The Definite Article: Llokuma With Honey

 

New Albanian vocabulary: ju bëftë mirë (literally ‘may it do you good’: bon appétit. The usage of this phrase definitely doesn’t translate from the equivalent in the UK – it has less of the sense of a fanfare before you stuff your face, more of the feeling of saying grace before you take nourishment. It really is a prayer that this food may serve you well, and as such it is said to almost anyone you see eating. You say ju bëftë mirë in the same way you might say ‘bless you’ in English when someone sneezes near you, even if you don’t know them well – if at all), krushq (wedding procession), zana (fairy)

 

 

How can you know someone if you can’t speak to them in ways they understand? I remember a newspaper I once bought in Chinatown. At the back was a strip cartoon of two animals with speech bubbles coming out of their mouths, filled with Chinese characters. In the middle picture, the cat was grinning, and in the third frame both he and the mouse were doubled over in hysterics. I had stuck it by my mirror and scanned it regularly, looking for a clue to the joke. I never got anywhere.

I thought about that cartoon a lot in my first weeks in Kosovo, as conversation flowed around, about and over me. If I couldn’t find a way to communicate with this place soon, I would never feel at home here. I had started trying to learn Albanian on my own from a text book and with my best friend, the dictionary, with whose help I was still translating every poster and food packet I had time to look at. But I had been warned about Chapter Six.

’I had great plans like you, when I arrived. But honestly – have you seen what you have to learn? It’s impossible once you get past chapter five.’ We were at a barbecue with some other well-intentioned native English-speakers. And later that week, lying sunbathing in the garden sweating over my studies, I realised that they were right. Even when I’d looked at the back of the book for the answers to some of the exercises, I couldn’t understand why they were as they were. And I had no-one I could ask.

Rob’s contract with the government had included a certain number of hours of language training for both of us. He had twenty hours in London before we moved – lessons with a Kosovo Albanian artist from whom Rob came home buzzing with adjectives and – his speciality and my bugbear with any new language – carefully conjugated verbs. When we arrived in Pristina he was immediately put in contact with a teacher to continue his studies but I had more trouble in setting up lessons. So when Rob and I were out together, I would ask him what I should say, would defer to him to order in restaurants or negotiate with shopkeepers. Meanwhile, all I could really do was smile through gritted teeth and try to look pretty. Shpresa suggested that it was excellent training for understanding the position of women in Kosovo.

I was wary of bothering Shpresa herself for anything more structured than the incidental vocabulary she offered when we were out together, but I increasingly felt the need for a teacher. Finally I begged Rob for the chance to come along for the first five minutes of his next lesson to get some help. I felt like the direct descendant of all those bright young Victorian women with furrowed brows who borrowed their brothers’ schoolbooks to learn Latin.

Thankfully, Gazi the language teacher didn’t really have Victorian values. He had a certain nineteenth-century intellectual pride though. It was only later that I discovered that he had lived in the UK while studying for his masters degree and had paid his way by working at Harrods. Asking this great mind and great linguist to help me with the tedious problems of the different forms of ‘it’ in ‘I gave it to him’ and’I gave it to them’ I felt rather like you might on walking into the grand decorated Food Hall and asking to buy a sandwich.

I greeted him in Albanian. He replied in a long sentence that I didn’t let on that I didn’t understand. I started again in English – would he be able to help me? He said he was rather busy at the moment.

I persisted – could he help me then for a few minutes this evening with some questions I had from the book I was using to teach myself? He glanced at Rob, and began an impatient series of questions about what exactly I was misunderstanding.

’It’s in Chapter Six.’ I waited for the impact of this to sink in.

’You tried to cover Chapter Six?’ He unbent. By the time I’d finished my drink, he had agreed to set up lessons three times a week with me.

We met in the café next to our house. I continued lessons with Gazi every week while we lived in Kosovo, but that summer was a golden time, with my diary all but empty, and the lessons offering a sense of progress and engagement in a world that I wanted a better grammar for.

Gazi guided me through the crazy inflections of Albanian, where nouns, for example, change their form not only with singular, plural, gender, case, but also exist in both definite and indefinite forms – so the word for ‘the café’ is different from the word for ‘a café’. It was he who explained to me the crucial difference between the Kosovo and northern Albanian Gheg dialect and the southern, and now standard, Tosk dialect. Albanian has only had an official standard since a conference in 1972 when the dialect of Albania’s despotic ruler, Enver Hoxha, from southern Albania, was tactically and tactfully adopted as the standard. Gazi is an advocate of (and has his own publishing house to support) Gheg Albanian being used for literary as well as street purposes. As I studied with him he always gave me the Tosk and Gheg versions of words or structures, when they differed (they could do significantly – ‘I will go’ is kam me shkue in Gheg, do të shkoj in Tosk). I was keen to start learning the language that would enable me to embark on Albanian literature – I had as a benchmark the novels of Booker prize-winner, Nobel candidate Ismail Kadare – but also pleased to be learning the language as I could hear it being spoken around me in Kosovo’s cafés and bars.

It was also Gazi who was interpreter for me of Kosovo’s culture and– since we were meeting in kafeneja, the café – Kosovo’s cuisine. Through him I learned that the satisfactory but uninspiring pizza and pasta served at the restaurants that were easy to find in central Pristina were not the true tastes of Kosovo. I learned about small restaurants in back streets, and about the things to ask for that might not be on the menu.

He told me that the name of the café where we met at translated as something like ‘the fairies’ shelter’. Any ideas I had of an under- ground gay rendezvous or delightfully fey enchanted castle were dispelled when I was told the sassy reputation of Albanian fairies – huge women with hair down to the ground, who suckle Albanian heroes at their breasts, and live entirely on honeycomb.

And it was Gazi who suggested I tried some honey with the ’llokuma’ that was on offer on the café menu. I had a vague sense that ’llokuma’ was part of the word for what we call Turkish delight, but he assured me that these were different.

So in one of our lessons after a few weeks of confidence-building, I caught the waiter’s attention. Slowly (laughably slowly, especially given the idiomatic English he had spoken to me before) I ventured in Albanian, ‘I would like... please... some llokuma [feminine, indefinite plural, accusative].’ Gazi smiled indulgently as I reached the end of the sentence, and we both held our breath to see what the waiter would come back with.

They are difficult to describe, these deep-fried puffs of dough. Calling them doughnuts makes them sound denser and yeastier than they are. It also suggests a sweetness which they don’t have on their own, being neutral in flavour, and served with a range of tastes including white cheese, jam, chocolate spread, something like tzatziki – and, best of all, honey. Like so much of my engagement with Albanian, the name for them loses something in translation. As I learned, you’re better off making and tasting it for yourself.

 

Llokuma are an every-day treat – something that is relatively easy to prepare, with ingredients you’re likely to have to hand in your kitchen, but served to make a day feel special; a perfect Sunday breakfast. Served with the yoghurt and garlic dip they are also the perfect hangover cure.

In traditional Kosovan weddings when the bridegroom’s party of male friends (minus the groom) has set off to collect the bride from her home, superstition says that they must return a different way from the route they took to her house. On their journey, they stop off at friends’ who will serve them llokuma. Llokuma are also made when a baby is born.

I wrote the recipe down while I watched Shpresa making them for breakfast for us one morning when she and Rob and I were on a trip away from Pristina, near the mountains. Once I’d learned it, I reproduced it for all the house guests we had to stay – parents, sisters, British friends – none were allowed to visit us in Kosovo without at least one lazy brunch where we sat talking and repeatedly reaching for just one more of these bite-size breakfast treats.

Last time I counted, the recipe made 32 pieces.

 

Beat 2 eggs in a bowl.

Add a cup of yoghurt.

Add half a cup of sparkling water.

Add 1.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda.

In a larger bowl, mix 450g of plain flour with a tablespoon of baking powder and a palmful of salt.

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and fold together.

Add more flour if the mixture is too wet – it shouldn’t stick to your fingers – and then decant from the bowl and lightly roll in flour on a surface.

Press out to ½cm thick.

Cut into rectangles 3cm x 5cm.

Put into smoking vegetable oil (at a depth of a little more than ½cm).

The llokuma should puff up to four times their thickness in the oil.Turnthem as soon as they start to brown. Eat immediately.