BOSNIA: Survival : Making food palatable is one of the challenges of war.

Zemira Tanovic nearly embraces her brown ceramic pot, sheltering the unlikely symbol of sharing in a time of sacrifice. Removing the lid, she surveys her homemade yogurt carefully, almost as if she could see the cultures multiplying if she’d only look hard enough.

“I hold on to some of the last batch because you can’t buy it,” she says. Before the war, Sarajevans, unlike cooks in the countryside who raised yogurt from a starter culture the old-fashioned way, were used to getting their versions of Yoplait and Knudsen in grocery stores just like Americans. “(Now), it’s passed among the neighbors . . . from hand to hand.”

Food--in a city with precious little of it--obsesses Sarajevans. Garden plots watched over by armed guards have replaced grass patches; planters made from empty cooking oil cans have converted the city’s balconies and windowsills into oases of salad greens. Wild herbs are collected, dried and stored. Basins and jugs of drinking water are held in reserve, should water be cut off again unexpectedly.

Survival itself has evolved into a ritual. Even the humanitarian rations have fallen into patterns: sometimes oil, sometimes what Sarajevans only half-jokingly refer to as Vietnam-era biscuits, often rice, always flour . . . and beans, beans, beans.

Making this food palatable continues to be one of Sarajevo’s most involved challenges, a job shouldered by women in this patriarchal society. Cooks have responded with ingenuity, using experience and resolve to defy the circumstances and create the edible from banal basics.

“You get tired of eating the same thing all the time,” Tanovic says. She especially frowns on rice and beans. “We never ate them before and we’ll never eat them again.”

Tanovic tries to make the beans less identifiable by smashing them into a paste reminiscent of the inexpensive meat pate consumed before the war.

Such manipulation of humanitarian aid to replace unavailable food items is the cornerstone of a war-time cookbook, “How to Survive on Humanitarian Aid,” a 43-page photocopied pamphlet held together by staples. Backed by the World Health Organization and written by a Sarajevan now living in Zagreb, the book should soon be distributed throughout Sarajevo.

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Author Enesa Seremet says she chemically broke down the elements of some foods, considered the humanitarian aid offerings, and substituted. That means her recipe for cream breaks down into powdered milk, salt, water, oil and yeast--staples supplied by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees and other organizations. Her recipe for halvah breaks down into flour, oil, sugar, water and cinnamon. “Cheese” is formed from rice, water, vinegar and powdered milk.

The recipes form a catalogue of resistance in the war that has engulfed Sarajevo’s civilians. Seremet argues that cutting off food supplies for Bosnians took on spiritual as well as physical significance for a people with a tradition of lengthy family meals and unquestioning hospitality. Taking away food, Seremet says, “is certainly the right way to kill people in Bosnia.

“It’s one more part of the war,” she says. “We wouldn’t have felt this war so deeply if it had not been for the food.”

Seremet’s culinary expertise arose as a consequence of war. In prewar Sarajevo, the one-time teacher, her husband and their two children mostly ate in restaurants or got takeout. “I hated to cook,” she admits.

But as the war necessitated individual independence, Seremet set out to create from scratch many of the things she would once buy.

Things began badly. While serving her first home-baked traditional Bosnian bread, pita, a bomb shattered her family’s apartment. The mortar blast ripped through the dining room and splattered fragments into Seremet’s back and legs. Severely injured and with all hospitals filled to capacity, Seremet was forced to recuperate in the only room of her apartment that had escaped damage.

Hungry and without recourse, she experimented in the kitchen during the 10 months she and her family waited for medical evacuation. Cooking by candlelight, often with little or no fuel, she wasted nothing and consumed her failures as well as her successes: “When you are hungry, everything works.”

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The women of Sarajevo realize that they are their own best source of information. Most don’t have war-time cookbooks like Seremet’s. They share expertise and news while waiting in food lines, at water pumping stations or, as in the past, over precious cups of coffee.

Word-of-mouth recipes include Stojanka Hodzic’s no-bake chocolate cake, made with stale bread and cocoa gleaned from the humanitarian parcels. Recipes like hers comprise elements of the common struggle to approach the standards of the past, a skirmish of the overall conflict that united women in the city’s struggle to survive.

“Everyone in the whole neighborhood knows one another . . . so we all know who’s come up with another recipe,” she says. “We pass it around, and for that week all 13 apartments (in the building) will make the same cake.”

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Hodzic cooked her “war cake,” on top of a crude cast-iron stove when Sarajevo faced its most violent days. With electric power now becoming more regular, the cake is easier to make. It melts with the consistency of pudding and looks like a flourless torte. Serving her creation on china and with Turkish coffee, Hodzic recalls better times. But, she says, Sarajevo’s siege has forever changed the way she’ll prepare--and think about--food.

The new collective memory is demonstrated by the small black volume Hodzic pulls from her bookcase, an ad hoc cooking literature compiling the recipes of friends.

“I have learned so much . . . to cook without eggs, butter,” she says. “I don’t even remember how to cook the way I used to.”

The caution in cooking continues, even as the conditions of the siege ease. More food is available, though Sarajevans might wait most of the day in crowds clustered around the doors of a store that may have gotten bits of merchandise from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s new partner in a recently created confederation. That deal eased food prices as recently opened truck routes made possible the delivery of supplies.

Still, after two years of war, much of the financial resources of Sarajevo’s citizens have been exhausted, leaving most dependent on humanitarian assistance and packets of aid sent by families abroad to those still trapped in the noose.

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Tanovic’s relatives in Austria have sent things, but parcels can take as long as eight months to arrive. So when Tanovic makes creamed spinach, she uses ingredients that she has watched grow from her kitchen window. Cooking the green glob bubbling on the stove proves much easier now than when the war first broke out.

“At the beginning of the war, we didn’t even have a wood stove,” she says. “(The tenants) of the entire building went out front and we put two rocks down and laid a big, flat metal plate (on top of them) to cook over a wood fire. Seven families used that to cook every day. Afterward, someone managed to make us a wood stove. And somehow, everyone else eventually got their own wood stoves.”

With electric service becoming more frequent, Tanovic now worries less about gathering firewood and more about the seedlings outside her front window. It is a plot the Muslim woman shares with her neighbors--the Serb family upstairs, the Croat family downstairs and the mixed-marriage couple across the hall--an unintended but symbolic illustration of the integrated effort to survive.

“Once we saw the war going on, we managed to adapt,” she says. But after two years of cooking on wood stoves, hunting the hillsides for herbs and other taxing ventures, Tanovic, 60, adds wearily, “We hope to God it doesn’t go on.”

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These recipes, devised to be made with wartime staples, are obviously not dishes you would make for entertaining in a land of plenty. But they demonstrate the ingenuity of people who refuse to give up living, even in the face of extreme adversity.

Note: Nutritional values are based on American food products.

STOJANKA HODZIC’S NO-BAKE CHOCOLATE WAR CAKE 1/2 cup cooking oil 1/2 cup milk powder 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup cocoa powder 1 3/4 cups water 8 slices sandwich bread, torn into bite-size piece War Cake Icing

Place cooking oil, milk powder, sugar and cocoa powder in large saucepan and stir to combine. Add water and place mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly until blended.

Gradually add bread pieces until mixture forms single piece. Spread mixture in 1 (8x5 1/2-inch, 1 1/2 cup-capacity) oval gratin dish and let cool.

Spread War Cake Icing on cooled cake and serve. Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about: 396 calories; 217 mg sodium; 24 mg cholesterol; 22 grams fat; 44 grams carbohydrates; 10 grams protein; 0.40 grams fiber.

War Cake Icing 4 tablespoons milk powder 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons sugar 1 tablespoon cocoa powder 1 cup water

Place milk powder, flour, sugar, cocoa powder and water in saucepan. Cook over medium heat until ingredients form frosting-like consistency. Let cool before spreading on cake.

STOJANKA HODZIC’S “CHEESE” FROM RICE 2 cups steamed rice, still hot from cooking 1 tablespoon dry active yeast 1/4 cup water 2 tablespoons vinegar 1 shot glass milk powder, about 2 tablespoons

Place cooked rice, yeast, water, vinegar and milk powder in large bowl and combine. Let mixture stand 24 hours until cheese-like in flavor. Makes about 4 servings.

Each serving contains about: 367 calories; 24 mg sodium; 4 mg cholesterol; 1 grams fat; 78 grams carbohydrates; 9 grams protein; 0.18 grams fiber.

ZEMIRA TANOVIC’S CREAMED SPINACH 3 tablespoons oil 4 tablespoons flour 1 pound spinach or Swiss chard, stems removed, washed and patted dry, chopped 4 tablespoons powdered milk 2 cups water Salt, optional

Place oil and flour in skillet and cook over medium heat until flour is browned. Add spinach. Stir in powdered milk, then water. Heat, stirring occasionally, until mixture boils and thickens. Add more water if necessary. Season to taste with salt. Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about: 90 calories; 60 mg sodium; 4 mg cholesterol; 7 grams fat; 6 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams protein; 0.52 grams fiber.