Bosnian Maslanica

Hungry yet? If Muki’s ratiocinations don’t send you straight to the feedbowl then I don’t know what will. With a plate full of gratitude for this generous preamble, and a grumble of hunger for further accounts of Muki’s valiant attempts to substitute picaresque encounters with the absurd for the banal nourishment offered by what we humbly refer to here as “food,” we dive directly into the bowels of the matter—bread and fat, the fundamentals of Bosnian cuisine. In a word—maslanica, with its evocation of mast (fat). In a phrase—zamastiti bradu (to get one’s beard greasy), the consequence of its ingestion.

My first encounter with this formidable victual occurred in a small town in north central Bosnia. The story unfolded in the usual fashion. At a café my companion, thinking he recognized a distant cousin, struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be not his kin but a local poet. Coffee led to several coffees and then to lunch at a restaurant. Unsuspectingly I ordered the aforementioned—thin layers of bread brushed with oil and kajmak (a dairy product resembling pungent, somewhat friable sour cream) and compressed into one pleasingly compact brick. This particular maslanica came doused with gravy and crowned with a veal chop. Not my first introduction to the concept of a meal as a test of stamina—to boost my confidence, I recalled a six-hour French meal successfully endured. But whereas that ordeal involved modestly-apportioned courses doled out over the span of an entire evening, this restaurant packed all its calories into one staggeringly heavy dish. I watched in astonishment as my tablemates dispatched their portions with ease, transitioning briskly to yet more coffee and, my god, dessert. I tried in vain to keep up, but my maslanica simply vanquished me. Meanwhile the writer, in a gesture that was either surpassingly romantic or utterly homicidal, lit cigarette after cigarette for his chain-smoking wife, then his own, without missing a beat. I realized that the past eight years of living in northern California had done nothing to prepare me for the rigors that Bosnia would present.

Here’s a Bosnian friend’s recipe for Whole Wheat Maslanica. The recipe comes from north Bosnia but can vary by region. Add a glass of yogurt and salad and you have yourself a meal.

1 kg whole wheat flour
0.2 kg flour
0.5 kg homemade kajmak (or substitute sour cream)
0.25 liters buttermilk
oil
salt
0.75 liters warm water






Stir together kajmak, buttermilk, and a little salt and oil.











Mix the flour, a little salt, and warm water, knead the dough, and divide it into two parts.











Roll out until each half reaches the dimensions 1 x 0.8 meters. Sprinkle the kajmak mixture onto the dough.











Fold each half of the dough into the shape of a letter












Keep folding...












Done!












Place one square of folded dough on top of the other in a pan.

Bake at 180 C for around 40 minutes. Enjoy!

#1

The way in which a person satisfies the need for self-justifying is among the more obvious measures of maturity attained. Youth pleads its qualities, groans them until its audiences dwindle, becomes limp and pitiful if left to itself for only a moment, then brightens again at the sight of another new someone else it can bore with its eager-beaverness. Whereas the more decrepit can take the smugger way, and have just to flaunt themselves around town as fact, silently, very, very slowly, impermanent and unpromising, far better justifying by simply having been and being than pretending there were any delicious treat beyond either.

Had I the need to justify myself – and I don’t, to anyone, least of all myself, my imagination’s too feeble, I understand none of the decisions I have made in my life, nor their consequences, so nothing to justify – it would likely be in some way half between these two, the reason being, not strangely, my age, which marks me as old enough to enjoy belittling the hopes and dreams of the younger generations, but young enough to bear the burden of an accumulation of life-force, an effervescence that, to my dismay, will take me many years to exhaust, always replenishing partially, but never entirely, with food.

I won’t bother imagining how I would go on from this first approach; it’s more interesting to think of food, a necessary evil without need of justifying, aside, for example, from those of us who blame food for their gluttony and confuse its defense with their own against the disgust they’ve aroused in others. There they confuse too the discussing and the discussed- and to justify discussing is my purpose here, to honor convention and introduce a body of text that I hope will be read with the same amount of enjoyment we have lost in sacrificing our leisure to write it and, more dismally, offer it to the public.

One of its primary topics will be food: why write about food? Or a small Balkan city where food is eaten? Given the infancy of the text, now three paragraphs old, excuse me if I avoid these questions to avoid answers that from the vantage of posterity, of vast length, richness, insight, would nibble at my sense of shame; then the silliness of our insisting upon ourselves would strain self-mockery, and give future readership, till then never nagged, as reward for an understandable curiosity into our origins, an unwelcome grope.