Category Archives: macedonia

M&M Enterprise Cooking, Vol. X

Srpska salata

local crockery helped presentation

It’s been a few days of rich and bountiful eating, so I decided to go for something lighter, not to mention the cucumbers and tomatoes, so fresh a few days ago, were in danger of getting overripe. It’s immediately obvious to me what to do with these two delicious and cooler summer vegetables (technically fruits to the pedant). In a Spanish-speaking country where I could get sherry vinegar, and if I had a blender, it’d be gazpacho. But šopska salata is also a fine choice, especially given that the stalwart Italian PX stocks DOP feta cheese.

Now, I’m treading into the Balkans here, and I know that emotions run high about most all questions of national identity in that part of the world, and I know the Greek battle to secure DOP labeling for a kind of white sheep milk cheese that is produced in innumerable forms all over the Balkans was seen as a nasty nationalist move by many. But this is war zone cooking, and although I’d prefer real sirenje, that ain’t happening, and DOP feta is not a bad substitute, especially for my countrymen used to eating bland and hard stuff at salad bars and in gyros most of their lives.

I can’t think of any foreigner who, when traveling in the Balkans, didn’t immediately fall in love with the šopska salata. (I feel particularly strongly as I lived in the Šopluk for a bit.) Now, there is a lot of information on the internet about what is and what isn’t in a šopska, which seems common to all ultra-simple regional foods.

What I knew was this: the freshest possible tomatoes and cucumbers, cubed, topped with the most finely grated sirenje. Maybe a single black olive for decoration at fancier places. Possibley trace amounts of sunflower oil, not that you could taste. To Americans used to bland, tasteless iceberg topped with ranch or thousand island dressing, this was a new frontier in salads.

In the cafés in Belgrade, they’d add some finely diced and fairly hot fresh pepper. Every few bites, you’d get a bit of heat that could be instantly ameliorated with the cooling cucumbers and creamy cheese. Delightful on a sweltering summer day. That’s what I replicated here, to, I think, great effect. My only gripe is that the south Slavs rely on sunflower oil far too much. With a few drops of Zucchi organic, it was delightful. My only regret is not having some hearty Macedonian white bread to sop it up with.

I should probably have a post at some point about similarities between the Balkan and Central Asian kitchen — the fresh vegetables, grilled meats, and good bread all doubtless have Turkish roots. But that’s a subject for a different post.

 

 

Literary Lunches: Rebecca West

Today we’ll kick off what will hopefully be a literary lunch series, in which I’ll showcase a (usually) simple meal from a great book. 

Black Lamb & Grey FalconAll I had time for today was a quick lunch — a couple of slices of prosciutto di parma (Citterio, aged 420 days, Trader Joe’s; $6.49 for 4 oz.) on a leftover hunk of pain de campagne (Leonora’s; de-thawed free “sympathy loaf” given to me the day before Snowzilla). This spartan lunch reminded me of Dragutin, Rebecca West’s chauffeur in the Macedonia chapter of Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. All I’m missing is some good Hungarian, or better, Serbian paprika. 

 

On the step of the automobile Dragutin sat and ate his lunch between the two young soldiers, who had the dutiful and dedicated look I have noticed so often in Yugoslav conscripts. His lunch was, as always, ascetic and chosen in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic: he liked lean meat and rough black bread and paprika, and he regarded as weakening all soft and slippery things like butter and kaymak and sardines.

Certainly no sardines on my sandwich. But if only one could get some decent njeguški pršut around here. 

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Review of Peter Hessler’s River Town

Fuling, where Peter Hessler served
Fuling, where Peter Hessler served

Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan in 1996-1998 and his book chronicling his life there, River Town, is an excellent Peace Corps memoir. Even though I can’t think of a place more different from Macedonia, where I served, than China, he still has many of the same or similar experiences living in a remote, rural and developing place. River Town is also highly readable; one can knock it out in a day or two, despite coming in at almost 400 pages. Hessler is a dedicated teacher, even if he is still finding the voice that is so clear in later books like Country Driving: his tendency to mimic repeated Chinese adjectives can annoy, as does his repetition of turns of phrase that he himself admits are awkward and clichéd.  Despite his differences from most of the volunteers I served with — I didn’t know volunteers who went to church, for starters —  the experience is broad enough to resonate with Peace Corps volunteers removed by a decade and thousands of kilometers.

For these reasons, River Town succeeds more as a Peace Corps memoir than as a straight-up China travelogue. Hessler mentions how the one group he connects with the least are the new moneyed young males, arrogant, self-assured, and decked out in garish styles. Macedonia had a similar class — pretty boys with shaved armpits, garish faux-designer sweaters and fast cars, who would eagerly give you a lecture on how much money you could make doing whatever your Peace Corps job was back in America. Like Hessler, none of our group were really friends with this chunk of society. I’m sure large chunks of the rest of the developing world have their analogues as well, even if the stakes may be far higher in ever-growing China.

The book is not without its flaws. Despite being the ultimate Peace Corps book, meticulously chronicling the whole two years of hardships similar to volunteers all over, what I ultimately didn’t like about it was that Hessler’s problems all seemed easily resolved, leaving perhaps some vague sense of discomfort but nothing more.  Largely, his experience is one of positive, self-enriching activities. He rises early to write every day. He diligently masters Chinese without major frustration and speaks exclusively in it. He goes to church and give the church money. He meets crazy desperate women and whores, and nobly turns them down. He participates in macho Chinese drinking, but realizes it is wrong and boring. He cheerfully gets his students through Shakespeare and other English classics, even getting them to perform plays. He is a dedicated runner whose only issue seems to be grappling with American competitiveness.

Too much of this can make the author come across as sanctimonious at times. He tangles with all manner of foreigner-in-a-developing-country issues, but he almost always rationally and calmly makes the right choice, and even when he doesn’t, the consequences are banal: he almost gets into a fight with an ignorant villager, but just walks away after humiliating the guy. I was cheered to see that even the best volunteers almost got into fights with annoying villagers after a year and some of taunts and unwanted attention, but it might’ve been interesting to read about the Peace Corps volunteer who didn’t always make the right choice or who made bad friends.

Although I wasn’t expecting Hessler, who is largely realistic about the goals of his service, to adopt a pro-democracy viewpoint of either the humanitarian interventionist or neoconservative stripe, his judgment did seem off-kilter at least once, less for political reasons than the personal. But the personal is telling: at one point he meets a pro-democracy student whose English name is “Rebecca” and he dismisses him as a loser with a girl’s name, and after giving him an old Newsweek writes the kid off.  After a brief discussion about how this dumpy loser didn’t fit his image of the Tiananmen protesters as “noble characters,” he disappears from the book. Instead, he prefers the nobility of the party:

He was the only student who has anything like a dissident, and I remembered how I had imagined those figures before coming to Fuling. I had always assumed that they were noble characters — charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, brave. Perhaps that was the way it had been in 1989, and perhaps it was still like that in the bigger cities; but here in Fuling things were very different. My best students — Soddy, Linda, Armstrong, Aumur; the ones who were charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, and brave — those were the ones who had been recruited long ago as Party Members. If you had any talent you played by the rules; being a Party Member was good for your career, and in any case all of the students seemed to think that it was good to be patriotic in the narrow way that they were told to be. The image I had once had of the Chinese dissident had no reality in Fuling.

All I had was Rebecca — he was the only one, and he was a loser. He was a bad student, and he was socially awkward. He had no friends. He had a girl’s name. Some of these characteristics had conspired to set him apart, and in his bitterness his ideas had undoubtedly swung even further from the Party line. If there were big changes in China’s future, it was hard to imagine them coming from people like Rebecca, or, for that matter, from any of my other students.

I found the above passage recently reproduced on a blog with a strong nationalistic Chinese bent. (That’s nationalist in the present sense, not the 1949 Taiwan/Guomindang sense.) There are several problems with this, not the least of which is that the authors of such blogs using Hessler’s love of a winner to prop up their own idea that the true and good of China belong to the Communist party and that the marginalized and pathetic are ones who resist it. Of course Hessler spends an equal amount of time talking about how sick he is of the party’s ham-fisted attempts at controlling his school and the teachers’ interactions with students, but that is easily overlooked by the selective blogger.

Hessler does make a good point that being a Peace Corps volunteer makes a foreigner automatically marginal and thus attracts the local fringe element. This is definitely true: certainly Peace Corps volunteers attract both good and bad fringe elements. Sometimes the bad ones were the among worst – several of my colleagues and I had experiences with both categories. But most of the volunteers I knew, who were in-country for complex reasons of their own that might’ve included feeling marginal in their own country, always tried to lend a sympathetic ear to the good fringes. In my own town, my good friends Traki and his pal Ace, sons of a laid-off factory worker and a policeman-cum-hog-farmer respectively, were losers with bad grades who had taught themselves English from action movies. They wanted nothing from me but friendship and gave me just that and more in return.

Hessler’s ardent Chinese Communist Party students remind me of my Macedonian students who had what were called vrski — connections, most of which were with that country’s ex-socialist ruling class as well. They were civilized and the most “European” of my students, speaking usually excellent English well before I arrived, and I liked them — but they didn’t need any help. Mostly their parents had arranged decent careers and jobs for them, and they had little interest in things like scholarships to English-speaking universities and journalism clubs.

The students who were interested were indeed the marginalized — the Roma, the orphaned, the refugees. These were the students that eventually did move, get scholarships for their many talents — languages, computer programming, graphic design — and end up living and earning money abroad. Whether living in the West was ultimately to their benefit is perhaps another question, but I never had any doubt that working on the margins of the world I would end up serving the marginalized.

Friday AM briefs

Unctuous?

There’s way too much news this week, from the Libya to the milleproroghe, from Macedonia’s electoral crisis to the role of social media in the events that have shaken the Arab world.   Fini’s proclamation that the PM was not ‘anointed by the lord’ may hint at the beginning of the end on this side of the Mediterranean as well.

Look for a more thorough weekend update as your chronicler has other deadlines to meet this mild Friday morning.

For those who’ve spent time east of Apennines, ponder this bit from the Economist’s review of David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples.

Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines).

Friday AM Roundup

What’s great about Friday morning?  Having the Economist placed at your feet.  And even though this is a blog, sometimes it takes having the paper placed in your hands to do a good scan.

Tying together all the threads

Premesso’s not-quite week in review, drawn from the weekly of record:

1. On February 15, La Padania interviewed Pier Luigi Bersani, PD secretary.  (Shown elsewhere on this blog with his sleeves rolled up.)

Salient quote: Va anche bene che il governo rimanga nell’ambito del centrodestra. “It’s also all right if the government stays center-right.”

Is el Senatur sharpening the knife?

English language coverage.

2. As the holes in the immigration walls get harder to plug, shifting from Ceuta and Melilla to Lampedusa to the Greece-Turkey land border, Greece talks of suspending the Dublin Convention for asylum seekers.  The Economist’s Charlemagne comes out with the following sound idea: “A painful compromise might be tried: if Greece wants to suspend Dublin II, it should accept a temporary suspension of Schengen and the return of border controls.”  Me likey.

3. The Oscars: “this year’s awards are less relevant than ever.”  More need not be said, except that Hollywood need to keep looking to that export market.

4.  In Lexington, Obama’s handling of Egypt gets a look.  Much howling and gnashing of teeth from John Bolton, Niall Ferguson and Michael Scheuer, among others.  But maybe No-Drama Obama was the Decider?

Obama is said to have been more certain in private that Mr Mubarak’s jig was up than America’s public pronouncements (especially those of Hillary Clinton, his sometimes behind-message secretary of state) let on. He flatly rejected the Israelis’ analysis that the Egyptian president could hang on and that America should do everything to help him. Mr Obama’s conversation with Mr Mubarak on the evening of February 1st is said to have been the toughest between an American president and an ally since Ronald Reagan’s scolding of Menachem Begin during Israel’s bombing of Beirut in August 1982.

5. In Schumpter, the uneasy art-business axis is examined.  Damien Hirst is one shrewd businessman.

Damien Hirst was even more audacious. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from £70.5m ($126.5m) on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.

And following in his footsteps in Venice, perhaps the Zero Group?  Stay tuned.

Italian Neighbors

For what do we live?

It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up late to finish a book. But Tim Parks, with his impeccable rural Veneto credentials, has long fascinated me, and I finally got hold of his Italian Neighbors. To his credit, I could not put it down, although I was at times unsure what to make of his detachment — whether it boded well or poorly. Given that he’s still here, and now in Milan, I must assume the former. Doubtlessly the Veneto has changed even more in the quarter century between when he was writing and when I was living in Rovigo — his descriptions of rural rituals from a bygone era reminded me much more of my experiences in rural Macedonia than in Rovigo. But his descriptions of the sundry habits of the proper Veneto bourgeoisie, from obsessive cleanliness to worry about health, from state employment and its attendant security to the enterprising, and presumably-tax cheating small businessman, were spot-on. What mystified me, however, was what often seemed like a confusion over habits and attitudes that, although deeply different than those in the Anglo-Saxon world, I would have thought obvious, such as the pious Catholicism of the Veneto region or the great premium placed on eating well over the holidays. These are great differences, but I found myself keenly prepped for them — possible due to the amount of Italo-Americans and the habits they’ve imported? But that doesn’t seem right; London had its fair share of immigration, too, although one can reflect that perhaps a melting pot culture was less lauded there.  Also, too, I think I would have appreciated perhaps a bit more comparison of Britain to Italy.  Parks touches on it but I find that comparison of America to Italy informs a large percentage of my daily thoughts — and usually ends up in balance.  One must reflect, is anyone truly 100% content with their own culture when they come to live in another?  Parks criticizes the Italians for the self-assuredness of their own culture, but doesn’t he do just the seem with regard to Britain’s?

These quibbles don’t take away from the general enjoyment of another Anglo-Saxon displaced to the Veneto, though.  And, politically, there are the early rumblings of Lega Nord mentioned in a chapter on elections — and the few lines make for a trenchant and still-accurate profile of your likely LN voter in Veneto.  Personally, it’s refreshing to read about someone actually trying to hack out a living in the belpaese, and experiencing the pain of cancelled private lessons and mind-numbing boring translation material.  And stylistically, I enjoyed his use of the second person as well — because, if you live in the Veneto, you will indubitably experience most things just as he has. I’m eager to explore the rest of Parks’ Italian oeuvre. Maybe I’ll run into him when I start a new course near IULM next week.  One can hope, anyway.

More on Bosnia

It’s turning out to be a Bosnia-focused weekend here.

Marko Hoare has an excellent and sober assessment of Angelina Jolie’s Bosnia “imbroglio” up here.

For those who don’t know, the British left often has an odd — to say the least — way of viewing the Balkan Wars.  Mainly it consists of lionizing Milosevic as some kind of “anti-imperialist” simply because he was able to get his country bombed by NATO.  This is an old article from Indymedia Ireland that explores some of the myths and flat-out denying that go on amongst some British leftists when they discuss the Balkans.  It should serve as a useful warning for a treacherous path to “sinister idiocy” that sadly continues to influence thinking on the region.

Finally, it seems that Greek nationalists have managed to clean the internet of any photos of their paramilitary unit, the Greek Volunteer Guards, with Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb leadership.  But fear not, Takis Mikas’ intriguing book Unholy Alliance is up on Google Books.   The above photo is from it.  It’s worth pointing out he’s being sued for for stating that the Greeks were in Srebrenica, and it’s further worth pointing out what the name of the organization that’s suing him is. And here’s Hoare on the same issue.

The Artist is Presented

It’s voting season. And this year in the US, it will be important to vote. But that’s not what I’m pushing here.  You need to go here and vote for Igor Tosevski for Wooloo’s artist of the month.

The Piano Has Been Drinkin' (Not Him)

When I lived in Macedonia, I met one Igor Tosevski through a series of mutual acquaintances. After long periods in rustic and rural places, going for a coffee or a meal with Igor and his longtime parter, Tanya, was always a breath of life. Conversation was never limited. Their horizons seemed to be continually broadening at a time when mental space in Skopje was continually shrinking. No mean feat, that.

In addition, I got an education in situational art beyond the passing acquaintance I’d had with pompous and effete fops in the US.   Sure, guerrilla art has been the provenance of a certain urban class of elites since its inception. But what does it mean to do this in the former Yugoslavia and in Macedonia, especially during the nineties, when it was prudent to keep one’s views to oneself? What does it mean to do this during times of nationalism and small-mindedness? The stakes are much higher than what they might be in Milan or New York.

In 2004, I had the good luck to see Process at a time when the Macedonian government’s inability to regulate or commodifiy any kind of production — much less art production — was making the lives of most people a bureaucratic hell. The use of a rubber stamp to create a giant self-portrait in a room festooned with the actual legal text stipulating that artists must register as ‘traders’ was a biting commentary on the attempts of post-socialist bureaucrats to privatize virtually everything.

In the same year, I had the even better luck to go with Igor on some of his missions to paint occupied Territories at various sites around the country.  Macedonia had just narrowly avoided the kind of senseless violence and partition that still plagues places like Kosovo and Bosnia today, so the act of painting arbitrary (or, sometimes not-so-arbitrary) lines in the people’s common spaces, delimiting them for obscure motives, was even more trenchant.  The looks on people’s faces ranged from apathy to disgust to — rarely — joy.  It was a project that bound the absurd with the deadly serious in an active, physical, even fun way.

Igor’s art is compelling and actually makes one question what is going on in one’s surroundings. It accomplishes that very rare thing of succeeding where so many others have failed miserably.  (In that way it reminds me of another artist from the same country that once upon a time, there was.)  It is timely; never hectoring, always thoughtful, with a keen eye to the political but not overtly so. It’s good art. That’s uncommon.

And after two and half decades of work he’s finally getting some recognition, so go over to Wooloo and vote for him. With any luck, you may be seeing him somewhere familiar soon.