‘Homogenised, Industrialised’: Shopping For Honey In Kosovo

 

New Albanian vocabulary: përbërësit (ingredients), pazar (market: of course not an Albanian word originally, but an etymological item of barter and exchange, being linked like our own version, bazaar, to the Turkish and Persian traders who have left their traces in markets across the world)

 

 

I’d found us a house – a disconcertingly large place with a downstairs reception room we nicknamed ‘the ballroom’ and never sat in on our own, because we felt we couldn’t quite live up to it. We were in the centre of town but we had a garden with rosebushes and apple trees. It was a place that felt like it could become a home, and my first instinct was to fill its cupboards. I was hungry for home cooking; the simple processes of creating and sharing meals in our own space. I needed groceries.

The first place we tried was one of the large out-of-town super- markets. The names of these large chains could as well be brand names for industrial solvent or powerful prescription drugs – Maxi, Interex, Intereminex, Albi, Ardi, Era, Ben Af. The latter, as Rob pointed out, could also have been the nickname for the lover of J Lo.

Our first visit to one of these stores, piled high with imports, was reassuring, if not exciting. You could buy Nutella in Kosovo, you could buy balsamic vinegar, and wholemeal pasta, Milka chocolate, even Worcestershire sauce, and French wine. Really, there wasn’t much you couldn’t buy (cheddar cheese was our one constant slice of homesick- ness, although we did find something called cheddar, produced in what must be Somerset’s Turkish dominion).

However, we had been trained like good wholemeal-pasta-eaters that we should be mindful of the food miles of the products we bought. And whilst I wasn’t willing to exchange the local equivalent, ‘Eurokrem’ (another solvent?) for my Nutella, and was doubtful of finding an alternative to Lea and Perrins, I wanted to try as much as possible to buy local.

So I set off to explore the covered market in the old quarter of Pristina. The Cairo souk it ain’t, but it was still a lot more of an adventure than Sainsbury’s had ever been. Small radios bleated local pop music, distorted by being cranked up to full volume on fragile speakers. Handsome young men with eyes that flickered back and forwards stood next to towering walls of bootleg Marlboro Lights. Old men sat on wheelbarrows waiting for someone to pay them to transport sacks of vegetables. Stallholders greeted everyone with a smile, called out enticing prices and provenances of their stock. I love markets for the way that, like dancing, they offer a form of ritualised licensed flirting. The stalls were piled high with heaps of spinach, bosomy mounds of nectarines, sleek-buttocked peppers, kept looking fresh all day by the traders who use old plastic mineral water bottles with holes punched in them as sprinklers.

It was crowded, not just with bodies, but with bags. The dance- floor of this market was the kind where everyone comfortably bumped up against one another’s plump protrusions which could be belly, breast or bag of onions. You could only buy by the kilo or more, and the bowed figures with netted sacks of cucumbers and bleeding paper bags of cherries seemed little spots of indulgence in this concrete city of subsistence living I’d experienced up till now.

Kosovo’s history and geography was laid out here, in its food.The market was all-Albanian, and this area, I had been told, had always been an Albanian part of Pristina. Even during the bombing campaign and the days of the most intense Serb paramilitary violence when so many Albanians had left Pristina, in this part of town Albanians had stayed hiding in their homes. But the names for vegetables here were Turkish, Serbian, imported along with all the delicious ingredients the Ottomans had brought to Kosovo – spinach, beans, tomatoes named with the Turkish name for aubergines, and aubergines given an additional colour description to form their name ‘patëllxhan i zi’ – ‘black tomatoes’. Cucumbers were sometimes labelled with their Albanian name, ‘tranguj’, sometimes with the word, ‘kastravec’ adapted from Serbian. You could tell this was a country in transition.

I haggled inexpertly, worrying about the words for numbers and the conversion rate. Usually at the end of a transaction, the stallholder threw in an extra peach or potato anyway.

Following my nose, I found myself in the cheese section. It was quieter, an annex to the main market which looked like a garage. It smelt like sick.

As far as I could see, everyone there was selling the same kind of cheese. It is a white, fresh cheese moulded into small irregular, loaf-like lumps. It’s kept in brine or in whey, and stored in barrels.They came in different sizes, in blond wood with darker bands with the bark still on, holding the staves in place. They were different from English barrels, starting from a wide base with gradually tapered sides. It wasn’t fine craftsmanship, but it was elegant, neat and ergonomic in the way that handmade things are when they have a design that has been followed and refined for generations. The barrels were stacked high and I stared at them. The cheese makers stared too, at this foreigner transfixed by such ordinary things. I got out my camera.

That clinched it. ‘Do you want to buy?’ asked the guy standing nearest to the stack of barrels, with an edge of hostility in his voice.

‘Yes!’ I realised that I did.

‘How many kilograms?’ he asked.

No, not cheese. I wanted to buy the barrel.

They tried to explain to me that I didn’t have to buy the whole barrel, I could decide how much cheese I wanted. I tried to explain to them that their cheese made me feel like retching, but the barrel was beautiful. I had a plan to use it as a small table in our new sitting room.

Eventually we understood one another. They had never sold a barrel before, and they didn’t have any bags big enough for it. I was taken to a stall selling dustbin bags where the cheese-seller explained what I needed it for.

‘She wants to buy the barrel!’

‘She wants to buy the barrel? Are you sure she doesn’t just want some cheese? Are you sure you don’t just want some cheese?’ A small crowd gathered.

An old guy sitting on a wheelbarrow outside was summoned to carry my barrel for me. He held his nose humorously as we trailed back through the market, me processing in front with a little triumphant smile on my face, and the wheelbarrow carrying its barrel like a madonna. People parted to let us (or maybe that pungent smell) pass.

I explained to the wheelbarrow guy that I wasn’t ready to go home yet. I had come to the market not just in search of salad, certainly not in search of cheese-barrels, but really for some comfort food.

For some years now, Rob and I had had a Sunday afternoon ritual to take the edge off end-of-weekend blues. In the face of lesson planning and marking and all the other things that seep out of the class- room into the home, we had established a rule of no work after Sunday tea. As a consequence, Sunday tea had grown into an indulgent, celebratory, buttery time of togetherness round the toaster. All the baking I did was for this meal. We would close my lever arch file, the laptop lid, spread a tablecloth, and with warm scones, a cake, even homemade bread, we would stave off Monday morning.

That sacred part of the weekend felt just as important now, even though I wasn’t working. Rob’s new job was seeping in even more than my teaching had. As the Prime Minister’s advisor he seemed to be as busy as the Prime Minister. Like the Prime Minister, he was required not only during office hours, but for all the official activity out-of-hours. Dinners with visiting VIPs, opening of fire stations, as well as text messages alerts whenever something happened that was significant for the government (ministers caught in compromising situations, car bombs, traffic accidents involving personnel working in Kosovo with the UN, EU etc, the so-called ‘internationals’). It was fascinating stuff for him, and for me as a spectator. I loved watching Rob becoming absorbed by this new system he was helping to create. But I was also determined not to let it overrun Sunday tea.

To be truly comforted by Sunday tea, you have to have two things. The first is a pot of Marmite – I had snuggled one inside the sleeves of a jumper in my suitcase for our journey to Kosovo. The second is honey.

The old man grinned toothlessly at me when I asked about honey – he was happy to wheel my barrel round as long as I wanted. He was becoming something of a comic hero to the audience we were attract- ing as we made our way through the market. He took me outside the covered section to the street where the country cousins sit on their haunches behind the dusty rugs where their goods are displayed. As well as meaner piles of fruit or vegetables from their gardens they bring Coke bottles filled with the morning’s milk, and purple plastic pails with slabs of more fresh white cheese smelling like babies.

They also bring their honey.

The honey sold here is all colours, and in jars of all sizes. As with the milk, the honey salvaged from this promising land is packaged in recycled containers – you can see the labels on the lids of jars showing the jams and pickles that the glass used to hold.

Small holders recycling their packaging like this is exactly what I should be supporting. It was the reason that I came to this market and avoided all those neologistic supermarket chains. But once I got up close, in the whiff of the cheese, wondering how much of the taste of the pickle jar had transferred itself to the honey, and why exactly the colouring is different in each jar, it all looked far more like a secretion than I had anticipated. I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy any of it. I apologised to the man who had brought me here, shaking my head, and then correcting myself. Round here, I had learned, that means ‘yes’. Nodding instead, I asked him to take me to the bus stop, where he left me at the end of an unimpressed queue of people who realised they would be sharing a small hot space with me and my new purchase.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden with a hosepipe and a bottle of bleach. I judged my success by the number of flies crowding round the barrel after each successive scrub and rinse. By the end of the day there was only one; I could live with him, and I left my new piece of furniture to dry out. I had achieved something, but it was with a sense of disappointment in myself, that I added ‘honey’ to the list of things to buy at InterAlbiMax on our next trip.

When we next went shopping in the supermarket I walked down the aisles of migraine lighting, and looked for the honey section. My options were ranged before me, all in identical jars with tidy labels. My little bourgeois honey-loving heart sang, and I chose a neat jar.

When we got home I tried it in a sandwich. It was a simple syrupy drool with none of the floral complexity of good honey. I wondered whether I had chosen the wrong brand. I examined the label more closely, looking to see where it was produced, from what flowers. I worked slowly because of the Albanian, but I did see something that I thought translated as ‘ingredients’. This surprised me because I had imagined that the only ingredient would be ‘honey’. Not so – this stuff was made of ‘glucose’ and ‘honey flavouring’. No wonder it tasted so foul.

The label on the front had the company’s slogan – the one I had fallen for when I scanned the shelves at the supermarket. ‘Homogenised. Industrialised’, it proclaimed. Well, exactly.

If you don’t have a smallholding, like the men with the weather- beaten faces outside the market, then ‘homogenised, industrialised’ produce is the easiest food to find. Increasingly, I was feeling that what- ever my education, my comparative material wealth, round here I was one of the dispossessed.

The next day I went back to the bandy-legged man in the market and bought myself a jar of the stuff that looked like earwax. It was delicious; Rob and I ate it on toast for tea on Sunday, balancing our plates on the bottom of the well-bleached upturned cheese barrel, in our house that was becoming a home.