After Communism, a Cuisine of Survival

Pencils ready? Name the country sandwiched between Greece and the former Yugoslavia.

Don’t know?

You’re not alone. My gut tells me that four out of five of you out there haven’t the foggiest notion.

The only frame of reference most people have concerning tiny Albania (which happens to be in southern Europe--not Asia, Africa or the Middle East--and nowhere near Albany, New York) is media coverage of a country in civil strife or, more likely, the movie “Wag the Dog,” in which the only truly Albanian things were the few fractured Albanian phrases spoken by actor Jim Belushi, who is an Albanian American. Like me.

Unlike me, you probably haven’t exactly held your breath for the arrival of “The Best of Albanian Cooking” by Klementina and R. John Hysa (Hippocrene Books, $22.50), which is available in or can be ordered at most bookstores.

But I was delighted to see an Albanian cookbook written by an Albanian couple who followed their dream of freedom and a better life. The Hysas now live in Quebec and work as apartment house superintendents, a sort of miscasting common in the story of immigration. In their homeland, John Hysa was a director and editor at a government printing house, and his wife a biochemist and short story writer. John Hysa is also author of the “English-Albanian Comprehensive Dictionary” and the “Albanian-English Standard Dictionary.

“The Best of Albanian Cooking” might be the first Albanian cookbook written since the fall of the Communist regime in 1990. For almost 50 years, the most impoverished people in Europe had been ordered to practice thrift by eating less meat, less fat and fewer dairy products. And, for that matter, less food.

According to the authors, who left Albania after the regime collapsed, the decree was issued not so much out of concern over the health of the masses but to control people through their stomachs, deliberately wiping out any vestige of bourgeois excess, culinary refinement or self-expression.

But to judge from the pages of “The Best of Albanian Cooking,” Albanian cooking is alive and well.

Of course, it has changed greatly from the free and bountiful cuisine of my mother, who came to America in the early ‘30s, when Albanian cooking was rich with influences of an opulent Ottoman cuisine--abundant, generous and overflowing. My mother used butter, olive oil, sugar and spices with abandon, causing even my father to worry. “Wife, your free hand will drive us to the poorhouse,” he’d say.

Today’s Albanian cooking is a spare, lean, bare-bones cuisine, as if the steely hand of some government home economist with beaker, test tube and level measuring spoon had slashed every ounce of excess fat, sugar and calories; certainly the envy of our own U.S. Surgeon General, who has been calling for similar dietary reforms in this country for the last 20 years.

The biggest surprise, however, was to find that the Albanian cuisine has become “collectivized.” In other words, no longer are there regional or individual differences, in keeping with the Communist ideological pattern of creating conformity in a single “collective consciousness.”

This was a shock because the Southern Albanian food of my mother--who is almost 90 and still cooking, by the way--is very different from the pre-World War II cooking done in the North.

When I asked John Hysa about the shortage of historical information about the recipes or their regional differences, he pointed out that the recipes are “universally Albanian. These are the Albanian recipes we were raised with.”

So if you are looking for insights about the cuisine’s cultural origins, style or transformation, you won’t find them here or, for that matter, anywhere else, to my knowledge.

Albania, which sits on the Adriatic Sea in the Balkan Peninsula, is sort of a micro-laboratory of rich plains, forests, lakes, rivers, mountains and ocean, with a temperate Mediterranean climate allowing the land to produce an abundance of fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, seafood and dairy products. Unfortunately, during 50 years of tyrannical rule, little of these products reached the masses.

Historically, Albanian cuisine is a remnant of the richly endowed Ottoman cuisine imposed by the 500-year domination of the Balkan Peninsula by the Ottoman Turk Empire up to the early 1900s.

You will find the same filo pastry dishes invented by the Turks as in Greek and Middle Eastern cuisines. Shish kebab is found throughout the former Ottoman world. Moussaka, popularized in the United States by Greek restaurants, exists in Albanian cooking as well. The names may differ from cuisine to cuisine, but the dishes are basically the same.

With very little detective work, I realized that the Turkish names of many recipes known in my mother’s day have also been erased. Stuffed eggplant, once called imam bayildi (Turkish for “the imam fainted”), is now simply “stuffed eggplant” (patellxhane te mbushura). Shapkat, a cornmeal pudding with spinach and cheese, is now “cornmeal pie” (lakror).

One detects a few foreign influences, despite Albania’s isolation and determination to purge any memory of its cultural past. “We added a few classic Italian sauces because of Albania’s proximity with Italy over the centuries,” said Hysa.

I suspect that not even Hysa may realize that the so-called cabbage soup, called borsh in his book, may be the same as the Russian borscht introduced during the last 50 years and not before. An oven beef dish is called biftek, an internationalized name for beef steak.

Unfortunately, we may never know what dishes actually are indigenously Albanian.

The Hysas did not set out to discuss culinary history or food customs. “We are writers, but not experts in culinary history,” confessed Hysa honestly. In fact, the book was not their idea. “Our publisher of my dictionaries and other ethnic cookbooks suggested we write an Albanian cookbook,” Hysa said. “We tried to include the most common and popular recipes from our family and friends and whatever help we could find from previous cookbooks in Albania.”

The 14 chapters start with appetizers (hot and cold) and include, among others, ground meat, hot meat dishes, poultry, vegetables, soups, fish, sauces, compotes and desserts and refreshing beverages.

You will not find bread recipes in this book. The reason is simple: In the Albania of the last 50 years, Albanians did not bake their own bread. “We queued up at government bakeries, sometimes waiting hours to buy bread. We couldn’t buy all the bread we wanted,” said the Hysas’ daughter, Ann.

The art of baking that once flourished in households of the past was eliminated with the rise of collectivism, resulting in Soviet-style apartment housing in which the only equipment in the tiny, partitioned kitchens were a few cupboards and a small counter on which a gas burner stood. “You would have to be very lucky [meaning politically privileged] to own an oven in Albania when we were there,” said Ann Hysa.

She also explained that all foods requiring baking were taken early in the day to a communal oven and picked up in the evening. “You would turn in your ticket and take your food,” Ann Hysa said. “People don’t realize what it means to do this every day.”

There are several filo pastries, though not as many as one would expect of a cuisine rich in savory pastries made with filo dough. Byreks filled with cheese, leeks and a sweet custard (galaktobouriko in Greek) are in the book. They are, at least, good examples.

There could be no Albanian cookbook without baklava, the pastry and nut layered dessert prized throughout the Balkans and Middle East. In the recipe, filo dough is homemade and the walnuts for the filling are pounded with cubed sugar in a mortar. However, the authors suggest buying the filo pastry sheets, which come rolled in a tall, thin box in most supermarkets.

There is a full range of cold appetizers in the Hysas’ book, including the popular eggplant salad and the yogurt salad called tarator in many Balkan countries. Among the hot appetizers, the Hysas give several organ meat specialties, such as fried liver, and a street-food item called Kukurec, made with lamb entrails and mercifully over-spiced with oregano.

You’ll see many lamb dishes similar to those found in Greek cuisine, among them lamb with potatoes and stuffed lamb breast. There is also a veal stew with okra and an unusual pork with cauliflower. Most are seasoned with the same favorite herbs--oregano, mint, basil, bay leaf and thyme.

Comlek (pronounced chohm-lek), the same as the Greek stifado, is a wonderful meat stew made with onions and flavored with vinegar and garlic, a seasoning people in the Balkans seem to like.

Perhaps the most distinctive meat dish is the lamb baked in yogurt, tave kosi. Yogurt is eaten with almost everything, including meatballs and fried vegetables, or by itself.

Ground meat dishes are played up in a separate chapter. “In Albania, ground meat was less costly and you could make it stretch by adding other ingredients to it,” said Ann Hysa.

My personal favorite ground meat dish is qofte (pronounced kyohf-teh), which I ate by the dozen as they sprang out of the skillet during my youth. Cooks’ reputations have been won and lost over this meatball-like dish. The criteria for perfect qofte differs with every region and cook. In my humble opinion, the cooks of Gjirokastro (a city in Southern Albania) prepare perfect qofte--soft inside and nut-brown outside. The fluffier the better. I have tried desperately to reproduce the texture of these qofte but fail.

The small chapter on poultry and rabbit brought a flash flood of memories of my mother’s wonderful chicken with walnuts (pule me arra). The toasty fragrance of walnuts sizzling in the skillet wafted through the house mostly on Sundays, when there was time for leisurely cooking. Boiled chicken is topped with a creamy walnut sauce.

Don’t hesitate to try the vegetables, especially the stuffed eggplant, tomatoes and pepper and the numerous moussaka (musaka in Albanian) dishes, which are popular throughout the Balkans.

One of the most unusual, rib-sticking breakfast cereal soups, called trahana, is made with sourdough crumbs, available in Greek grocery stores as trahanas. It’s eaten plain or with a sprinkling of olive oil and a few crumbs of feta cheese. My mother spent hours rubbing fresh crumbs between the palms of her hands before laying them out to dry and store in jars for use through the year.

The fish chapter is loaded with recipes, as one might expect in a country filled with ocean, lake and river fish. Unfortunately for Albanians, fish was as scarce as meat during the days of Communism. John Hysa recalls when a rumor that trout might be sold in markets started a frenzied rush to stores six hours before they opened.

You will find some very interesting fish dishes in the book, however, including a baked trout with walnut sauce, flounder with spinach souffle and shrimp in white wine. Baked fish (tave peshku) also has the garlic and vinegar seasoning Albanians enjoy.

If you like game birds, grouse with olives or goose with orange might be tempting. I fantasized that the “goose and oranges” recipe on Page 45 found its way into the Albanian cuisine via high-ranking Albanian government officials on a spending spree in Paris. But that is not so. Goose a l’orange is also Albanian. And it’s simple to make. A flour-butter sauce flavored with orange pulp and peel is poured over the baked goose.

In the chapter called Pasta and Pies (brumat means dough), there are a few pastico recipes similar to Greek pastitsio. These macaroni dishes layered with bechamel sauce are great party dishes as well as economical family fare.

You’ll notice that desserts in the book center mainly on fruit, including the highly prized compote made with quince and others made with peaches, pears, prunes, apples, oranges and cherries.

Don’t forget to try the rice pudding, sultiash, that Albanians regard as a national dish. A more experimental cook might want to try halva, a pudding made with cornstarch or flour (this is not the deli almond paste version).

Pickles, called turshi, are usually homemade. The authors give some insight about Albanians’ taste for them: “There is no such thing as sweet pickles in Albanian cuisine. Overly sweet pickles of vegetables or fruits are simply called jams or stewed fruits. The presence of vinegar in such jams or compotes just makes them unacceptable to people.”

While the book leaves much to be desired in terms of technical help and explicit recipe instruction, it provides an accurate glimpse of a modern-day cuisine that has, up to now, been hidden from view. For that, I applaud the authors for bringing Albanian cuisine to light at last.

Chicken With Walnuts (Pule me arra)

Active Work Time: 20 minutes * Total Preparation Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

1 (1 1/2-pound) chicken

6 cups water

Salt

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup peeled walnuts

2 tablespoons vinegar

6 cloves garlic, crushed

Pepper

* Simmer chicken in water seasoned with salt to taste until tender, about 1 hour. Remove chicken from cooking water, reserving 1 cup stock. Cool chicken slightly, then cut into 4 portions.

* Melt 2 tablespoons butter in large skillet. Add chicken pieces and saute until lightly browned. Remove chicken pieces and keep warm. Add remaining 2 tablespoons butter. Add flour. Cook and stir until lightly browned. Add reserved stock, stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Bring to boil. Add walnuts, vinegar, garlic and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer over low heat until heated through, about 5 minutes. Spoon sauce over chicken pieces.

4 to 6 servings. Each of 6 servings: 334 calories, 171 mg sodium, 64 mg cholesterol, 29 grams fat, 7 grams carbohydrates, 14 grams protein, 0.98 gram fiber.

Baked Lamb With Yogurt (Tave Kosi)

Active Work Time: 10 minutes * Total Preparation Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

1 1/2 pounds lamb leg or shoulder

Salt, pepper

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter

2 tablespoons rice

2 pounds yogurt

5 eggs, beaten

1 tablespoon flour

* Cut meat into 4 serving pieces. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Dot with 1/4 cup butter and bake at 350 degrees, basting now and then with pan juices, about 40 minutes, or until well browned.

* Stir rice into pan juices. Remove baking pan from oven and set aside while preparing yogurt sauce.

* Combine yogurt with salt and pepper to taste. Stir in eggs until smooth. Set aside.

* Melt remaining 1/2 cup butter and add flour. Saute until smooth. Add yogurt mixture and stir until smooth.

* Pour yogurt sauce in baking pan, stirring it with meat pieces, and bake at 375 degrees 45 minutes. Serve hot.

4 to 6 servings. Each of 6 servings: 519 calories, 444 mg sodium, 305 mg cholesterol, 44 grams fat, 8 grams carbohydrates, 23 grams protein, 0 fiber.

Fried Meatballs (Qofte te Ferguara)

Active Work Time: 7 minutes * Total Preparation Time: 20 minutes

Serve these hot with French fries or mashed potatoes.

1 pound ground meat (lamb, beef or chicken)

1 slice stale bread, broken up

2 tablespoons chopped feta cheese

1 onion, finely grated

Salt, pepper

Crushed dried mint leaves

1/2 cup flour

1 cup oil

* Combine meat, bread, feta cheese, onion, salt, pepper and mint to taste. Form into 1/2-inch thick patties, cylinders or balls. Roll in flour and fry in oil heated to 350 to 365 degrees.

4 servings. Each serving: TK calories, TK mg sodium, TK mg cholesterol, TK grams fat, TK grams carbohydrates, TK grams protein, TK grams fiber.

Cookies in Syrup (Sheqerpare)

2 cups sugar

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened

2 egg yolks

2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 cup water

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 to 3 whole cloves

* Mix 1 cup sugar and butter in bowl. Add yolks and stir until smooth. Add flour and baking soda and stir until soft dough forms.

* Roll out dough. Cut into 2-inch rounds. Place on baking sheets and bake at 350 degrees until pale gold, 20 minutes.

* Meanwhile, make syrup. Bring remaining 1 cup sugar and water to boil in saucepan and cook until syrup spins a long thread, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from heat and season with vanilla and cloves to taste.

* Remove cookies from oven when golden and cool. Pour hot syrup over cookies. Serve at room temperature.

About 30 (2-inch) cookies. Each cookie: 124 calories, 48 mg sodium, 31 mg cholesterol, 5 grams fat, 19 grams carbohydrates, 1 gram protein, 0.02 gram fiber.