Russian Honey Dessert With Moroccan Tea And An Albanian Mangall

 

New Albanian vocabulary: filxhan (dainty coffee cup, espresso size)

 

 

My folder of recipes copied down from beekeepers and their colleagues and daughters was growing nicely plump, and so was I, from trying so many. I was learning about the techniques for making these recipes, and for serving them, learning how to substitute honey for sugar – adding a pinch of bicarbonate of soda to counteract honey’s slight acidity, slightly reducing the amount called for in the recipe, to allow for honey’s greater sweetness, and adjusting for its (approximately twenty per cent greater) liquid content. My appetite was growing for entertaining Kosovo-style, and I decided that it was time to expand our entertaining hardware so that we could offer our guests the honey from our hives in appropriate settings.

In Kosovo, stylish entertaining means coffee. People say that the coffee served in Kosovo is the best outside of Italy; there is certainly enough fuss made of it. I knew that making coffee for your guests was traditionally men’s work in Kosovo. So while the women of the house would have struggled in the heat of the kitchen, hefting sacks of food bought in quantities to feed extended families (even now in Kosovo the average household size is seven – no vegetables are sold here in measurements less than a kilo, and the supermarkets carry what I would call ‘catering’ size packs of flour and rice), the men would have practised the fine art – in the Balkans almost a science – of coffee-making.

I’d seen at the Ethnological Museum how in a culture where it was not considered suitable for a man either to abandon his guests in the room where visitors are received, or for him to enter the kitchen (i.e. women’s) quarters, the practical consequence of the host’s coffee- making was the often beautiful piece of furniture called a mangall. It is a decorative brazier, with a removable metal bowl that can be filled with hot coals outside the house, and then brought in to be used as the heat source for boiling up the coffee grounds in the traditional xhezve. Around the edge of the bowl to hold the coals is a brim wide enough to hold the attractive little coffee cups.

 

The xhezve for making Turkish coffee

 

Sadly I had only seen these mangalls in museums. Don’t go think- ing this is because the modern male Kosovar is now comfortable in the kitchen – it has more to do with the advent of electricity. But the mangall struck me as both useful and elegant, and I wondered how I could get such an accessory for our own sitting room. I made enquiries of my colleagues at the museum and was met with polite indulgence mixed with bemusement.

’You can’t buy mangalls any more in Kosovo. And, er, why do you want one?’ I gestured at the bronze dome, the ornamented handles.

’Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’

’Well, yes, but would it go in your sitting room?’ I had not taken account of the fact that this was a country where if you could afford it you would buy your sitting room as one piece: wraparound sofa, huge matching cabinets, all still smelling of plastic and varnish, and the foreign factory where they were produced.

Yes, it would go in our sitting room! The room was already a strange mixture of John Lewis imported fabric, things we’d had made by a local carpenter, and a leather sofa and chairs we had haggled for having found them abandoned in a field of chickens on a journey out of Pristina in our first few weeks in Kosovo. My friends’ scepticism only made me more determined to find us a mangall, so Rob and I planned a weekend in Albania. Rob would go walking, exploring the Shala valley, on the other side of the Accursed Mountains from Kosovo; I would go shopping.

The trip would be a fun tourist opportunity, but there was some- thing more fundamental than that. Because of Kosovo’s close relation- ship with Albania, and the aspirations of some Kosovo Albanians to unite politically with their older brother, I was beginning to feel that I couldn’t move much further in understanding Kosovo without meeting the family across the border.

It made me sad to think that this was the sibling who had done so much better at preserving the family silver. Kosovo was empty of its own antiques – the result of historical poverty (mangalls of the style I was looking for would always have been a rare luxury item) and pillage: the European Agency for Reconstruction estimates reckon nearly fifty per cent of Kosovo’s houses were, like Adem and Xhezide’s, burned during the conflict from 1998 to 1999; far more were abandoned when their owners fled during that period. These were just the last in a series of attacks on the property of Kosovo’s inhabitants over hundreds of years.

The town of Kruja, where Scanderbeg had his castle in northern Albania, has known pillage of a different kind, and was – I was assured– stuffed full of antique shops which in turn would be stuffed with man- galls. Villagers from the surrounding area come to Kruja with their grandmothers’ hand-woven aprons, the hand-embroidered belts used for swaddling babies, the kilims from rooms that are being upgraded with Ikea design rugs – and when they’ve fitted the central heating and bought the cafetiere, they also bring in their mangalls.

When I reached the cobbled streets of Kruja, an old town sitting high on an escarpment, and started visiting the tens of shops huddled there, I saw it was true that there was an enormous choice of braziers in Kruja. It was lucky that I had planned Operation Mangall as a two-day campaign.

Scanderbeg himself couldn’t have been more careful in his tactics. I arrived late one afternoon and spent almost four hours going into every shop asking about mangalls and prices and taking photographs of the options. Some were ancient to the point of shabbiness, and I could imagine the Kosovars’ faces if I came home bearing any of those as booty from my trip. Others were made of copper shined pink as fingernails – they would not have looked out of place in one of the plastic all-in-one rooms of the Kosovan elite. But they would certainly not fit in with a leather sofa that had had to have the legacy of chickens wiped off it before we could use it.

While making the decision I comforted myself with buying other smaller handcrafts: some old rugs, some jewellery, a carved wooden block that the shopkeeper told me was used to mark your bread when you took it to the village oven, but from the dye that seeped out onto the dough I first tried it out on, seems more likely to have been a textile printing block. Yuk. I tried on traditional waistcoats, ornate necklaces and embroidered blouses. I haggled as best I could, as the shopkeepers looked on in some bemusement. They could tell from my accent that I wasn’t from round here, and when I used ‘kqyrë’ instead of ‘pa’ for’ looking’ at their wares, when I said ‘tash’ instead of ‘tani’ to tell themI didn’t want to buy now, they could tell that my Albanian had been raised in Kosovo. But somehow it didn’t fit together for them. Sometimes I wondered whether it fitted together for me either.

Finally I decided that our humble sitting room couldn’t quite carry off the mangall with the elaborate dome crested with an eagle, and I settled for the mangall with more than a passing resemblance to the one at the Ethnological Museum. Was it this that I had been trying to recre- ate in this long quest across a mountain range, across a border? I realised that I had a long way to go before my chicken-shit sofa and Oxford Street curtains could attain the elegance of the museum’s oda, but for cosy evenings, attentive hosting and good times with friends my new acquisition seemed to bode well.

It was wrapped up in sacks and then bundled, with me, into a minibus taxi to take me on to the town of Shkodra where Rob was waiting to drive us back to Pristina, exchanging our traveller tales. I had my antiques; he had stayed the night with the family of a man he had got talking to in one of the villages on his walking route. The man’s elderly mother had offered to wash Rob’s feet to welcome him to their home. If I hadn’t been so pleased with my mangall I might have felt outdone.

With all the effort that had gone into buying this large lump of old metal, I was keen to use it as soon as possible. We organised an evening meal including honey dessert for our American friends, ‘Coriander’ Sue and her husband, Mike. Sue’s appreciation of my honey had recently led to her visiting the bees with us and watching the harvest of more honey. I had enjoyed the visit – she had asked the same kind of questions I had a year before. This time, I had been able to answer them myself. I had begun to accept what the limitations of my beekeeping skill and scope were always going to be, at least while my hives were on Adem’s farm, but I could also now see my growing competence in my work with the bees. There’s nothing like explaining something to someone else to make you aware of what you’ve learned. I was going through the parallel process in my relationship with Kosovo – we had had a stream of house guests from the UK over the summer and I had surprised us all in being able to talk authoritatively about this place, despite the complicated iden- tity of resident foreigner I knew I had here. When outsiders appear, you feel you belong more than ever before.

I had planned that we would sit outside and use the mangall for warmth after the sun had gone down. But when Sue and Mike arrived they announced that they had brought with them their set for making mint tea, bought during their time living at the other end of the former Ottoman Empire, in Morocco. It was a perfect companion to the mangall, and at the end of our meal we sat on the terrace with Mike pre- siding over water boiled on the brazier and flavoured with his home- grown mint. We all knew that the rules had got a bit muddled when it was the guest who made the drinks, but once women are allowed out of the kitchen and into the conversation, you’ve already unleashed all kinds of chaos on Ottoman structures. We drank happily.

Before that, we had indulged ourselves in a honey recipe I had seen in an Albanian cookery magazine that had started circulating that month. The dish calls itself ‘Russian dessert’, which was a bold bit of marketing for the time, given that Russia was obstructing recognition of Kosovan independence. The country’s natural cultural and religious ties with the Slavic Serbs mean that Russians – and maybe even Russian desserts – are viewed with suspicion or worse by most Albanians. However, with our Moroccan mint tea and our imported mangall, the Brits and Americans sitting on a terrace in Kosovo were prepared to welcome new international ideas to our dinner. Anyway, apart from the thirty millilitres of sour cream, the recipe didn’t seem very Russian to me. As I had discovered, it takes more than a dab of a country’s national foodstuff to make you one of them.

 

‘Russian dessert’ (though since this ends up as something like a loaf, I felt afterwards that this would really be best served at a tea rather than as a dessert for a meal. My friend, Martha tried the recipe and suggested that it made a very successful pudding served with fruit and cream)

 

Ingredients

170g butter

4 eggs

200g sugar

2 tbsp sour cream

2 tbsp honey

130g ground hazelnuts

80g plain flour

1 sachet yeast

juice of half a lemon

130g icing sugar

1 tbsp water

 

Preheat oven to 200 degrees.

Beat the butter until it is soft. Break the eggs into the bowl and combine with sugar, sour cream, honey, hazelnuts, flour and yeast.

Grease and line a loaf tin and pour in the mixture. Bake in the oven for45 minutes.

While it is cooking, put the lemon juice in a bowl with the icing sugar. Add a tablespoonful of water and mix until combined.

When the loaf is baked, cover the surface with the icing using a knife. Slice and serve.