Gluten Free Serbian Kolac

When my friend Gigi was coming over to celebrate Serbian Christmas with us, I wanted to develop a gluten-free version of my treasured family recipe for Božićni kolač (pronounced bo-zheech-nee KO-lach) so that I could share this delicious tradition with her. It took several iterations, and I finally got something that comes close, very close. I hope you'll enjoy this moist, chewy, mildly sweet creation.

The big discovery was including whey protein. I found a couple of sites, including Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, that recommended whey protein isolate, which is really pricey. Instead, I ordered a container of my favorite whey concentrate brand, Jarrow unflavored whey protein. It has a little more non-protein content than whey protein isolate, but it still magically transformed my loaves into something much, much more like regular wheat bread. The crust, crumb, and rise are all better. The stretchy, tough characteristic of wheat gluten is the missing link that whey protein provides.

Another innovation here is the use of corn flour. Corn flour is absolutely not traditional in any holiday kolach recipe I can imagine. But in this recipe, it adds a robust quality to the flavor and texture of this brioche-like bread that was otherwise missing from these rice-flour based loaves.

This recipe is for the mini-loaf that I made. I image that you can multiply it as desired for a bigger round of kolac (kolach) as you desire. However, I haven't tried it. If you do, please let me know your results.

I used Namaste brand all-purpose gluten-free flour mix. I have no idea if this recipe will work with other mixes. I haven't done much gluten-free baking.

I can vouch for the success of the metric weight measures. I provide here cup equivalents of the measures, but such equivalents are notoriously unreliable, so I can't vouch for them.

From Gluten-Free on a Shoestring's book Gluten-Free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread, I also learned that it's safe to heat your yeast-liquid solution much higher than everyone else tells you. Nicole, the author/blogger at that site, reports that the thermal death of  yeast occurs at 140º F. Warming milk or water closer to this temperature is far more effective than the tepid 100º to 110º F that is recommended practically everywhere else.

If you use salted butter, use less salt.

Note that you want corn flour and not corn meal.

1/2 cup whole milk, warmed to 120º F to 135º F
1/2 tsp. active dry yeast
1 Tbs. sugar
1 egg, separated
1 Tbs. unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for greasing the pan
2 g (1/4 tsp.) salt
80 g (1/2 cup + 2 Tbs.) Namaste brand all-purpose gluten-free baking mix
15 g ((1/4 cup + 1 tsp.) Jarrow unflavored whey concentrate
20 g (3 Tbs.) Bob's Red Mill gluten-free corn flour

Sprinkle the yeast over the surface of the warm milk. Add the sugar. Stir together until completely dissolved. Place the mixture someplace warm for about 15 minutes for the yeast to activate. I turn on my oven to its lowest temperature and place the mixture inside. I turn off the oven when it reaches temperature, and let the inner warmth just coast.

Stir together the gluten-free baking mix, whey powder, corn flour and salt.

Add the dry mix to the yeast-sugar-milk mix.

Add the egg yolk and stir the mixture vigorously. You'll have a silky, stretchy, soft mass.

Reserve a teaspoon or so of the egg white for brushing the top of the loaf later. Place it in a teacup or similar vessel.

Beat the egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Do not overbeat, or it will break down into liquid and won't form bubbles anymore. Stir the beaten white into the dough. You'll have a softer, still silky and stretchy mass.

Grease a small loaf pan. Mine is a stoneware pan with a capacity of 1 1/2 cups.

Pour the batter into the pan. Let rise an hour or so in a warm location. I use the inside of the oven, set to 150º F and turned off to coast at warmth, as before.

When the bread is nicely risen, remove it from the oven (if it's in there) and turn the oven to 400º F.

Brush the top of the dough all over with the reserved egg white. This will bake into a beautiful gloss.

Make an aluminum foil tent for the bread pan that leaves lots of room for it to rise more. You want to protect the top from over-browning, create a little steam chamber for nice baking, and also be sure that the rising dough doesn't stick to the inside of the foil. Cover the pan with the tent.

Place the loaf pan in the 400º F oven. Immediately turn the temperature down to 350º F.

Bake 1 hour. Remove and check with a toothpick. When it's done, it'll make a hollow sound when you thump it, and a toothpick will come out mostly clean but with a few moist crumbs clinging to it.

Remove from the pan and cool on a rack.

Slice and enjoy! Prijatno!

Cellular Peptide Cake -- with Mint Frosting

Data: "What kind of cake is that?"

Worf: "It is a cellular peptide cake. With mmmint frosting."

This exchange takes place in Act 1 of Phantasms (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 7). Data has discovered that, although he's an android, he can dream. In Phantasms he discovers how disturbing dreams can be, when he wanders into Ten-Forward and finds Counselor Troi as a giant cake with a slice taken out of her, no less.

No worries, Troi assures Data in the closing scene: "Sometimes a cake is just a cake." She presents him with a cake in the shape of Data.

Ethan Phillips's, in The Star Trek Cookbook, provides a sponge cake recipe for you to make your own cellular peptide cake. However, his is made with 10, count 'em, 10 yolks. No whites. First of all, this will yield a deep yellow cake with a relatively dense crumb, not like the ethereally pale and loosely bubbled cake Mr. Worf is forking in. Second: 10 yolks! Not when I'm paying four bucks a dozen for fantastic, farm-direct, organic eggs. And what am I going to do with 10 whites, eat egg white omelettes? Make angel food cakes? Say, what is it about angel food cake that gives it that bone-white paleness and exceedingly open crumb? Hmm, could it be ... egg whites?

The sponge cake found in Mark Bittman's sweeping How to Cook Everything is made with an equal measure of yolks and whites. It gave me just the right spongey consistency. Because I made a half recipe, using small 6" cake pans, and because the Keene Organic's eggs are so big, I only needed to use two. (I weighed them out to find two Keene eggs that equalled three standard large ones.) A very simple recipe. Basically, beat yolks and whites separately with a little sugar, fold them together and stir in flour and a pinch of salt. It was really delicious, not least because those eggs are SO good. "You made this with a sponge!" Ulysses proclaimed.

The Star Trek Cookbook's frosting is chocolate mint, which makes no sense to me at all, because the only color you can make it after adding cocoa powder is going to be -- brown. Besides, did you hear Mr. Worf say, "Chocolate mint frosting?" Of course not. I got mine Starfleet-uniform blue by using Wilton's Sky Blue color and adding just enough No-Taste Red to shift the hue just right. I used my favorite buttercream recipe, which is from the C&H powdered sugar bag (1 pound sugar, 2/3 stick of butter, 1/4 cup milk, 1/8 teaspoon salt), plus a little cream and glycerin to get it really creamy and really smooth. Plus about 3/4 teaspoon mint extract which in retrospect was probably three tmes more than was needed.

I traced the insignia from the Star Fleet Technical Manual. Don't you have one?

I used the tracing paper stencil to outline with black royal icing, and then filled white buttercream using a star tip, appropriately enough. I sprinkled gold and silver shimmer dust, also by Wilton. over the white. Sparkly!

Purists will note that the angular bar behind the insignia is closer to the design of a comm badge circa 2370, as in the STNG movies, while Counselor Troi wore a badge with an oval shape behind the arrowhead at the time of Phantasms, which takes place in the 2360s. So sue me.

Goodbye, chompsticks

Yesterday, we had spaghetti (low-carb from Dreamfields, the best!) and meatballs for breakfast. Fabulous red sauce, Newman's Organic marinara bolstered with caramelized onions and multicolored peppers. Last week I turned several pounds of on-sale ground chuck into many quart sacks of meatballs and froze 'em. Grated Romano. A satisfying start to a Sunday.

Ulysses joined us at table, new but catching on with him. He didn't want the red sauce, but was happy for me to squeeze some Annie's organic ketchup (the best!) over his pasta, along with plenty of romano. He even was thrilled to have meatballs in his bowl, although he did not deign to eat one.

His utensil of choice: chopsticks. He asked for them by name, but for the first time really called them "chopsticks." Up until now, he's always said "chompsticks." A great name for them, I've always thought, and plenty more descriptive than the real one!

No more "chompsticks," I guess; once he switches over to the regular word, there's never any going back to the cute-kid version. Thus our "cooking room" now is just a kitchen. We no longer hear of "PP3O" and "R2D-toon" as the names of that loveable pair of Star Wars droids.

At least Admiral Ackbar, he of The Return of the Jedi, is still, in Ulysses's words, "Eggroll Ackbar."

Michael Pollan is coming to town!

I'm so excited! Wednesday the Lakeview Libary and Community Groundworks at Troy Gardens is having a potluck and discussion in the evening to discuss In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan as a kickoff event to his visit this week.

I'm getting up early tomorrow before work to bake an apple crisp (not low-carb, but reduced sugar, at least) made with apples from a co-worker's home orchard and from Green's Pleasant Acres, where Jennifer and U and I made our annual pilgrimage this past weekend. On Thursday, the man himself is speaking at the Kohl Center on the UW-Madison campus. On Saturday morning, it's REAP Food Group's annual Food for Thought Festival, where Pollan is the keynote speaker.

I've been a Pollan fan ever since I read his eloquent "Naturally" when it appeared as the New York Times Magazine cover story in 2001. I swooned over every beautiful word in The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World.

I don't agree with Pollan on everything, but if more people turned on to what he's saying, wow, this would be a better place. I wish Obama had taken his advice to turn those manicured acres surrounding the White House into sustainable farmland growing veg for presidential family meals and state feasts! What a message that would have been.


My main gripe – my only gripe, really – with Pollan is his anti-meat, anti-saturated fat stance. It irked me whenever it came up In Defense of Food. He consistently treated the unhealthfulness of saturated fat as a given, even though in several passages he spelled out evidence that it is not. He says humans can live healthfully without meat, but not without plants – but surely he must be aware of the Inuit and the Masai, whose traditional diets included little to no plant food.

His main arguments against eating meat turn on arguments against industrially produced meat – but every one of those can also be used as arguments against all industrially produced food, including his beloved plant leaves. Which, by the way Mike, ya can't live on eating mostly them! Environmental, ethical – all of it. The recent book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Kieth (a fellow ex-vegetarian, and a feminist – I haven't read the book yet, but I like her already!) spells out the horrific cost to animal life – in greater numbers – that factory farming exacts. Woe to the wildlife that crosses the path of a harvesting machine, for instance.

That's why I'm staying up tonight making a shirt that sasses back at his famous dictum, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Gee, I hope someday I come up with a famous dictum that people quote all over the place. In the meantime, here's the design. And, for readers who aren't familiar with it, here's the cover of his book which I'm spoofing, with Pollan's oft-quoted manifesto printed on the yellow band around the romaine. (Bibb?)

To that I say this: "Eat food. Mostly cheese."

That's my Wisconsin manifesto.

Everything goes better with...

Don's mother arrived from Savannah on the Greyhound bus Tuesday evening for a long visit. For years she's been saying she wants to be here when Ulysses starts kindergarten, and now here it is. His first day will be Sept. 1. Tonight we're all going to the elementary school for registration. He's already registered, but we can meet his teacher, see his room and so forth.

The bus rolled in from via Milwaukee around 7:30 and we stopped at the China Wok on our way home to pick up our traditional Chinese feast, as we do every time she comes to visit. This time Ulysses seemed to know what Chinese food was, or at least he crowed about it and was thrilled when Don came out of the strip mall storefront laden with a heavy bag. We had been strolling along the shrubbery-lined walkways with Don's mother, who U calls "Ama," trying to get that rubbery road trip feeling out of her legs. "Chinese food!" he called. "You got the Chinese food!"

Back home we ate what seemed vats of egg foo yung with gravy, won ton soup, pork fried rice, lo mein with all sorts of seafood and meat -- it's the Wok's house special -- beef with broccoli. We each got an egg roll, too. That was Ulysses's pick.

He had his on a plate with a plenty of duck sauce and Annie's natural ketchup. Round and round went the end of the egg roll in the custom sauce between every bite. The orange and red swirl had to be replenished once or twice over the course of the egg roll. At the end of the meal, when we lifted the plate there was a ring of crunchy bits in red sauce that had built up around it over the course of the meal, left neatly behind like a reverse stencil of some kind.

When Ama got in the fold-down futon couch/bed in the living room for the night, Ulysses jumped in with her, smiling happily. "Read me a story!" he said. "Read me the scary book!" (Bears in the Night by the Stan and Jan Berenstain.)

"I'm too tired to read a book to you," said Ama. "I'll tell you a story. A story about when I was a little girl."

Ulysses's eyes shone in anticipation.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl and her two brothers. They went walking in the woods and they found some blackberry bushes. They were the juiciest, sweetest, darkest blackberries ever."

Ulysses was fairly bouncing with joy.

"They picked and picked and picked the blackberries and then they took them home. Their mother brought out some cream...."

Ulysses burst out, "...and then they put it all in a bowl with ketchup!"

.

What kind of cake? Birthday.

Ulysses is into knights and castles these days, so I got the idea to make him a cake shaped like a castle, with crenolated turrets made from flat-bottomed ice cream cones, and spires of inverted pointy cones. I was going to bake in a big, rectangular pan, cut out the center for a courtyard, and build up the corner towers with the material I had cut out from the center. Graham cracker drawbridge and door. Licorice ropes.

"Ulysses, your birthday is coming," I told him a couple of weeks ago. "How would you like a cake shaped like a castle?"

"A castle cake? No," he said.

"For your birthday cake," I said. "With towers and a gate and a courtyard."

"No!" he said.

Obviously he didn't understand what I meant, I thought. I showed him some pictures of castle cakes on the Internet. "No," he said to all of them. "No cake castle."

What's with this kid? I thought. Doesn't he realize how fabulous this cake will be? I started up the conversation a few more times over the following week. It always went the same way.

Then I had a brainstorm. "Ulysses," I said, "Your birthday is coming up. I will make you any kind of cake you want, in any shape. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?"

He answered without hesitation. "A mountain."

I was embarrassed at how silly I'd been. Whose birthday was it, anyway?

"A mountain!" I said, "Do you want your mountain to be a volcano?"

"No."

It was such a great idea, I assumed he'd misunderstood the question. I asked him a few more times, describing how the cake would look, with lava and all.

"No."

So I supposed I wasn't completely cured of whatever led me to try to feist the castle idea on him. I dropped the volcano idea and thought I'd draw out some more details.

"Do you want the mountain to have a tunnel going through it?"

"Mmmmm.... yes," he said, decisively.

Uh-oh. How on earth was I going to put a tunnel in a cake? Well, I'd walked myself right into that one. I got on the Internet and found a cake that looked promising. It even had a Thomas the Tank Engine track running through it, with trains going round and round! Perfect -- we've got all that. Donald looked at the picture and description and explained to me how it was made (he's genius at that sort of thing, unlike me). Great! I could do that!

I showed Ulysses. "Is this what you want for your birthday cake, something like this?"

He looked pleased. "Yes," he said, like a happy client to an architect who had finally figured out the assignment.

I spent some time figuring out how to put the track together on the board I'd be building the cake on. Took some pictures to guide me in reconstructing it later. Over the week, I gathered materials, and thought about how to build this thing. Emptied and cleaned a big tomato can for the tunnel (it would be slit down one side and then stretched open).

* * *

Yesterday evening, Ulysses and I were at the grocery store. I was shopping for the candies to make into jelly bean boulders, peanut cluster rocks, pretzels for logs and so forth.

I thought I'd better do a reality check. I squatted down to Ulysses, who was in the little car in front of the shopping cart, and said, "Ulysses. You know your birthday is coming." He looked at me. "I will make you any kind of cake you want for your birthday party. What kind of cake do you want?"

"A birthday cake," he said. "Round birthday cake."

"Do you want it to look like a mountain?"

He looked at me as if I had just turned purple. "No."

"Do you want a cake shaped like a mountain with a tunnel in it?'

"No."

"Do you want a mountain cake with a tunnel and a train going through it, like the picture we looked at and you said that was what you wanted for your birthday cake?"

"No! No!" His voice began to rise in panic.

"Okay, okay, you want a round birthday cake," I said, switching tracks. "Do you want it to be chocolate?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want it to be chocolate on the outside and chocolate on the inside, or yellow on the inside?"

"Chocolate outside and yellow inside," he said.

After a bit we went to the baking aisle and I showed him a cake mix with a picture on the box of a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. "Does this look like the kind of cake you want for your birthday cake?"

"Yes!" he said with excitement. I saw a flash of confusion cross his face when I put the box back on the shelf, but it was gone quickly when he heard me say, "OK. That's the kind of cake I'll make for your party."

"Yes! Birthday cake! Round! Chocolate outside, yellow inside!" he said.

So that is the current plan for the Sunday party. Meantime I already have a double batch of frosting (half is chocolate), enough for the enormous mountain, which would have used two cake recipes.

Maybe I'll make a small mountain cake for my own amusement.

Kupus: Serbian cabbage soup

The most fundamental heirloom recipes are often most at risk for being lost in the sands of times. Why? One reason is that "everyone knows" how to make them, and so nobody writes them down. Another is that they're so close to us, so intertwined with daily life and the act of ordinary eating, that the people who live with these recipes don't even think of them as recipes.

Consider the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. If you were raised in the USA, you might snort and say, "PBJ? You don't need a recipe for that. You just make it." And that is precisely what would make a recipe for, or a really accurate and comprehensive description of, that thing difficult to find a generation after it has gone out of style.

Years ago, I had some friends over for a writing session. I had just made a pot of soup, so I shared it with them. Never would I have dreamed of making it especially for guests; it was just ordinary soup.

They went crazy over it. They demanded the recipe. The richly flavored broth, the big, rustic chunks of well varied vegetables, the savory rings of sliced sausage – they enthused over the most ordinary features in their ordinary bowls. I was taken aback. "There is no recipe," I said, "It's just soup."

"What kind of soup?" they wanted to know.

"Cabbage soup?" I said, feeling like I was giving a flip answer. The soup was built around the cabbage. I didn't know what else to call it.

"Well, can we have the recipe for your cabbage soup?"

"Um, OK," I said, and then never did anything about it. The idea seemed weird, writing a recipe for this. Wasn't it obvious from looking at, how it was done? You go into the kitchen and start putting things into a pot until you have soup. What was there to say?

It took me years to notice that I was responding just as home cooks too often do about the everyday food that is the bedrock of their own culture's cuisine. I've been on the other side of the conversation myself, trying to pry open the oyster that somehow won't believe there's a pearl. There's no recipe. It's just minestrone. There's no recipe. It's just tempeh with onions. Or chile ancho stew, or chicken and dumplings.

And that's how stuff gets lost.

Reflecting on my ordinary soup, which seemed so inchoate, so spontaneous and free of recipe or method, I realized there was plenty I knew about it. First of all, it has a name: Kupus. The "u"s are long, as in cuckoo, and the stress is on the first syllable. It means "cabbage soup," and it's the same as the word for cabbage itself. Sauerkraut, an ingredient I'd forgotten to include for years, is called "Kiseli Kupus" (KEE-seh-lee KOO-poos), or sour cabbage. So the whole thing is sort of cabbage to the third power.

I didn't make this soup up, as I had thought (actually, I wasn't thinking). I learned it from my mother, who made it often. I do a couple of things differently than she did; she used a can of Campbell's vegetable or cream of mushroom soup to fortify the broth, while I use a couple of
cups of my homemade stock -- the type I usually have on hand is chicken. I use a wider range of root veg also. I remember her using potato and carrot; I like to include parsnip and rutabaga as well.

Also, I include the soft, inner green leaves of a celery bunch in my aromatics, sauteeing it along with the onion. This is a trick I learned from my macrobiotic years, along with the roll cut, which I use for the parsley.

This is one of those dishes that everyone makes, and everyone makes a little differently. My mother made it different ways, too: sometimes with a hamhock, sometimes with no meat at all, sometimes with kielbasa as I've described below. We called whatever sausage we used "kobasica" (ko-BAH-seet-sa), the Serbian word for sausage. The vegetable combo varied, too.

Kupus is a wonderful, comforting soup, especially in wintertime. I love to have plenty of broth in my bowl, and I always take an extra moment to select a spoon that will be pleasant to sip from. I like to have a big chunk of cabbage in my bowl, and carve off bits with the spoon as I go.

The simplicity of the seasoning is, I think, elegant: salt, bay leaves, parsely. Whole peppercorns exude a soft, ember-like warmth that grinding shatters and sharpens (I've tried); it's key to the soup's character. Parsnips, rutabagas, even potatoes -- these are optional. Whole peppercorns are essential.

Kupus (Serbian cabbage soup)

Ingredients (listed in the order they're added to the pot)

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced
• the inside of a bunch of celery, including leaves and tender shoots
• 2 outer stalks of celery, cut in 1/2" crescents
• 4 carrots, cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 parsnips, roll cut
• 1/2 rutabaga, cut in 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/4" slabs
• 2 cups homemade chicken stock or beef stock, brought to the boil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 10 whole peppercorns
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, or 3 tablespoons dried parsley
• 1 small cabbage, or 1/2 cabbage, cut in chunks that include the core
• 2–3 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut in 8 or • 12 pieces (cut longways, then 3 or 4 horizontal cuts)
• 1–2 packages of Polish kielbasa (or ring baloney, or a big hamhock), cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 cups sauerkraut, with the juice (Gundelsheimer is my favorite!)
• several cups water, brought to the boil

You will need a big pot, at least 6 quarts capacity.

Heat the oil in the pot over medium-low. Add onions and cook until they're a light golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the inner parts of the celery and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the carrots, parsnips and rutabagas. They don't need to hit the pot at the same time; just keep prepping and adding to the pot as you get them ready.

In a separate pot, heat the stock to a boil and add it to your sauteed veg. Add the salt, peppercorns, bay leaves and parsely. From this point on, it is not necessary to stir after adding anything.

In yet another pot, or a tea kettle, bring several cups of water to boil, but don't add it just yet.

Prep and add the cabbage. When you prep the cabbage, don't cut out the core. That's essential for keeping it in big chunks that stay together during cooking. Just slice off the very bottom, if it looks brownish to you, and discard the outer leaves. Then cut lengthwise through the core to quarter it, and then cut that horizontally into pieces. You'll also have lots of leafy pieces that aren't connected to the core. After you add the cabbage, start a timer for one hour.

Add the potatoes. Add the kielbasa. Add the sauerkraut.

Add hot water until the pot is full to about two inches from the top. Everything should be submerged.

Your soup will be done one hour after you added the cabbage. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more salt if needed.

Grind some fresh pepper over the individual servings. It's a different kind of heat than the warmth of the cooked peppercorns. In case you didn't know, don't eat the bay leaves!

Enjoy this soup with some rustic bread for dipping, or all by itself. This is a filling meal in a bowl.

I'm a volunteer!

I just signed up to be a volunteer recipe tester for Cook's Country magazine, which I love. If I had to pick a favorite magazine, I'd have to say CC edges out even Cook's Illustrated in my affections, because of the 50's-ish retro production style, what with its ever-so pastel-cast color photos and lightly country elements.

Supposedly I'll be getting notifications of recipes to test every couple of weeks. I can try them or skip them as I please. After I prepare the dish, I send in my notes.

I get to give Cook's Country my two cents! And to think, I was just telling someone my dream job would be as a writer and tester in their kitchens.

Close enough for now!

Dan i Noć (Day and Night Serbian bar cookies)

I've always loved the name of these cookies – "Dan i Noć" (pro nounced "DAHN ee NOCH,") translates as "Day and Night." They show their sense in such a forthright way. Day and night: a light layer and a dark layer. What could be more sensible? The layer of apricot jam between the day and the night makes sense, too: a shimmering sunset – or perhaps a sunrise – of transluscent orange.

These cookies – or little cakes, as you might consider them – are generous and rich. The recipe includes a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, darn close to a half pound of chocolate, a whole jar of apricot preserves. Speaking of which, I recommend spending the extra couple of bucks to get really good apricot preserves. Look for apricots as the first ingredient, and real sugar as opposed to high-fructose corn syrup or other sweeteners. (Fruit-only sweetened is good, too.) If you buy more than one jar and do a side-by-side taste test at home, you will see how big a difference it really makes.

I remember having these at the home of my aunt and uncle when we would visit around Christmastime. it was one of the sitni kolaći (little cookies) specialties of my Grandaunt Naka (b. 1913), whom I shared more about here. Like Naka's Vanil Grancle, these feature apricots, that grow so well around her native town of Kikinda.

My cousin tells me Naka got the the recipe from her best friend, also from Kikinda. The best friend's family helped Naka's family in some way during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, but I don't know the story beyond that.

Here's Ulysses in January 2008 (nearly four years old in this picture) enjoying a piece of Dan i Noć.

Shortly after this photo was taken, that laptop stopped working. Turned out it was plugged up with cookie crumbs.

I'm posting this today as a hat tip to my niece, Anne (she is the daughter of my cousin, and by the Serbian way of looking at family relations, that makes her more of a niece to me than anything else), 7. She loves Dan i Noć, and was sad to discover there wasn't any at the family get-together in Baltimore this year. My cousin wrote, "She was really, really bummed when she heard that no one made dan i noc. I remembered telling her to choose either gitar [another exceptional sitni kolacic in the family, I'll post that recipe too] or dan i noc as her favorite and she chose gitar so that's what i made but it seems i may have forgotten to tell her why i was asking. she got tears in her eyes, made me so sad!

"so this weekend we're making dan i noc. that works because i wouldn't have had time to make it with her before Bozic [Serbian Christmas] this time and making it together is just as important as having it for Bozic!"

Here's Anne last year (she was Annie then) enjoying the Dan i Noć she made with her mother for Božić 2008.

Recipe: Dan i Noć

Filling
1 jar apricot preserves

Noć (Night)
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
6 squares (or 6 ounces chips) semisweet baking chocolate (each square is one ounce)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Dan (Day)
Same ingredients as the Noć, but without the chocolate:
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Melt chocolate
Melt the chocolate. Use low heat and stir often, so the chocolate won't seize or scorch. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, a flame tamer, or a double boiler if you have one. By the time you add the chocolate to other ingredients, it should be liquidy, but cool enough that it won't cause the eggs to cook on contact.

2. Soft-bake the Noć
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Stir in the chocolate and vanilla.

Whisk together flour and baking powder. Mix these dry ingredients into the wet mixture. This will make a soupy batter.

Line a rectangular baking pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil. No greasing is needed. Pour in the batter. Shake sideways, or rap the pan sharply against your counter, to knock out extra air bubbles. You can see in my photos that I missed this step – see what happen?

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. It needs to be firm enough that you can spread jam over it, but not baked through, That is, at this point a toothpick inserted in it will not come out anywhere near clean.

3. Prep the Dan
While the Noć is in the oven, prepare the batter for the Dan. Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, beat in vanilla, whisk together flour and baking powder, stir dry mix into wet mix.

4. Apply the jam layer
Remove from oven. Spread the apricot preserves evenly over the dark Noć layer while still warm.

5. Add the Dan layer
Carefully pour the light batter evenly overtop the contents of the pan.

6. Final bake
Put the pan back in the oven for another 30 minutes, or until a knife (or cake pick) inserted in the center comes out clean. The instructions I received say to check the Dan, but I found that the Noć took longer to bake through, so make sure your Dan and your Noć are baked throughout.

The Dan will be beautifully golden brown on top. If the Dan is as browned as it needs to be, but the cake inside still needs more baking, cover the pan tightly with foil (or place a cookie sheet over it) so the top won't overbake.

7. Cool and cut
Let cool. Carefully lift the whole cake from the pan and transfer to a large cutting surface. Slice into rectangular pieces about the width and length of your index finger. Cut carefully and methodically so that your pieces are evenly sized, with straight sides and square corners. I used the patterns on my wooden cutting board as my guides.







The finger-sized pieces are lovely and make hearty portions of this rich dessert. However, after a while I cut some of them into thirds, and found this size makes a wonderful bite-sized treat.

Badnje Vece – Serbian Christmas Eve – Menu

Tomorrow, January 6, will be Serbian Christmas Eve. Technically, it's called Badnji Dan during the day, and in the evening Badnje Vece. If you guess that "Dan" means day and "Vece" evening from this, you'd be correct. But as I remember, we always just called it Badnje Vece, all day long, in my household growing up.

The photo shows my Badnje Vece table from 2005. Here's my blog post from that year.

I wrote a bunch about Serbian Christmas (Bozic) customs in an article several years ago. Here's a link to it on my online article archive:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/serbian-christmas.html

Badnje Vece is a day of fasting from meat, fowl, dairy and egg products. But it's not a vegan day! The main course of the Badnje Vece dinner is fish.

The traditional menu for this meal is extensive. And, meat and dairy or no, it is as filling a repast as any I've experienced. In the early 1990s, my mother, who was born in 1920 in Ruma, a town in Srem, near Belgrade, described the Badne Vece meals she remembered from her youth. I wrote it down in my recipe notebook. Here's what she told me.

Badnje Vece menu

• Kolac on the table, but not eaten until Bozic proper
• Fruit – cooked prunes
• Posna pogaca (flatbread)
• Corba od patlidjan (tomato soup)
• Pasulj (kidney bean and onion salad)
• Rezanci c makom (noodles with ground poppy seed)
• Rezanci c badem (noodles with almonds)
• Riba (fish)

In addition, a friend told me that apples with nuts and honey are also traditional. Just slice the apples and put out a little bowl of ground walnuts and a little bowl of honey. These are put together on the fly, one at a time, by the eater – like chips and salsa. You pick up an apple slice and dip the end into the honey. Then you dip the honeyed, sticky end into the walnuts. Presto: you've prepared yourself one lovely bite of apple with nuts and honey.

The beans are delicious, and so easy to make. Here's the recipe my mother gave me. I doubt her household had canned beans in the 1920s, but it's possible, as her grandparents owned a general store. If there were commercial canned beans at that time, that's where they would be, after all.

Pasulj
(Kidney bean salad)

one can light red kidney beans, including the liquid
one small onion, diced (about 1/3 cup)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/8 teaspoon salt
several grindings of pepper
1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

Mix all in a bowl.

Chill at least a few hours, or overnight.

Baka Ljubica's Vanilice crescents

This recipe of my grandmother's comes to me from my aunt, who fortunately has kept the recipe all these years. These were my Ujka (uncle) Sava's favorite cookies when he was a little boy.

Just to give an idea of the timelines involved here, my grandmother Ljubica (b. Stefanovich) Jankovic was born in 1888, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My mother was born in 1920, and her brother (my uncle), was born in 1923. So, want to talk about an heirloom recipe, this is it.

A few notes: my grandmother, who we called Baka, did not use an egg. However, these cookies are very fragile without one. When my aunt (my Ujna) would make these for my Ujka, she started adding an egg for strength. I made these for the first time this month, specifically to ship to my Ujka and family for Christmas, and I didn't want to take any chances with shipping a box of broken cookies, so I used the egg variant.

These hyper-vanilified cookies use a whopping two tablespoons of vanilla in a batch. Not only that, but they're dusted with vanilla sugar. Baka would place a vanilla bean in powdered sugar for a week or so in advance of making these cookies, and have a wonderfully perfumed sugar to dust with. If you don't want to incur the expense of a vanilla bean, you can pour a teaspoon or so of vanilla into a container and then place two cups of powdered sugar right on top, and wait a few days or weeks for a similar effect.

I didn't plan ahead, and I found myself making the cookies the day before I needed to ship them. Not enough time to make vanilla sugar! So I placed vanilla directly into the resealable container in which I was packing the cookies, and packed the cookies in powdered sugar. The result: I had a great insulator for my cookies that protected them from breakage, and by the time the cookies arrived by UPS ground, and then were opened a couple of days later, the powdered sugar had become vanilla sugar!

Vanilice
(Vah-NEE-leet-seh)
Serbian vanilla crescents

3 cups all-purpose flour
10 tablespoons sugar
3 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups walnuts, finely ground (use food processor or coffee grinder)
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1 whole egg (optional – will make cookies less fragile)
vanilla powdered sugar to garnish (directions below, you need to make this vanilla sugar in advance)

Mix together all ingredients except egg and powdered sugar.

Add egg, if using, and mix in.

When ingredients are combined, form a small ball, a tablespoon or so and then shape the ball into a crescent. I found that the prettiest crescents are made like this: Shape a tablespoon of dough into a ball. Roll the ball back and forth between your palms until it forms a rope the width of your palms. Roll the rope with a few more back-and-forth motions. The ends of the rope will extend beyond your palms, but will be tapered. Shape this into a crescent, with the points nearly touching.

Place the crescents on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 350 until just barely browned, about 10 min.

Remove from oven. Place on cooling racks.

Meanwhile, prep a pan, like a lasagna pan, with the powdered vanilla sugar. While still warm but no longer hot, drop several crescents at a time into the sugar and roll them around, shaking the pan, until they're well coated.

Make the vanilla sugar several days ahead of time by pounding a vanilla bean into the powdered sugar with a mortar and pestle. Or, put vanilla extract at the bottom of a container of powdered sugar several days ahead of time. The vanilla flavor and aroma will infuse the powdered sugar.

Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle

In the past, I've blogged about these exquisite little jam-filled Serbian sandwich cookies that are a family heirloom. See:

http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2008/02/vanilice-va-nee-leet-seh-serbian.html
and
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2005/12/vanilice-serbian-holiday-cookies.html

Those posts told the story of my attempt to recreate, from memory, my Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle (VAH-neel GRAHNT-sleh).

Today I share the exciting news that I managed to get the original recipe! My grandaunt had written down her recipe.

In Western genealogical terms, I guess she's not really a grandaunt to me, as that refers to the aunt of one's parents. But it's the only term that seems to make sense. Yulia (b. Joanovic) Pecic, whom we all called Naka, was my aunt's mother. More specifically, she was the mother of the wife of the brother of my mother. The mother of my mother's sister-in-law. Get it?

Born in 1913, Naka was from Kikinda, a municipality in what's today the Serbian Banat, part of a larger historical and geographical region known as the Banat, which happens to be extraordinarily well suited for the cultivation of apricots.

The Banat overall straddles three nations, as the borders are drawn today: Serbia, Romania and Hungary. The word can be loosely translated as "province," and whereas once there were lots of banats within the Austro-Hungarian empire and within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, this is the area that's meant when you just say "Banat" or "The Banat." It's more or less identical to a region called "The Banat of Temeswar" that was circumscribed by an 18th century treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, by which the area was within the Kingdom of Hungary but controlled by the Ottomans. Or something like that.

Kikinda is also in the Voivodina, a word that means a sort of duchy (a "voivod" would be a duke), which has historically been an autonomous region relative to the succession of empires, kingdoms and nation-states that have surrounded it. Or something like that. The Voivodina encompasses at least the Serbian part of the Banat, as near as I can figure.

But don't take my word for all this. Poke around on Wikipedia and the many other sources available on the Net and in print, and if you can figure it out better, let me know. I'm no expert. (And by the way, the experts disagree.)

At any rate, when Naka's mother was born, in 1870, Kikinda was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

These cookies represent the intersection of the horticultural tradition of apricot growing in the Banat with the sophistication of Austro-Hungarian cuisine, especially its culinary tradition of baked sweets.

* * *

Earlier this month, I tried out the recipe and sent a batch of grancle east to Baltimore, where my cousins and my uncle and aunt sampled them just this weekend. They report success! The recipe yields a cookie that's true to the original.

The only thing yet to work on, though, is the thickness of the cookie. The pictures you see show a cookie about twice as high as the original. The instructions below will yield cookies that are thinner and have a more favorable jam-to-cookie ratio than the ones in the photo. Also they'll be less of a Dagwood experience to get your teeth around.

Over the decades, I had misremembered the name of Vanil Grancle as Vanilice (vah-NEEL-eet-she). Vanilice, or vanilitse, it turns out, is a different Serbian cookie altogether. In fact, my uncle Sava's favorite cookie from his boyhood was my grandmother's Vanilice. Fortunately, I was able to get the recipe for that from my aunt, via my cousin. I'll give that in a different post

Here's my cousin in early 2008, comparing the photo and description of my 2006 cookies to Naka's grancle.

your vanilice look just like my grandmother naka's granzle (grantsle) except her top round circle cut out was smaller. they were my favorite cookies growing up and haven't had them since she passed away 5 years ago. she used to make them up until the time she died, despite the fact that her hands were almost crippled from arthitis and i used to eat each one slowly and carefully thinking of her crippled fingers making them lovingly for us.

mama never did make these herself, again the apricot jam connection to naka's recipes, wonder if they are austro-hungarian influenced because banat was occupied by austro-hungarian empire.

baka's recipe that mama recalls is the crescent. i just realized that if you remember a friend of our family saying they baked hundreds of these and froze them each year those are definitely my naka's recipe!!!!! she would make hundreds each year, they were among her specialities and i think i mentioned i really think she was a master baker among serbian women who are really mostly master bakers.

i've been to many slavas where people serve "sitni kolaci" that can't compare to these cookies.

Vanil Grancle
Yield: about 60 sandwich cookies

200 grams (1 cup minus one teaspoon) sugar
200 grams (1 stick + 6 tablespoons) butter at room temperature
1 whole egg + 3 separated eggs
1 tablespooon lemon rind, grated and minced
400 grams (2 1/3 cups) flour
1 heaping tablespoon sour cream
* * *
powdered sugar
about 2 cups walnuts, chopped into small bits
about 1/2 cup apricot jam

Forming the cookies

* Mix whole egg and three yolks with sugar.
* Mix in butter, sour cream and lemon rind.
* Add flour and mix to make a soft dough. If exceedingly soft and sticky, add a bit more flour.
* Shape dough into two logs. Wrap in parchment paper or plastic cling wrap and chill. Slice into 1/8" rounds.
* Alternately, shape dough into two or three disks that are 1/8" thick. Chill several hours on a platter, separating the layers with parchment paper or clear clingfoil so they don't get stuck together. Punch out with a cookie cutter into 1.5" rounds.
* Using a thimble, cut a hole into the center of half of the disks. If you don't have a thimble, use any cylinder into which your middle finger will just fit. I used a bit of copper piping.
* Re-roll any dough scraps left over and repeat as necessary until you've made all the dough into bottoms (solid rounds) and tops (rounds with holes).

Baking

* Bake cookie bottoms at 300 F. They should be pale when done, with just the lightest browning on the bottoms.
* Paint tops cookie tops with egg white. I did this by putting the egg white in a tray, and then placing all the tops in the tray.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with powdered sugar.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with walnuts.
* Bake cookie tops at 300 F. Like the bottoms, they'll be pale when they're done, just barely browned underneath.

Unfortunately, I didn't write down the baking times when I did this. Next time, I'll take notes and add it to this post. All I can say for now is, start checking your oven at 10 minutes. Go by sight and by the aroma of baking. When done, they will have puffed up a little. Like most baked cookies, they will feel a little underdone when they are perfectly done -- they continue to bake and dry out after you pull them from the oven -- but they'll have a light brown cast underneath, where they rest against the baking sheet.

I think the bottoms took 20 minutes and the tops 25.

Assembling

Let cool. Place about 1/4 teaspoon apricot jam on each cookie bottom. Top with the cookie top. Press and twist together just enough to distribute the jam evenly to the edge of the cookies. These will be squishy and slidey at first, but the jam will set up after a few hours and the sandwich construction will be sturdy.

Here's a tip I got from Cook's Illustrated: give your jam a quick whiz in the food processor. This will break up the big chunks of apricot and distribute the fruit more evenly throughout the jam, making it much easier to sandwich the cookies.

Now here's the original text of the recipe that my cousin sent me. Note that the non-metric amounts are different from those given above. I re-translated the metric into non-metric, and used what I came up with, rather than the non-metric amounts below. Also, instead of an entire lemon's zest, I used a tablespoon, after checking with my aunt that indeed this made sense. These are not exceedingly lemony cookies.

here is the granzle recipe. the ingredients are straight from naka's recipe as are the instructions on how to assemble the cookies but the directions on mixing ingredients come from my mother and me trying to make sense from how the ingredients would go together.

apparently naka never wrote down how she makes the cookie dough and mama never witnessed it or made the granzle herself. so here goes:

20 dkg (1 cup) sugar
20 dkg (1 cup) sweet butter (unsalted) 1 1/2 sticks
1 whole egg plus 3 eggs separated (small eggs would probably be most accurate)
lemon rind to taste (mama thinks about 1 whole medium lemon)
40 dkg flour (2 cups)
1 heaping tblspoon of sour cream
powdered sugar
chopped walnuts (small pieces)
apricot jam (sorry, no info on quantity for these last 3 items, we'll have to experiment)

combine 1 whole egg and 3 egg yolks and sugar. add softened butter and add sour cream and rind, combine.

add flour and if too soft, add some more. (i'm not kidding, that's what it says)

note --naka used to roll the dough out and cut out the shapes but mama says she does know that naka changed that technique because the dough was always so sticky. i think her solution sounds brilliant.---
form the dough into a long roll like a salami, wrap in plastic wrap and chill until hard. (no info on how long) dough should be like sugar cookie dough you buy at the grocery store---slice and bake---similar shape and thickness.

then, remove wrap and slice the dough into 60 disks. cut 30 of the disks with a hole in the center (these will be the tops) using a thimble. (mama fortunately remembers naka using a thimble, i thought i remembered the hole was pretty small, i love this kind of historic detail and thanks to you, i bothered to get it from mama finally!!!!)

bake the bottom 30 disks at 300 degrees until done (again, no details sorry) and cookies should be pale, not browned.

take the 3 egg whites, whisk with a fork and then paint tops (the disks with thimble hole)with egg whites. dip the tops into powdered sugar and chopped (small pieces) walnuts. then bake at 300 until done, again pale and not browned.

when cookies have cooled, assemble as sandwich cookies using apricot (we always had only apricot but of course any jam will do) jam.

my editorial comment is that i would sprinkle the cookies with powdered sugar and walnut pieces but you might want to dip.

Koljivo (Zito/Zhito)

Koljivo, or Zito (pronounced ZHEE-toe, meaning "wheat"), is one of the most important dishes a Serbian can make. Loaded with the symbolism of life, death, harvest and renewal, it's presented at only a few special occasions: Slava, Bozic (BOH-zheech, or Christmas), and at funerals and memorials for the dead. More about koljivo on this blog here.

But if you don't happen to be Serbian, I suppose you could just make this as a delicious dessert.

To the American sensibility, it's extremely unusual, to say the least – a bowl of cooked, ground wheat fortified with ground nuts and sugar. Even the cooking instructions seem odd: Seven waters? Pillows and blankets?

The flavors, though, are straightforward, clean, accessible to the American palate, and easy to love.


Koljivo (Zito)

1 cup wheat berries (preferably white wheat, or psenica (pshenitsa) bela)
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 1/2 cups walnuts or pecans, or a combination of the two
2 cups powdered sugar
About 1/16 teaspoon grated fresh nutmeg, or 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg powder
[Nutmeg added 11/18/2012, per comments from Drago Babic and two anonymous posters.]

Garnish:
slivered almonds
whipped cream

Start this recipe the night before. There's an overnight step involved.

1. Seven waters
Place the wheat berries in a small pot or a large saucepan. Cover with water, about two inches above the level of the berries. The exact amount is unimportant. Bring to a rolling boil and let boil for a few seconds. Drain the water through a sieve and discard, keeping the berries in the pot.

Add new water to the wheat, the same amount as before. (I keep a kettle full of water brewing on another burner during the whole process to save time; I add the partially heated water from it and then refill the kettle from the tap.) Bring to a rolling boil. Drain.

Repeat until you've brought wheat and water to a boil seven times.

On the seventh water, add the salt. Don't drain the water.

2. Overnight soak
Place the pot of wheat on a blanket on your biggest, softest armchair or couch. I kid you not. Pack it all around with blankets and pillows. Leave overnight. Really. If you're watching Top Chef 5: New York, you'll know, from the very first episode, what happens when you try to cook wheat berries quickly. Imagine chewing on erasers. I'm telling you here what it takes to make wheat berries tender. And now you now why wheat is usually crushed into something else (flour, bulgar), and not served whole like rice.

Be sure your padded pot will be secure from wayward children or pets knocking it over.

3. Grinding
The next day, drain any water that hasn't been absorbed overnight.

Grind the wheat berries thoroughly in a food processor or a meat grinder. A blender could be problematic, but it could be done in small batches. Remove the wheat from the food processor bowl. Grind the nuts in the bowl. Add the sugar and nutmeg to the nuts and process together. Add the wheat back into the bowl and process together. Stir together the wheat and the sugar-nutmeg-nut mixture in a mixing bowl.
[Nutmeg added 11/18/2012, per comments from Drago Babic and two anonymous posters. Also, no need to process anymore; stirring works just fine at this point.]

Spoon koljivo into a serving dish, preferably a clear glass one with straight sides.

Garnish by sticking slivered almonds all over the top, like a porcupine. I've been told that if and only if the koljivo is to commemorate the dead, the almond spikes should be placed in the shape of a cross. However, I've come upon photos on the Internet of Christmas koljivo decorated with a cross of almonds.

Serve by tablespoons in very small bowls, like custard cups, topped with a dollop of whipped cream.

Notes:
To find whole wheat berries, try the bulk section of a natural foods store.

I used a pressure cooker this year. I didn't bring the wheat to pressure; I just made use of the tight-fitting lid to boil the water faster and to ensure a secure lid overnight.

[Added 1/5/9, in response to Mia's comment.] This is not a recipe I got from my family. It's my own version of the one given it by a friend, a woman who lives here in Madison who moved to the U.S. in, I believe, the 1960s or 1970s. She described the method to me over the phone and I took notes.

Salt is my own addition. My friend did not mention salt. I find that grains, when prepared without salt, taste like ... like they need salt. So I added that eensy bit, 1/8th teaspoon. The end result tasted like it tasted just right, if you know what I mean. If you have good results with no salt at all, let me know.

The quantities I give above are not quite the way she gave them. She specified one cup of wheat berries. However, instead of specifying a quantity for the nuts and sugar, she just said to use equal volumes of wheat, nuts and sugar. That is (she said when I asked for clarification), equal to the volume of wheat after it's been cooked and ground. I figured it would be most useful to readers (and to me in the future) to know what that volume is, so that we know how much nuts and sugar to have on hand in order to make the recipe.

The wheat made 3 1/2 cups, so I used 3 1/2 cups of nuts. However, I remembered that, in the past, when I made her recipe using equal volumes of wheat, nuts and sugar, the final product was chokingly, achingly sweet. So sweet it interfered with enjoying the dish, for me. (And besides, who needs more sugar if less will work just as well?) So this time, I started with a cup of sugar and mixed it up, then added until it tasted just right to me. Very sweet, very nutty, very rich. But not cloying.

One more note on cooking the wheat this way. I've tried cooking whole wheat berries many times before, including under pressure and for several hours (I think I got up to four), and it always retained an unpleasantly springy chewiness. Even after grinding! This method, with the waters and the pillows and the overnight rest is the only method I know of that results in a pleasant, tender berry.

Slava 2008

Yesterday we had a bunch of people over for my Krsna Slava, the Serbian family holiday to celebrate the patron saint, a custom that stretches back into prehistory and pre-Christian times, when the Serbs had family gods. As the story goes, they were reluctant to leave their family patron gods, so each family got a saint designated instead. Because this happened in the ninth century, the saints are all really ancient ones, like Saint Nicholas. My family's is a pair of twins, Saints Cosmas and Damian (Sveti Kuzman i Damian), born in Asia Minor (or Mesopotamia) to Saint Theodota.

The icon here is the exact picture that hung on my wall when I was a kid growing up. It's the current top-of-article image on the Wikipedia entry about them. In past years, I've seen other icons on the Wikipedia page and other pages that my Internet searches turned up. So it was a surprise, and gave me an unexpected eerie feeling, to see this very picture after so long.

More about Slavas past here:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/search?q=slava

The custom in the Old Country is to have lots of people over all day, coming in and out, with lots of food. I never experienced that, because we didn't live in a place with a big Serb community, but it sounds like fun, so that's what I went for yesterday. Also a priest comes over and blesses the home, but of course we didn't do that, either. We did invite a Universalist Unitarian minister -- as a guest, not in an official capacity -- but he didn't show.

For many years, Don and I would just go out to dinner on my Krsna Slava, November 14. Somehow we always seemed to wind up at a Mexican place -- Pasqual's or Pedro's or Laredo's -- so that we started feeling like the Slava custom was to go out for Mexican food. Once we went to a wonderful Laotian place, Lao Laan Xang, with our friends Sigurd and Gloria -- that must have been 1999 or 2000, because it was the year I wrote about them for the Isthmus dining guide. I'm not sure what inspired me to start celebrating at home and experimenting with Serbian food instead. A few years back, we began inviting our friend Gigi, who's become our Serbian holiday co-celebrant. This year, for the first time, I decided to do something closer to the real thing and invite a whole bunch of people, as many as I dared invite to our small space and cook for all at once. It worked out great and gave me confidence to expand the guest list even more next time around. Sigurd and Gloria were there, the Dutch and Spanish mathematicians we befriended almost immediately after moving to Madison, as well as their kids, Nico (now 14) and Vicky (now 9). Also our neighbor Jayne, from across the street (we offered to give her a ride) and our friend Jennifer. Later my co-worker Jill came, along with her partner Mary. Finally my former co-worker Gil, from Israel, showed up. He was lost in the mobile home park, so I directed him over the phone, and went out into the street and waved him into a spot before running back into the house -- I was barefoot and chilly. Somehow he couldn't figure out which house was ours in the dark, though, and after we waited minutes for him, some folks went outdoors to find him, wandering around the street trying to find the house. Yeah, I know, I don't get it either. Sorry, Gil. (Unfortunately, Gigi, who loves sharing Slava with us, couldn't come at the last minute -- her father had to get emergency eye surgery. We're still waiting to hear how that turned out, and of course we hope for the best.)

Well, I must say I am proud of myself for pulling this thing off. I planned all week, stayed up late cooking and prepping Friday and got up early and got cooking Saturday. It turned out to be the most tactically succesful of all the fun food parties I've thrown over the years. By that I mean: when the first guests started showing up, I had already changed out of my pajamas. And showered. And had completed enough of the cooking that I was actually able to enjoy the party! Here's what we had.

Slatko
Traditionally, whole fruit preserves, extremely sweet. Served in a jar, presented on a tray alongside several cups of cold water and a pile of dessert spoons. Each guest, on arrival, eats a single spoonful of slatko and chases it with water. The slatko I made for this occasion was apricot jam and honey. Someday I'll try to make my own from scratch. Maybe. Canning still intimidates me.

Kolach
One of the central, sacred dishes that must be on every Slava table. This tall, round loaf can be regarded either as a tremendously rich, cake-like bread, or the breadiest, most un-sweet pound cake you've ever had. The word means "cake" in Serbian (and just about any other Slavic language, too). The recipe is passed matrilineally through the generations, just as the Slava saint is passed patrilinealy. I like the way that sort of balances things out. And the crisscrossing, continuous invigoration of the family tradition it makes for. My recipe comes from my mother (b. 1920), who had been Nada (Nadezhda) Jankovic. and from her mother (b. 1888), who had been Ljubitsa Stephanovic, and from her mother, who had been Radivojevic, and from her mother, who had been Bojic. So you see that it is a very old recipe, because this lineage is only the beginning. The recipe is posted here:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/serbian-christmas.html

This year I incorporated the famous no-knead bread technique that swept the foodie blogosphere after Mark Bittman's 2006 New York Times column came out here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/08mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html

and by gum if it didn't work just fine. In a big crockery bowl, I mixed up the usual Kolach ingredients on Friday night. They came out wet and sticky -- depending on the weather, you have to add milk or add flour to get the dough to the right consistency for kneading. In this case, I left if just as it was, and covered the bowl with clingfoil. In the morning, it had risen perfectly, with bubbles on top and all. I added a bit of flour and folded it over and over a few times. Then I put it in a well-buttered crockpot liner, covered it with its glass lid, and let it rest and rise for a couple of hours. After that I baked it in the oven as usual -- 400 uncovered for 10 minutes, then 350 covered with the crockpot lid for an hour. Perfect results, most of the work done overnight, and the oven freed up early on for all the other stuff that needed to go into it.

I sure wish I had two ovens. Or three.

Koljivo (Zito) (KOHL-yee-voh, ZHEE-toh)
This is another sacred dish, and one of the three elements de rigueur on a Slava table. (The third is a white candlestick ablaze.) (A fourth element needed in the room would be an icon of the saint or saints whose day it is.) It's made only for three occasions: Slava, Christmas, and for a funeral or requiem. My friend, an elderly Serbian woman in Madison I'll call Sophy S., tells me that only for the commemorating the dead is it decorated with slivered almonds arranged in the shape of a double cross. For Slava and Christmas (Bozic), it's decorated with slivered almonds stuck all over like a porcupine. However, searching for info about Koljivo on the Internets on Friday night, I came upon a picture of Slava Koljivo that was decorated with a cross.

So what is it? Essentially, boiled, then ground, wheat berries. The symbolism is powerful, especially when it's made for the dead, for what is death but the ultimate harvest? So saith the Reaperman. The wheat is mixed with ground nuts and powdered sugar. It's sweet and incredibly rich, so a tablespoon of this is a hearty serving. No kidding. Top it with whipped cream. You don't serve this for dessert; you eat it before the meal. Remember, just a tablespoon, or less. Save room for dinner.

Koljivo recipe in a separate post.

Gibanica (GHEE-bah-Neet-sah)
Call it Serbian cheese bread, call it savory cheese pie or strudel, call it flaky cheese casserole -- there's no ready American analog for this room-temp wedge of cheesy, flaky goodness, one of the most typical of all typically Serbian dishes. Read about it in this previous post:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2007/11/gibanica-flaky-savory-cheese-pie.html

The big discovery I made this year was to use only 3/4 of the package of filo, instead of the whole pound. For the first time, my giba was puffy on coming out of the oven, as recipes suggested it would be. Best yet, with the dough-to-cheese ratio more favorable, the result was way more cheeeesy. That's a good thing.

Djuvec (JEW-vech)
Ah, djuvec. That wonderful one-pot meal. Pork and/or beef with veg, cooked long and slow in a big pot with just enough rice to soak up the juices that exude from the eggplant, tomato, celery, parsely, onion and meat herein. I've written it up before:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2006/11/slava-with-friend-and-djuvec-recipe.html

This year I made it with equal parts pork shoulder and beef shoulder (I'm guessing that's another name for chuck, don't know why they called it that at the UW Provision Store where we buy in bulk to load up the standalone freezer we splurged on this summer); previously I'd used all pork. Also I upped the rice to 1/2 cup, but I think it could have taken more. The rice sort of disapperd amidst all the rest. Used a new (to me) rice this year, also: an organic variety grown by Lundberg but packaged and sold for Asian-American markets.

Pogaca (POH-gah-cha)
I made a "Farmer's Pogaca," a recipe adapted from the 1963 "Yugoslav Cookbook" printed by the state. Of course, in 1963, just about everything in Yugoslavia was done by the state, as it was a comprehensively socialist economy. Everything from the Zastava factory, where Yugos were made, to most larger restaurants were owned and run by the state. When I traveled there in 1989 I learned quickly to avoid those restaurants. They had the ambiance of, say, a DMV here in the states. Can you imagine the charm of ordering a meal from the person behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles? Asking them the difference between the shopska salata and a Srpska salata listed on the salad page? That was pretty much the flavor of the interpersonal transactions at such places. Small, privately run inns and cafes were the place to go for a warm, southern Slav experience. And good food more redolent of tradition than of institution.

Pogaca is bread, and it can be as plain and dressed down as kolach is rich and resplendent. Usually it's a yeasted flatbread, round and meant to be broken, not cut. There are many versions, including bogota pogaca, meaning "rich pogaca," with extra special ingredients like buttermilk and egg yolks, that's flaky and folded, sort of like croissant.

This "farmer's flatbread," though, is just flour, water, yeast, salt and oil. Easy, quick, and a great side to a hearty meal. The recipe makes three 10-inch pogace.

Farmer's Pogaca recipe
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoon yeast
6-8 cups flour ( I used 2 cups whole wheat and the rest AP)
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup olive oil or other fat
Beaten egg (for brushing over top)

Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add remaining ingredients. Mix to a medium dough. Knead for 5 minutes. Let rest 15 minutes. Divide in thirds. Roll to size and shape of layer cake pans. Lightly grease the pans. Place dough inside. Brush dough with beaten egg. Dock (prick all over with a fork.) Bake 20–25 minutes at 425, or until golden brown and done. Serve hot, or whenever.

I forgot to dock and brush with egg yesterday. I learned from this that the docking keeps weird bubbles from misshaping these.

I used these for dipping the ajvar, which is the next speciality on the menu.

Ajvar (AYE-var)
Also known as eggplant caviar or sweet red pepper relish, this can be made with either or a combination of these as the main ingredient. The word is etymologically related to "caviar," so I'm supposing the eggplant version came first. However, on Serbian tables I've usually seen it as mostly or all pepper.

I've heard that it can be spicy hot or not, but I've only encountered it non-spicy in person.

Srpski Ayvar recipe
1-2 eggplants
1 red bell pepper
5-6 cloves garlic, still in their peels
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespooon paprika
fresh lemon juice to taste -- a teaspoon or two.

Place the eggplants, pepper and garlic on a shallow baking sheet -- for instance, a cookie sheet -- and roast at 350 for 1–2 hours, until the eggplants have totally collapsed. The bell pepper and the garlic will certainly be done and need to come out of the over after an hour; the eggplant might take an hour or so longer. Every fifteen or twenty minutes or so, turn everything over so that as much surface as possible spends some time in contact with the cookie sheet.

If you make this in the summer, you can grill instead of roast the veg, and get a wonderful smoky aroma in the bargain.

Remove from oven and let cool. Placing the veg in a brown paper bag will make the peeling go easier.

When your veg is cool, peel 'em all. Discard the seeds and core of the pepper as well as its peel.

Process all this in a food processor, adding the oil, salt and pepper. Add lemon to taste. Serve as a dip.

I just realized I forgot the paprika. So much for all that tactical success, I guess. Well, I suppose that means the paprika is optional, because that ajvar was pretty darn tasty.

Snezani Jabuke (SNE-zhah-nee JAH-boo-keh)
Literally, snowy apples. OK, the Yugoslav Cookbook (1963) just calls this "Baked Applesauce." But what's the fun of that?

Deep into the evening, I said I was going to make dessert. Don looked like he was going to fall over on hearing that -- everyone was pretty well stuffed by that point. However, I was determined. That Kolach uses egg yolks only, and I had noticed this recipe the night before -- it uses egg whites. Finally, something to do with all those egg whites I can't bear to throw out and therefore collect in a seal-top plastic bowl and keep in the refrigerator for several days until it goes bad and I throw it out later!

Vicky peeled and sliced the apples for this, using the Peel-Away gadget that I and all kids love so well. Ulysses calls it the Apple Robot. After we got this into the oven, Ulysses brought out another apple from the crisper and peeled and ate it right on the robot, one crank at a time.

Snezani Jabuke recipe
2 pounds apples (about 8 apples -- exactitude is not necessary here)
2 egg whites (or however many you have on hand)
1/4 cup sugar

Peel, core and slice apples. Place in a saucepan with a few tablespoons or so of water (just enough to keep from scorching) and cook at medium-low heat until soft.

Turn apples into a buttered pie plate or casserole dish.

Beat egg whites stiff, adding sugar partway through. Spread on top of apples, making pretty peaks with your spatula.

Bake at 400 about 20 minutes, until golden brown.

Spoon into custard cups or any little dessert dishes. Serve hot or cold.

You may notice this is not applesauce. The Yugoslav Cookbook had involved instructions for rubbing and grinding and grating the apples into applesauce before turning them into the dish. But I thought, what for? As it stands, this is sort of like a crustless apple meringue pie. And about as fast as a baked dessert can get -- especially if you have an Apple Robot on your side.


Srpska Kafa, Slivovitz (Serbian coffee, plum brandy)

These would have been great, but I forgot to bring 'em out. OK, I said most tactically successful so far. Not perfect!