Hazelnuts In Honey For A Ladies’ Night

 

New Albanian vocabulary: rrëmojcë (toothpick)

 

 

As the date of my second birthday in Kosovo approached, friends asked ‘what are you going to do to celebrate this year?’

Rob’s contract for his work in Kosovo had initially been for one year with Prime Minister Çeku, but now he had secured a year’s extension, even with a new Prime Minister voted in after the elections (Çeku had pledged that if independence had not come by the time of the election he wouldn’t stand again. Bizarrely – for any politician, especially one in Kosovo – he had honoured that pledge. He had been succeeded by another man with good KLA credentials, but a very different personal style; Hashim Thaçi, wartime codename: The Snake). When the news of the extension had come through we had had animated discussions about what more we could do with this new opportunity, our second wind. But the extension brought challenges too; when you think you’re only going to be in a place for a year, there’s a temptation to use up all your ideas on a metaphorical and literal party splurge. I’d done that in the museum the previous November.

After a lot of thinking, my idea for celebrating my second Kosovan birthday was to hold a party in another one of Kosovo’s little-known sites. Older than the Ethnological Museum – by at least 250 million years – the Gadime caves are a short drive outside Pristina. They hold stalactites, stalagmites, columns, rare star-shaped crystal formations, and combinations of these which, as you are shown during the guided tour of the caves, have grown in the form of the map of Kosovo, Scanderbeg’s eagle, Scanderbeg’s beard – or other parts of Scanderbeg’s anatomy which are pointed out only to the men in the tour group. When we had visited earlier in the year, Rob had been laughing in a rather wearied way for much of our walk round the caves in the company of the over-imaginative, over-confiding elderly man guiding us.

That visit had been in the summer, but we were assured that the caves have a constant year-round temperature of 16°C.What had been refreshing coolness in August would be a welcome way to warm up on a Kosovan winter evening. The only logistical challenge was the distance of the caves from Pristina. A number of my guests didn’t have cars, or would be wanting to drink during the evening, so I had to organise transport. One idea led to another, and I succumbed once again to the temptation to splurge all your party ideas in one evening – and booked not just a minibus but also a limo for the night.

The plan was that Rob and I would drive to the caves during the afternoon and set everything up. I would then return by taxi to Pristina, put on a party frock, and get into the limousine with nine suitably glamorous girlfriends to drink Baileys and eat chocolates during the ride to the caves. At university a friend of mine spent much of her time designing activities that she believed no-one else in the world could be doing at the same moment as her – living her life as a kind of googlewhack. I wondered whether drinking Baileys in a Kosovan limousine on the way to a party in a cave would count.

Whether it did or not, in the end I myself never qualified. Despite my carefully planned itinerary, Pristina’s famous fog rolled in and took over. Most significantly, this risked my most important party guest – Rob – being able to get to the party at all. He had been in Vienna with the Prime Minister taking part in independence negotiations. Arriving at the airport to take the flight that would bring him home for bedtime the night before my birthday, he was told that no flights were landing at Pristina.

The first I knew of it was a call from the Ambassador while I was mulling wine ready for the party the next day.

‘You’re not to worry, but Rob is going to be a bit late back. He’s not even sure he can get as far as Belgrade. But the Prime Minister knows it’s your birthday tomorrow – they’re doing everything they can to get Rob home in time.’

I finished mulling and put myself to bed, thinking that I mustn’t make a fuss, but wishing that I could wake up next to Rob on the morning of my birthday.

I was woken many hours later. It was dark outside, but there was someone in the room. He smelt of diesel and cigarette smoke and fog.

An overnight bus from Belgrade had brought me the only birthday present I really wanted.

Rob was with me all the rest of the day. So was the fog. That afternoon in the bad weather all the necessary journeys to and from the caves – for me, the taxi, the caterers, a saxophonist – took longer than planned or didn’t happen at all. At six thirty I was still waiting for a taxi to take me back to Pristina, as the dramatic fog swirled around the car park for the caves. If the taxi didn’t come in two minutes...

It didn’t come in two minutes, and I realised that I was stranded at the caves in the jumper and skirt I’d been wearing all day, with a bottle of Bailey’s in my bag, while nine glamorous girlfriends were waiting for me in a limousine in Pristina. I phoned Alisa, my friend from the museum who was one of the women due to be there in the limo.

‘Where are you, Elizabeth?’

‘You’ll have to set off without me’ Or the chocolates, I realised. I put down the phone. And then I burst into tears. The daughter of the family who owns the caves, struggling with the last-minute repairs to the generator, saw that some social disaster had struck, and came over to comfort me. Mopping my nose, I asked if I could borrow a bathroom to put some make up on and somehow transform myself to party hostess.

She managed to find me not only a bathroom, but one in the house of a beautician friend of hers, who delighted in a Grease-style makeover of the smudged Englishwoman who had been deposited on her doorstep. I emerged from her house with bouffant hair, two colours of lipstick, and eye make-up I had to wipe off just a little bit.

As the caves filled with sixty people echoing along with a saxophone, I forgot my girly trauma. Almost everyone I’d invited had braved the fog and the directions to get to the party. There were more Kosovars than ‘internationals’, and for most people (both local and foreign) it was their first visit to the caves. The teacher in me enjoyed that. Only a few people hadn’t been able to come – Adem, Xhezide and Mirlinda had politely said they couldn’t make it, and I’d realised how much it would cost them to get from the village. Also absent were some of my friends who were abroad, and a friend who suffers from claustrophobia.

Even when the inevitable power cut came in the middle of the party, and we discovered that that generator never had been fixed, the 250 candles Rob had placed in every available rock crevice saved us from terrifying blackout. It was an unforgettable party.

But I felt that life still owed me some Baileys.

And so it was that a while later I organised a reprise version – and one which three of my friends who had been out of Kosovo for my birthday itself were able to attend. Many of the women who came had supported my honey habit in some way: Saskia, the German friend who had taken me to the Xhonaj folk festival and screeched to a halt so I could jump out en route and buy my first skep Alisa, the guide who had first encouraged me to return to the Ethnological Museum, Naxhije, who had been photographer in residence at the museum, and was now a friend who shared my croissant habit. The wife of Gazi, my Albanian teacher, came too, as well as the beautiful heroine of the kulla, Cindy. With us was my American friend known to my family as Coriander Sue because of her request whenever I went abroad for me to bring back the fresh herb you can’t find in Kosovo, and so was a young Kosovan fashion designer I had got to know, and a politician I’d met through Rob’s work, along with Mary, the British doctor working on women’s health in Pristina and the villages beyond. We had no caves, and we had no limousine, but we made up for it at my house with drink, chocolate, very classy outfits – and honeyed snacks.

I worried that chocolate might not be sufficient to sustain ten ladies for a long night, and developed a menu of possibly limo-style snacks to keep us going. Along with the caviar on rye bread, the courgette korma petit fours, the salted popcorn with Nutella dip, and the Eton Mess in tiny Kosovan tea glasses, I brought out some of my honey. I soaked a packet of hazelnuts in the honey during the day, and provided cocktail sticks for serving.

We ate our way through all the honey, we chatted, and we played frivolous games. We played one game, too, that was not so frivolous – when conversation turned inevitably to Kosovo’s independence, we ended up placing bets on what the date for a declaration by the government might be.

Late that night, a group of women tiptoed home on unsteady high heels with sticky chins – and crossed fingers, for at least one of the bets to come right.

 

Ingredients:

 

100g hazelnuts

Enough honey to cover them

 

Method

 

Pour the honey over the hazelnuts and leave to soak overnight. Serve with cocktail sticks.