It used to be the only favors I asked of Helena Bedwell were for phone numbers of particular officials I could not otherwise get from my usual sources. Helena, a journalist for 25 years, knows everyone in Tbilisi. Then last week, I called her for some help of a more domestic kind: I wanted to learn how to cook a Georgian holiday dish. She offered to show me pelamushi, a voluptuous tooth-smacking porridge. A couple of years ago, the Georgian journalist published her first cookbook, “Georgian Flavors from Helena,” a homey, straightforward collection of her take on classic Georgian recipes designed for “busy and on-the-go” people like her who may be abroad and want to recreate Georgian dishes with a limited supply of time and ingredients.

Sunday, April 19, was Easter in the Orthodox Christian world, the holiest day of the year. Like most people in today’s pandemic world, Maka Shengelia, one of our walk leaders in Tbilisi, was home being a responsible citizen. But she was also spreading butter on her own freshly baked paska, Easter bread, popular in the Eastern Church. It is a tall, dome-shaped cake, inseparable from Easter’s other “edible decoration,” boiled eggs dyed a deep magenta with endro (madder root). God will forgive you for celebrating Easter without going to church, but commemorating it without red eggs and paska is another matter entirely.

Darra Goldstein introduced a generation of cooks and readers to the cuisine and culture of Georgia with her seminal work, “The Georgian Feast.” Originally published in 1993, the book was awarded the IACP Julia Child Award for Cookbook of the Year. A revised and expanded 25th anniversary edition, which features new photography, recipes, and an essay from celebrated wine writer Alice Feiring, was published in October 2018. We spoke with Darra, the founding editor of “Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture” and the author of five award-winning cookbooks, about this new edition.