"Eating is something political"

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 Šopska-Salat, goulash and cooled, Rakia, told about dishes they had tasted and philosophised about the social implications Tragweite of eating drinking and preparing meals.

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  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.

Barbara Maier: That sounds very interesting. You never stop learning. Let's try that out straight away (goes into the garden and comes back with a bunch of herbs)

At the beginning of the 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?

Barbara Maier: We drove over 5000 kilometres with our 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?
Barbara Maier: 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 forms 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"?

Lojze Wieser: 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 Ukraine 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.

Barbara Maier: 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.

Lojze Wieser: 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 speciality 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?
Lojze Wieser: 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.  …
Lojze Wieser: 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 relict 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!
Lojze Wieser: 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 Draga Verlag and since 1987 has been the owner of the Wieser Verlag (publishers). He was awarded the First Austrian State Prize for publishing.

Books:
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

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