Discover unique Balkan flavours with these traditional recipes
For my grandmother, cooking beautiful food and feeding people was the ultimate manifestation of love. When she died suddenly in the summer of 2011, it struck me that I would never again be able to learn from her and understand the intricacies of everything she did in the kitchen.
In that moment, the idea of The Balkan Kitchen flew into my mind and has refused to give me peace since.
I knew then that I needed to set out on a journey to teach myself to cook like the inspiring women and men in my family, and to recreate their recipes as well as the flavours so vividly preserved in my memories.
In this way, I thought they would somehow always be with me. I did not realise it then, but cooking was to become my way of dealing with grief, with what we call taga – a sorrow, a yearning, a love for a person, a time, a place. I have heard it said that home is where your eyes first see sunlight. Even though I had left out of choice, there was an irrepressible pull to my place of birth, to the Macedonian sun, to the Balkans.
Sharing my food became a way to share a part of myself with people I loved so that they could experience the tastes of my childhood and understand me and where I came from. It has, in recent years, also become a way for me to teach my son where a part of him comes from. His eyes may have first seen British sunlight, but his soul carries those threads of Balkan flavours and memories.
The Balkan Kitchen, £27, Quadrille
So, what then is ‘Balkan cuisine’? It is the culmination of waves of human evolution and migration, the product of both nascent civilisations and occupying empires that have traversed or dominated the region, either fleetingly or for prolonged periods of time. This is not uniquely Balkan. There are many parts of our world that have been the thoroughfares of human history. But what is unique is the sheer variety of influences found in the Balkans at any given point in history, which over time have created an extraordinarily profuse Balkan heterogeneity – in all respects, but especially the cuisine.
It is a cuisine born at a crossroads of human history, on the line of demarcation between the Hellenistic and non-Hellenistic world, the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, Byzantine Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism, a Muslim Ottoman Empire and a Christian Western Europe. The Balkans have been the non-aligned buffer between the communist East and the capitalist West and, most recently, the ‘other’ Europe on the doorstep of the European Union. A frontier where ideas and ideologies were born or arrived, intermingled, were adapted and hybridised, and which remained or continued their travels and influence in all directions.
It is a place where baklava and syrup-soaked sweets so beloved across the Levant sit comfortably alongside the creamy cakes and pastries of Central Europe. Where the Ottoman penchant for wrapping and stuffing vegetables, greens and fruits has taken on a life of its own – often combined with the Balkan obsession for fermentation, such as in sour cabbage sarma. Where the mixture of civilisations produced different results depending on the length of exposure to a relevant influence – for example, the southern Balkans, which remained under Ottoman rule longest, retain more of a Levantine flavour in their cuisine. Where traces can be found from across the world: Europe, the Levant, Persia, Asia and the Americas, the latter in the corn, tomatoes, peppers and beans introduced via the Columbian Exchange and Ottoman Empire.
The cuisine obviously differs across the region, reflecting the distinct natural conditions, flora and fauna, climate, topography, socioeconomic and political factors, culture, ethnicity, religion, family traditions and preferences of each area.
