Meat ‘under the bell’
By Eli Schwarer
‘What is your favourite dish?’
I love to ask this question. Eyes tend to light up, or a smile cracks across the face, and people become local informants, especially if you are a foreigner. They can be fervently anti-nationalist, and pride will likely still flush their cheeks when you ask about local cuisine. Just so in Kosovo, where I asked this question of just about anyone I could meet. The most common answer, by a far margin, was simply: ‘Meat.’
How so? Well, roasted goes down well with most, though many will tell you that meat, slow-cooked ‘under the bell’ is a favourite. The soup pot is a more than acceptable receptacle for chicken or lamb, and as to the question of sausage or cold cuts, one cannot go wrong. I must say I can understand the enthusiasm. The traditional, deliciously juicy ushtipka that I had with veggies, ajvar and potato wedges was fantastic. Even better, and for the mind boggling price of €1.50, I had a delicious burger slathered with spicy sauce and a generous helping of fresh salad. This burger became a favourite of mine, aided by the fun rapport I built up with the server. Popeye’s ‒ as the establishment was called ‒ was a tiny joint just below our hostel, with two short bars and an assembly station the size of a toilet stall, with all the works and an impressive chef whose banter with the locals was as delightful as the food. Those burgers nursed more than one hangover.
There is more than meat in Kosovo, though at first ask one is hard-pressed to get the locals to spill the beans. Or the vegetables. Or the carbs. It took me several days, and a vegetarian restaurant, to break through to the good stuff: bread. This was in Prizren, a southern town near the Albanian border which boasts pretty much everything from exquisite architecture to an infectiously friendly disposition. In Prizren there is a restaurant called Noja, run by a charming family, which serves vegetarian food to die for ‒ or at least to walk up a steep hill for. There I got to chatting with the chef, who shared a recipe with me for a fun summer snack, and told me how to make her favourite cornbread. Though you wouldn’t guess it from the restaurants, I heard the word ‘cornbread’ echoed between the many mountains of Kosovo in those next few days, as everyone agreed that cornbread was an absolute necessity ‒ so obvious it isn’t worth mentioning. Before leaving Noja, we were allowed to taste a creamy goat cheese that was recently made by the local goatherd up in the nearby mountains. As a goat cheese enthusiast, my standards are high; at the first taste, I melted.
This is the funny thing about food in Kosovo. Places like Popeye’s seem to cater to locals in a ‘global food, local flavour’ sort of way. Most places, however, have what someone told me is the ‘second cuisine’ of Kosovo: food for tourists and the occasional night out, not at all what people make when they cook for themselves. This cuisine seems to consist mainly of the following dishes:
Risotto which is not risotto, but rice (V);
Pasta Arrabiata, variably spicy (V);
Pizza (V);
Burgers;
Meat of various types.
Needless to say, our vegetarian colleagues were a little tired of the rice-pasta-pizza trio by the end of the trip. Had the menus been slightly extended, there may well have been more for them: several people described scrumptious-sounding vegetarian soups, cornbread-based dishes meze-style, cheese-stuffed peppers, and several ways of preparing beans that set the mouth salivating by description. We managed to find a few restaurants that served such things, and at these we gorged. Ethnohouse, for example, a quaint place in Gracanica just outside the capital, was a feast to be remembered. Certain of our party pooled their lot together on a meat platter that buckled the table. The rest shared a series of stuffed peppers, creamy cheesy bake, baked beans, and a soft wide flatbread perfect for mopping it all up.
It was at this restaurant, a few days later, that three of us spoke with Marko. Marko is a waiter at Ethnohouse and a nurse in a neighbouring town. He has a jovial laugh and a tattoo of a four-leaf clover with his family’s initials in each leaf, and he spoke to us about life in Gracanica, where food is fresh and good all year round. He swears that all Serbia is the land of the plum, and one cannot help but agree ‒ the whole region there produces lush and juicy plums that burst beneath the teeth invitingly. He also told us about the Gracanica goatherd (it seems everyone in this country has their own goatherd, a trend I think we all should follow) from whom they get their cheese and milk. Before we left, Marko helped us wrangle a cornbread recipe from the Ethnohouse chefs. On our way out, he pointed us to the Gracanica monastery (an absolutely breathtaking mediaeval Serbo-Byzantine building) to buy some local produce. We stocked up on plum jam and goat cheese, and I bought a pork sausage that smelt smoked even through its vacuum pack.
After that, I was sick for a few days, and food was a rather secondary concern. However, even with the nausea I found delicious dishes to soothe me: one of the finest chicken soups I have ever had, excellently salted and with soft-crunchy vegetables floating about in it. At this same restaurant, we had several large rounds of Albanian soda bread. When I asked for the bread recipe, I was told with a sly wink that it was a secret, and could not possibly be shared ‒ only that, since every Albanian knew how to make this type of bread, the waiter could tell me the basic ingredients. Hence the words flour, eggs, water, salt, oil were written in my notebook hastily by the dim lights of restaurant ambiance. Oh, and one cannot forget the magic words that made it possible to recreate the bread: let rest.
The three breads listed above became the centre of my final project in the course. I had decided before setting off to Kosovo that I wanted to explore food as a peacebuilding tool, and that I wanted to cook something for my colleagues when we returned. With very little knowledge of Kosovo culture (having only read about it) and little fieldwork experience, I believed that investigating food culture in the country would be fertile grounds for research. On top of this, getting to know the cuisine, both fine and domestic, is one of the best ways to get to the heart of a culture. People loosen up over food, conversation flows, and spirits are high, especially when the food is good. Everyone is concerned with food, everyone has a favourite dish, everyone has a story of the way their mother made a certain dish. One can learn much about seemingly unrelated topics when people discuss food: the subtle but vital differences between Serbian and Albanian bread, the implications about culture when someone says ‘every Albanian knows this recipe’, all of these paint a strong picture of the cultural and political landscape. While I did not know specifics, I guessed that food would function, at worst, as a positive conversation starter, and I was well rewarded with fantastic conversations all over Kosovo.
Here is the spread I prepared for the class:
Albanian soda bread
Gracanica cornbread
Prizreni cornbread, to be eaten in concert with:
Roasted paprikas stuffed with Sirene cheese that had been sauteed in milk and butter and
Watermelon slices
Plum jam
Smoked pork sausage
Spicy ajvar (paprika spread)
The testing process was tedious (I had been given few quantities for the bread recipes), but also fun. By the end I had fairly well turned into cornbread, but that isn’t the worst existence. The day of the presentation I cooked all day, and I had such a wonderful time of it. Cooking for large groups of people always makes me happy; 21 mouths to feed was a dream.
I had a wonderful time exploring Kosovo and its food, and I am very happy with the results of what I could bring back. Some recipes will definitely become standard for me (the stuffed peppers and Albanian bread are super easy and versatile, and really tasty), while others (cornbread) need to take a seat on the back shelf for a while after so much time spent eating them in the last week. I titled my presentation Good Food and Good Company, something my mum always told me I should seek in abundance and hold onto wherever I found it. In Prizren, when I spoke with the uncle of the chef at Noja, I told him that this was the mantra I tried to live by in my social life. In one of the few more serious moments he had during our conversation, he waggled a finger at me, looked at me through his bushy eyebrows, and said earnestly: ‘Yes, but you have to be good company.’
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