Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

“Eating is something political”
Antje Mayer: That looks marvellous. You are
making me a Šopska salad. When I make it at
home why does it never taste as good as it does
in the Balkans?
Barbara Maier: you have to chop the ingredients
– cucumbers and tomatoes – as finely as
possible. And also: in restaurants in the Balkans
it is always freshly made. It doesn’t swim
for hours in the kitchen in a salad sauce until it
becomes completely soggy. I think that is the
secret. Oh, and don’t use vinegar. Everybody
can add some vinegar at the table if they want
to. The feta cheese must be grated over it freshly
at the table – generously. In my opinion you
can safely leave out onions.
Lojze Wieser: For me the pieces could be a little
larger and I think onion rings belong in the
salad. We differ in this respect. I always thought
that Šopska salad, which is like a Greek salad,
is a typical Yugoslav dish. Therefore I was all
the more surprised when I learned that the
name comes from a sheep rearing people, the
Schopen, who lived in the area around Sofia in
Bulgaria. The shepherds had plenty of cheese
and vegetables and could live from these
foods over the summer. In Živko Skračić’ book
“Artischockenherz und Mandelkern” (Artichoke
Hearts and Almond Kernels) I read that
there were similar simple “survival dishes” in
Dalmatia also. There the farmers ate only a
handful of almonds every day and washed them
down with wine. Incidentally, Çopan in Turkish
means shepherd, and there the same kind
of salad is known as “Çopan salad", shepherds’
salad.
I also know this salad from Ukraine where people
eat it with a lot of dill and parsley. They use
almost as many finely chopped herbs as they do
of the other ingredients, which makes the salad
taste very fresh and means that it is full of vitamins.
B. M.: That sounds very interesting. You live
and learn. Let's try that out straight away.
(Goes into the garden and comes back with a
bunch of herbs.)
Last year you undertook a 17-day-long culinary
research tour in the Balkans. What did you
bring back with you in terms of new tastes?
B. M.: We drove over 5000 kilometres with our
Barbara Maier, cultural and scientific mediator, and publisher and author Lojze Wieser undertook a culinary voyage of
discovery in the Balkans. The pair invited Antje Mayer to a meal in their house in Klagenfurt where they served Šopskasalad,
goulash and cooled Rakia, told about dishes they had tasted and philosophised about the social implications
of eating, drinking and preparing meals.
— Antje Mayer talks to Barbara Maier and Lojze Wieser —
ancient Škoda Octavia, travelled through nine
countries and made 45 interviews, visited 38
restaurants and tasted over one hundred dishes.
I felt wonderful, didn’t put on an ounce and
never had a problem with my digestion.
What did you enjoy best?
B. M.: I was impressed by the variety of the
new kinds of tastes. The overall impression I
had was a very sensual one. In restaurants in
the Balkans cooking is not hidden behind milk
glass screens but is part of the entire enjoyment
of eating and drinking. In places Meals
are still cooked on an open fire and as a starter
the guest “eats” with his nose and naturally also
with his ears.
Through communism, but due also to strict
EU norms and the trend towards globalisation
many culinary traditions in the central and
southeast European countries have been lost.
Is a new generation rediscovering the “memory
of the palate"?
L. W.: In Slovenia the classic cookery book
“Slovenska kuharica”, which contains 900 recipes,
has been republished 28 times. The first
edition of this work appeared in 1868. Recipes
are living things that experience changes over
the decades. What are known as the fast- or
Lenten meals are not found in the later editions
because during the socialist era the religious
concept of fasting could not be mentioned.
Since the fall of communism these dishes have
been included again, by the way.
But let's not try to disguise the facts. A great
deal of knowledge about the nature, the method
of preparation and not least of all the medicinal
healing properties of foodstuffs has been irretrievably
lost in the East – and indeed in the
West. People today no longer know how to use
foodstuffs.
We use food wastefully nowadays. In a text she
wrote for “Report” the young Ukrainian writer
Marjana Gaponenko expressed her amazement
that we separate our rubbish in the West.
In Ukraine this isn't necessary as there is hardly
anything to separate there, everything is used up.
B. M.: Take a chicken for example. You can use
every part of it from the stomach to the comb
and you don’t have to throw anything away. I
think that you still experience this respect for
the foods we eat in the Balkans more often, because
the natural cycle of things has not been
interrupted.
L. W.: I enjoy offal for example and also like
to cook it. When my wife invites her friends I
cook tripe soup for them. This is a question of
trust. Offal in general is cheap and – contrary
to its reputation – good for your health. Venison
liver, for example, helps against arthritis
but you generally can't buy it in a shop as the
hunters keep this specialty for themselves. For
hygiene reasons a lot of abattoirs do not deliver
offal any more; for example it costs too much
to properly wash intestines. The “disgusting”
remnants are, at best, made into cat and dog
food or simply disposed of.
Are the many cookery programmes now found
on television in the Balkans, just like here, not
bringing about a revival of interest?
L. W.: Many people, above all the younger ones,
can no longer cook and these lifestyle programmes
in television don’t alter anything in
that respect.
It makes them increasingly dependent on a
global food industry that offers ready-made
products and that caters for as general a taste
as possible. The sensitivity towards different
combinations of tastes is lost and with it the respect
for the production of foodstuffs. This also
results in the spread of poverty, as people can
no longer cook for themselves.
With regard to poverty: in your book “Kochen
unter anderen Sternen” you tell about the beggar
Ina, known throughout the village, who
during your childhood came to visit your family
at regular intervals …
L. W.: When Ina came my mother did not serve
margarine but butter. Ina was given real coffee
which was very valuable and my father put a
frakali, a little glass, of the best schnapps on the
table. Probably a relic from the Middle Ages, a
memento mori: the more you give the greater
your reward in heaven after you die. Hospitality
was an important cultural value – as it is in
the Balkans today – that preserved a social balance.
Eating and drinking connects people!
L. W.: Like literature cooking is one of the cornerstones
of a culture. Like language, food is
“prepared” with the tongue, is the expression
of an identity, brings people together, has an
importance in terms of social hygiene. I would
even go so far as to assert that eating is something
political.
Barbara Maier, cultural and scientific mediator, was
born in 1961 and studied German language and literature
and the history of art. She is head of the department
of knowledge transfer at the Alpen-Adria University
in Klagenfurt.
Lojze Wieser was born in 1954 and has published
books since 1979. From 1981 to 1986 he headed
Drava Verlag and since 1987 has been the owner of the
Wieser Verlag. He was awarded the First Austrian State
Prize for publishing.
Booktips
Lojze Wieser: “Kochen unter anderen Sternen. Geschichten
von entlegenen Speisen”, Czernin Verlag, Vienna,
2007
Hans Gerold Kugler, Barbara Maier: “Santoninos Kost",
Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt/Celovec 2001; published in
German, Slovene and Italian
“Geschmacksverwandschaften. Eine kleine europäische
Speisefibel mit Geschichten und Rezepten”, collected
by Lojze Wieser, Christoph Wagner and Barbara Maier,
Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt/Celovec 2008
Norbert Schreiber, Lojze Wieser, “Wie schmeckt
Europa?”, Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt/Celovec 2009
www.czernin-verlag.at
www.wieser-verlag.com
Published in “Report” in July 2008 (online)
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