Ana’s Slava Baklava

 

New Serbian vocabulary: vreti (simmer), liti (pour)

 

 

On the drive to a Serbian lesson early in January, Zorica explained that Ana had been busy that week because it had been her slava. The slava is the family saint day – a day of visiting and eating which is preceded by furious cooking including the baking of a special slava cake made with water sanctified by your priest. I knew that this water blessed on the slava is very precious for the family – as well as each member of the family taking three sips on the day itself, the water is saved so it can be dabbed on the forehead if anyone in the family falls ill later in the year. In every way, the slava is a day for setting the family up, in physical, social and spiritual capital for the months ahead. When the priest comes round, the oldest member of the family is invited to repeat the names of all members of the family, whether present or not, to receive a blessing.

I was sad not to have known about Ana’s celebration, not to have taken part, not to have been invited. When we got to the house, Ana told me rather half-heartedly that you don’t invite people to a slava – every- one knows which your family saint is, and thus on which day to visit you. I didn’t know whether she was just making excuses, but I made up my mind to turn up on the day next time, and call her bluff.

But at least I hadn’t missed out on the food. None of the special slava cake, but there was still baklava to spare, and before I started on the tedious Serbian grammar, I was allowed to indulge myself with one of its better nouns. Baklava is one of the unifying aspects of culture in Kosovo. Of course, it has its own history of conflict – it is originally a Turkish dish, and spread through both the Serbian and Albanian popu- lations only with the spread of the Ottoman Empire after the fourteenth century. Yet it offers hope to a multiculturalist that there might be a future when people from all communities in Kosovo could eat their celebratory food together: once when running training here I tried to use my experience of ethnic conflict in inner-city London schools as a starting point with some ethnically-mixed Kosovan teachers. I mentioned the passions that could be raised by children trying spicy Pakistani food for the first time, or racist remarks when white British kids were offered Caribbean goat dishes, and asked the Kosovan teachers how they might handle a situation when a child brought in for a school party, for example, a dish from home that was unfamiliar, and perhaps unattractive to others in their class. They looked at me uncomprehendingly and somebody explained, ‘but everyone would bring baklava.’

I have been offered a number of celebratory pieces of baklava here. Some, it must be said, have tasted like tracing paper in syrup. Ana’s was fantastic and (because) you could taste the honey in it.

When I asked she dictated the recipe to me, a recipe handed down from her Gorani grandmother. The Goranis are Slav but in religion, Muslim, like most Albanians – and thus either uniquely placed to fit in with both the main ethnic groups here, or uniquely placed to be despised equally by both. They are known as the pastry-cooks of the Balkans and I had visited the area in Kosovo with the highest concentration of Gorani, the dramatic wooded hills and valleys of Dragash. We had stopped on our drive through and bought small sweet pastries in a little fly-blown shop, and driven on along tight hill roads where we caught glimpses of young girls in traditional Gorani dress – long frock- coats covered in sequins. I wished now that I had stayed longer, eaten more.

 

My version of Ana’s recipe, to make approximately 30 pieces of baklava

 

Ingredients

 

330g filo pastry for baklava (Ana makes her own; there was no way I was going to do that. I removed the pastry I’d bought from its plastic wrapper, unfolding it carefully like a very old vellum book with pages that might easily tear)

125g butter, melted

230g honey

230g walnuts*, half of them ground, the other half chopped

Juice of half a lemon

Half a teaspoon vanilla flavouring

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

 

Lay out a sheet of the pastry. Slather it with melted butter and then lay on another sheet. Slather again. Repeat so the final pastry is 3 sheets thick.

Cover the bottom third of the pastry sheet stack with the walnuts and then roll all the pastry tightly into a cylinder. Repeat until you have used up all the pastry and nuts.

Grease a baking tin.

Cut the cylinder into lengths of 3-4cm and place each small cylinder in the baking tin, snuggling them together. Drizzle any remaining melted butter between each length and over all of it.

Turn down the oven to 150 degrees and bake the baklava at the bottom of the oven for an hour.

When the baklava is out of the oven, put the honey in a saucepan with a few tablespoons of water and bring to the boil.

Add the lemon juice and vanilla flavouring.

Pour the syrup over the baklava. Cool and serve.

 

*I had never tasted fresh walnuts until I came to Kosovo. I didn’t even know that to start with they have soft, bready flesh like a conker, and it is only after this has been dried that you get the bitter, woody nut. In Islington I had only ever bought walnuts not only pre-shelled, but pre-chopped. In Kosovo, I was given them straight off the trees in the Ethnological Museum gardens; I once stopped the car on the road out of Deçan and handed small change to a young boy with eyes like coins, in exchange for a net bag of fresh walnuts, and saw as we drove away how he waved the money at his brother still up the tree picking them.

At the kulla in Dranoc I had even helped with selling walnuts myself, writing out the labels for bagged nuts when the boy from next-door brought them over to sell to the visitors at one of the cultural workshops. And it was in Kosovo that it was explained to me that walnuts are an aid to virility. Certainly, the boy in Dranoc is one of eight children.

 

Having tasted the pastry, I had even more motivation to note in my diary when Ana’s next slava would be. It was sooner than you might think because every saint, and thus every family, has two separate days of celebration – the ‘big’ and the ‘small’ slava – each year. These were about six months apart; so, salivating for the sweetmeats, half a year later Rob and I turned up at Ana’s house to see what we’d missed out on first time round.

We hadn’t been offered an invitation this time, either, and I felt like a gate crasher as we pulled up outside Ana’s house. This would be the first time I’d seen Ana socially, rather than with the heavy textbook under my arm as entry ticket. Walking up her little path I realised that this would also be the first time I’d visited any Serb family socially. It felt like all the months using highlighter pen in that textbook with its inexplicable chapters on idioms were being put to the test today in so many ways. While I was still muttering to Rob, ‘maybe we shouldn’t have come without a definite invitation?’ Ana came to the door and greeted us with an enthusiastic torrent of Serbian and smiles.

The tiny front room was packed. The mother-in-law was there, along with Ana’s husband, their daughters, an uncle and his wife, some neighbours, a family from a nearby village. None of the other guests spoke English any better than I spoke Serbian. Ana’s husband teaches at a Serbian university in the north of Kosovo and one of his colleagues was there, eager to talk to me about nineteenth-century world literature. His passionate Serbian flowed around me, as bewildering as the raki, with only the occasional ‘Flobber’ or ‘Hurter’ or other dimly- recalled continental novelist to anchor me.

The table was full of food and we were gestured to fill our plates. There were salads and pies, meats, cheeses and the ajvar I’d seen being prepared here. No matter what I took, or how much of it, Ana’s mother-in-law was offended. ‘More, more,’ she urged (and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ana’s husband, bottle in hand, saying the same to Rob). Great slabs of cheese pie were ladled onto my plate. There was no chance of saving space for the baklava.

As I struggled through my carbohydrate, I saw Rob turning to kiss his host, Dragan. My heart sank.

But Rob is a pro. And, unlike me, this was not his first slava, having been to others with work colleagues. He was being embraced in some version of a loving cup that seems to be a traditional Serbian male toast, especially on slavas. Imagine Auld Lang Syne and the pose for pulling Christmas crackers round a table. Throw in alcohol to the value of a Hogmanay’s worth of whisky plus a Christmas dinner’s worth of wine, and then picture two men kissing each other three times, trying to entwine arms and drink a toast from their own cup. Yes, it’s messy.

Ana ignored all this with great determination and was still correcting my grammar as we talked. I asked her more about exactly what was being celebrated that day and she put on her teacher’s voice.

’Your family saint is inherited from your father – like a surname.’ Like a surname, when women marry they take on the saint of their husband. Within this, there seems to be some flexibility as to which of the saint’s days you choose as your ‘big slava’ and which as the smaller celebration. She told me what happened when Dragan’s brother decided he wanted his main slava to be on the date when the rest of the family was celebrating ‘small’. When the brother came for the winter slava to Dragan and Ana’s house, the centre for celebrating a slava because it was where their mother lived, the mother symbolically gave him half of the slava cake. From that point on his nuclear family’s celebrations could happen separately, and out of synch with the rest of the family’s.

’At the next slava at our house, when the priest came round to say the blessing and Dragan’s mother recited the names of everyone in the family, including Dragan’s brother, the priest said that blessing Dragan’s brother and his children would cost extra now because they counted as a different family.’ I ventured a small smile and Ana offered an even smaller one back. It seemed to me a great medieval story of clerical wiles, but I wasn’t confident that Ana saw it the same way.

Sitting in Kosovo with Ana, who teaches local Serbian children in Serbian, using a Serbian curriculum in a school funded by the Belgrade government, it might have been tempting to make a political point after this story. About what happens when bits of a cake break off, parts of the whole secede. It always ends up costing more. I thought about my hives and what happened when the new queen was born and half the colony felt they had to take off to the nearest branch. I bit into my baklava and savoured it, with my mouth shut.