Honey Ice-Cream

 

New Albanian vocabulary: pranverë (spring)

 

 

Over the Easter weekend Rob and I took a short break from Kosovo, though not from honey. We drove down to Greece – a land that they say is impossible to leave, because your feet get stuck in the country’s honey. Certainly we indulged ourselves, breakfasting by the sea on yoghurt drizzled with thyme-scented honey, walking along sunlit pavements eating sticky pastries, picking at honey cake and paperbacks on our flowery balcony. We also treated ourselves to ice-cream. Of course, Kosovo has ice-cream but it doesn’t have much electricity. With that in mind, it always feels like Pristina Roulette to choose a tub in the supermarket; under which lid will the salmonella bacteria be hiding? The chances of having had constant refrigeration from the factory where the ice-cream is made, in the van in which it is transported, to the wholesalers where it is stored, and the shop where it is offered for sale, are slim.

So should we be, now that we have cut out regular Häagen Dazs from our diet. But of course you find ways to compensate – one of which was glutting ourselves when we left Kosovo’s borders. On a recent trip to Italy Rob and I had managed 24 scoops of ice-cream in48 hours. I hadn’t thought of Greece as being a destination dripping with ice-cream in quite the same way, but a small café in the Plaka, under the spot lit Acropolis, changed my mind. Not only did they offer rice ice-cream which I had previously seen in only a few Italian gelaterias, but you could have baklava ice-cream, which I had never heard of before. The ice-cream was vanilla with a gentle swirl of honey, studded with nuggets of golden filo pastry with their clumps of chopped nuts. I had one scoop after supper on Easter Sunday, and then we got up early on Easter Monday and before catching the train back home we found time for another scoop for breakfast.

Despite the sticky treats we were leaving behind us, I wasn’t sorry to get back to Kosovo. I always get a thrill at the border, and a growing sense of homecoming as it approaches. When flying back, the first clue that you are on your way to Pristina is the crescendo of Albanian words you snatch out of the hubbub of the airport crowd. Usually the first word I hear is ‘hajde’, the generic Balkan ‘come on’, ‘let’s go’, ‘this way’. All very useful airport vocabulary. The next phrase I hear is usually ‘ama dorën’ (‘hold my hand’), and with this brusque Albanian wooing, I know I am back.

My first chance to speak Albanian myself doesn’t usually come till we have crossed the border, when with the formalities of passport control I feel my Albanian muscles flexing once more. I love speaking the language again, and I can’t think of a rational way to explain or describe this. It’s like trying to explain why you enjoy kissing someone. In part it’s because of who they are; and partly it’s just the feel of it on your mouth.

The day after we got back from Greece we invited some people to supper. On my honey high from our holiday, I decided to make my ice- cream recipe to eat with pieces of cut comb.

 

I don’t have an ice-cream machine, but I do have a brilliant recipe that doesn’t require a machine. I inherited the recipe from my mother who in turn learned it from her accomplished expat friend, Trish. Trish has lived in a number of hot and interesting countries where buying ice- cream wouldn’t even have the fun of Pristina Roulette – because it would be a dead cert that you would find the salmonella bacteria.

 

Ingredients

4 eggs

85g sugar

570ml double cream

1 pot of honey

 

Whip the eggs and the sugar together until they are white. (This doesn’t mean whipping just the egg whites until they lose their transparency, but whipping the whole egg until it’s white. Don’t even bother trying if you don’t have an electric whisk. The air which is added to the eggs by doing this extensive whipping is the key factor in being able to have fluffy ice-cream without an ice-cream maker.)

Whip the cream until stiff.

To determine the flavour of the ice-cream, add a pot of whatever is appropriate: chocolate spread, fruit jam – or of course honey. Alcohol can be added at this point too – I have made a delicious raspberry and sweet Muscat dessert wine ice-cream, for example. I’ve also combined butterscotch chips with the honey very successfully. Combine the ingredients, folding carefully to keep in as much air as possible.

Freeze overnight (I always find this a rather strange direction as it sug- gests that you would be eating the ice-cream for breakfast. After our indulgence in Athens, I can recommend this, but I didn’t think that other people would share my odd eating habits).

 

One of our guests was Dardane, a Kosovar working internationally as a consultant for the World Health Organisation as well as having been the Kosovan Prime Minister’s adviser on health. She is the perfect target for a recently-established group called Brain Gain Kosova which aimed to lure back to the homeland all the educated, skilled members of the diaspora currently using their expertise in the service of other countries. When the Homeland Calling fund was set up to gather funds for the KLA in the late ‘nineties, it was an enormous success; everyone seemed more sceptical about this new attempt. It seems that Kosovars might have been more willing to give money to arm their soldiers than to skill up their newly independent government.

Certainly Dardane – young, beautiful, talented – talked about her frustrations at working in Kosovo. The job she had accepted here is at a fraction of the salary that she was offered elsewhere (recent consultancies had been in Fiji, Copenhagen, Kazakhstan), and she still felt that she had not been able to contribute appropriately. ‘I feel so frustrated that I go round the world helping other governments to improve their health services, and I’ve not been able to do things for my own country. You realise what that Kosovan expression means – ‘one bloom doesn’t make a spring’. There’s not much you can do when it’s just you against the system.’ The reasons she gave for the inability to bring full-blown spring to Kosovo include party loyalties that stop the best people getting the job because old party ties have more power. She also talked about being female and young; according to her, Kosovo’s problem is its fifty- year-old men.

Rob asked her what she would change about Kosovo if she could change one thing. She said she’d like to see a willingness to employ women in leadership, decision-making roles.

So I asked Rob what his one thing would be; he answered, ‘corruption. There’s a sense amongst the big fish that corruption is an accepted part of life in Kosovo, and that they are therefore untouchable. And the little fish, because they know (or believe they know) what their bosses are up to, think that no-one will go after people committing crimes that are so much smaller. There needs to be a high-profile case where someone apparently untouchable is taken down.’

I think that people would just assume that whoever has been caught had simply not paid off or brought in the right people. They’ll change their protection mechanisms, but not their corrupt behaviour.

I wondered myself about Rob’s question, and decided what my own answer would be. I told Dardane, ‘but at the point when the flower opens up its petals, it doesn’t know whether it is going to be a lone bloom or part of an enormous spring display.’ That’s what I’d like to see– a belief, in every part of life in Kosovo, that your actions can affect the whole, and that no spring display is possible without that attitude. But in Kosovo there are too many people who don’t want to take the risk that Dardane took, because they worry that they will find themselves a lone bloom. It feeds into the issue that Rob highlighted: people believe that they might as well make a bit (a lot) of money on a government tender, because everyone else is doing it, and their probity won’t change anything. In the face of the chronic water shortages, when Kosovo’s lakes were at their lowest recorded level, I had a conversation with the museum guides who lamented the terrible situation – as they hosed down their paving stones. They didn’t believe that their own small water-saving measures could do anything to improve the enormous problem facing their country. There is the same problem with the widespread non- payment of electricity bills (‘Why should I pay? Nobody else does.’), which leads to the lack of investment in the electricity system – which leads of course to power cuts – and inedible ice-cream.