Bratwurst, byrek, baklava and a turkey-cornbread combo in Albania
Has Donald Trump thought of annexing Albania, along with Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal?
It’s a pertinent question in light of Albania’s quintessentially American choice of items for the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner: Turkey and cornbread.
Sounds a bit like an American Thanksgiving meal. (Theoretically, such inherently American tastes should make Albania a natural target for a loose-mouthed US president-elect who claims territorially expansionist ambitions. That said, Mr Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal may be no more than a strategy to dominate the news agenda and forestall discussion of that crucial final report prepared by special counsel Jack Smith into the two federal criminal cases he brought against Mr Trump.)
Back to Albania’s cornbread and it is much different from the American product of the same name. We bought one of these rather flat, heavy and unyielding rectangular bricks with a very white crumb from a bakery for the equivalent of 1 euro. Finding it dry and tasteless, I thought it may be good as crumbs in casserole toppings and breading for patties. Turns out, many Albanians seem to have the same idea, making the cornbread into përsheshi, a dish of crumbs soaked in turkey broth. The broth, apparently, comes from boiling the turkey before it is roasted.
The highlights of Albanian food and drink include pomegranate juice (leng shege) and tzatziki. In fact, the cucumber-yoghurt dip might almost be the Albanian ketchup — they seem to eat it with everything. And then there is bratwurst, byrek and baklava, all plentiful and all very good.
As I found, some of the distinctions between types of baklava get rather lost in translation. Traditional baklava is made with walnuts. The non-traditional one, according to the bewildering English version of the menu at Nur Cafe in New Market, is “with sticks” (sic). What does that mean, I asked the waitress but the only intelligence she could offer was that it really is “with sticks”. Thinking they might be crusted with vermicelli or perhaps even served with toothpicks (!), I played safe and ordered the traditional baklava. It was only later that I realised the “sticks” were stika, the Albanian word for pistachios.
There was much less ambiguity about Albanian sausage, which is particularly good, whatever kind you have — pork, beef or chicken. Some of it is spicy and curled into spirals the thickness of a finger, with a local name that sounds like “lagavitz”.
The city of Berat in central Albania is very proud of its speciality, which they call schnitzel even though the breaded and fried cheese and pork slab is nothing like the German original.
Fresh juice is easy to find and relatively cheap (a glass of deep red goodness is yours for 200 to 300 Albanian lek, roughly equivalent to 2 or 3 euros). As for byrek, it is börek, the Turkish savoury pie made with filo pastry and usually filled with spinach and cheese, meat, or just cheese.
For, Albania’s food shows its genetic strain: the Ottomans, who ruled this country for 400 years, along with a swath of the Balkans.
There are also a variety of stews cooked in the heat-retaining clay pot known as “tave”. The Tave dheu we ate at one of Tirana’s best restaurants, Mrizi i Zanave, was excellent, with small pieces of veal, plenty of vegetables and deeply flavoured with a local cheese.
But the Tave kosi (yoghurt with lamb) at Odas Garden, another popular restaurant in Tirana, was deeply disappointing for all that some regard it as Albania’s national dish. Perhaps Odas didn’t cook it properly as it’s hard to see how a pot of bland baked yoghurt with chunks of unseasoned fatty lamb could have such a committed following, countrywide.
There are also arrays of elaborately confected creations in patisseries — often, in brilliant hues — and the popcorn too can be technicolour!
But more often than not, it is street kiosks that speak to the true tastes of a people. And so it is with Albania. Hanging packets of crisps are flavoured with oregano. And alongside the soft drinks to quaff as you walk around, there is beer aplenty, which some may find surprising in a country where roughly half the population is Muslim.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
