Chenopodium album L., Amaranthaceae; code: HE);

  3. 3.

    acidic taste (exemplar: sorrel, Rumex acetosella, Polygonaceae, code: AC);

  4. 4.

    bitter taste (exemplar: dandelion, Taraxacum campylodes G.E.Haglund, Asteraceae; code: BI);

  5. 5.

    garlic-like pungent taste (exemplar: wild garlic, Allium spp.; code GP);

  6. 6.

    rocket-like pungent taste (exemplar: shepherd’s purse, Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medik., Brassicaceae; code RP);

  7. 7.

    astringent taste (exemplar: unripe sour cherries, Prunus cerasus L., Rosaceae; code AS);

  8. 8.

    aromatic taste [exemplar: wild chervil, Anthriscus caucalis M.Bieb. (Fig. 10), Apiaceae and mint, Mentha spp.; code: AR];

    Fig. 10
    figure 10

    Lacto-fermented Anthriscus caucalis stems prepared in an Azeri refugees’ household of Meysəri

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  9. 9.

    crunchy texture (exemplar: fresh stems of milk thistle, Silybum marianum (L.) Gaertn., Asteraceae; code CR).

The figure shows how Azeris and, to a lesser extent, Tats, seem to favor wild plants having crunchy and aromatic tastes/textures, mainly represented by wild greens, and often Apiaceae snacks, thus reinforcing the hypothesis that among these two groups “pastoralist snacks” have shaped a large part of their foraging behavior. “Pastoralist snacks” are green plant parts, mainly internal stems or flower receptacles, gathered and processed using a knife, consumed as it is, mainly on-spot, or sometimes at home just dipped in salt, possibly originally adopted by shepherds as a side activity while leading herds to grazing areas.

On the other hand, the prevalence of bitter, acidic, and sweet tastes among Molokans could be partially interpreted as a more important attachment to the horticultural practice of gathering synanthropic, mainly Asteraceae, bitter weeds and to specific culinary processes as well (lacto-fermentation, which generates sour taste; and sweet preserves). The fact that the importance of pungent Amaryllidaceae (belonging to the former Liliaceae s.l. family) and Brassicaceae herbs (garlic- and rocket-like, respectively) decrease from Azeris to Tats, and especially among Molokans and Udis, could also be related to a more limited exposure the first two groups have had to industrial foods and mainstream cultivated vegetables living in more isolated villages.

Overall, the relative modest contribution to the diet provided by bitter tasting wild plants suggests that the distance of the Caucasian foraging we observed in Central Azerbaijan from the horticulturalist post-Neolithic nutritional framework of the Fertile Crescent, and in particular from Middle Eastern farming communities (Assyrians), which moved in ancient times westward toward Greece and the Central Mediterranean, created what we have referred to for several decades as the “Mediterranean Diet” (Cucinotta and Pieroni 2018; Pieroni et al. 2018; Pieroni and Cattero 2019).

Figure 11 shows the predominant botanical families of the recorded wild food preparations consumed by the four studied communities and considers the frequency of quotation of each of them as well. The figure illustrates how the aforementioned sensory fingerprints are only partially rooted in the cultural salience of certain botanical families and consequently the foraging ecology/foodscapes of the communities. It is remarkable to note only a single significant difference: a large predominance of Apiaceae species (responsible for most aromatic tastes) among Azeris, in whose cluster Rosaceae is not very relevant. This would confirm that both families represent reservoirs of mainly non-synanthropic plants, which agrees with the human ecological pastoralist origin of the Azeris. However, the absence of other important differences may suggest that the ecology of wild plant gathering areas, i.e. the possible human ecological historical trajectory of the studied communities, may represent only one of the different elements that have influenced their foraging patterns. In particular, our data also suggest that a possible different cultural attachment toward specific plant tastes may have played a crucial role in influencing the foraging preferences of the studied ethnic groups.

Fig. 11
figure 11

Most frequently quoted wild food botanical families among the studied communities

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Comparison with the ethnobotanical literature of neighboring regions

On the basis of the comparative analyses we conducted in the previous paragraphs as well as an analysis of the pre-existing ethnobotanical literature of the Caucasus and neighboring regions (see aforementioned literature in the Data Analysis section), we can outline some wild food plant uses, which may be relevant to the pre-history and history of food ingredients.

  • Russian Molokans, which represent a distinct, conservative ethno-religious group within the Eastern Slavic domain, have preserved a few ancient Slavic wild plant food uses (Pieroni and Sõukand 2018) that are not common, to the same extent, in neighboring areas and ethnic groups: these include the culinary uses of Rumex acetosella leaves, lacto-fermented Prunus spinosa L. fruits, as well as Armoracia rusticana, Crataegus spp., and particularly Viburnum opulus fruits.

  • The common traditional food uses by Tats of Berberis vulgaris L. fruits, especially in their original lacto-fermented preparation (Fig. 12) and Ornithogalum spp. are linked to the widespread culinary custom of using barberry fruits as a souring ingredient in Persian cuisine (Duguid 2016) and to the popularity of the complex Ornithogalum-Muscari-Bellevalia spp. group in Kurdistani and Iranian areas (Maassoumi and Bobrov 2004; Pieroni et al. 2018), whose uses are very ancient, as pollen of Muscari was found, for example, at the Shanidar IV archaeological site (dating to 35,000 years B.C.; Lietava 1992).

    Fig. 12
    figure 12

    Lacto-fermented Berberis vulgaris fruits prepared in a Tat household of Dəmirçi

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  • Udi commonly used wild food plants include, apart from the aforementioned weedy plants Portulaca oleracea L. and Chenopodium album, Smilax excelsa L. shoots, whose food use is very common in Georgian cuisine, as well as in that of other autochthonous Caucasian speaking groups in Azerbaijan (Bussmann et al. 2016, 2017; Łuczaj et al. 2017; personal observations). Young shoots of Smilax, however, are still sometimes used in folk cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece, SE Italy) (Pieroni and Cattero 2019).

  • The common Azeri uses of wild plants, which normally have their ideal habitat in mountainous and pastoral landscapes, such as wild Allium, Chaerophyllum, Prangos, Smyrnium, and Tragopogon spp. are similar to the patterns we recorded in Kurdistan and that of other ethnobotanists in both the Caucasus and Eastern Turkey (Bussmann et al. 2016, 2017; Çakır 2017; Hovsepyan et al. 2016; Kaval et al. 2015; Łuczaj et al. 2017; Pieroni et al. 2017, 2018; Polat et al. 2015, 2017).

  • The common Azeri and Tat use of some weeds (synanthropic plants) as vegetables, such as Capsella, Papaver, and Stellaria spp., may be linked, in our opinion, to a possible horticultural shift/sedentarization that these two former pastoralist groups may have gone through.

  • The widespread common use (recorded among all selected communities, but not Russians) of Fagus orientalis for sarma could be considered a pan-Caucasian custom (Bussmann et al. 2016, 2017; personal observations in various areas of Azerbaijan and Georgia).

  • The widespread culinary use of Rumex patientia L. and related species among all our mountain communities confirms the role of the Rumex genus in the food economy of mountain communities in the geographical and cultural spectrum that proceeds westwards from the Caucasus to the Dinaric Alps in the Balkans (Pieroni and Quave 2014, and references therein).

Conclusions

The current study shows that foraging is a practice which is still very much alive in the Caucasus, particularly in mountainous areas and among the middle-aged and older generations and that local environmental knowledge, practices, and beliefs related to wild vegetables are crucial in the spring and autumn for coping with food insecurity, especially within the most disadvantaged households and among internal refugees from Karabakh who are, in fact, involved in foraging not only because gathering these ingredients and cooking them is part of their regional cultural heritage and possibly represents an identity-driver, but also for more pragmatic reasons such as coping with economic constraints and food shortages.

Moreover, the traditional knowledge attached to these practices, as well as the gastronomic heritage concerning the manipulation of the plant items within the household, their cooking processes, and the consumption frames are the result of complex co-evolutions where both human ecological origins and sensory factors (i.e. preferences for specific tastes) have shaped the foraging patterns of the studied communities over centuries. Eventually, this complex and diverse heritage needs to be not only preserved but concretely considered in rural development programs in order to foster culturally-sensitive endogenous alternatives in food security policies.

All this may require educational platforms aimed at re-instilling local knowledge in the younger generations as well as public engagement for increasing the awareness of rural and urban civil societies regarding the importance of neglected and disappearing traditional food ingredients. Moreover, nutritional and nutraceutical studies on a few of these neglected wild plant ingredients will be important for possibly addressing the beneficial effects of threatened local foods, which could in turn help foster the resurgence of a broader interest in traditional wild plant foraging.