This update has been a while coming, but there is a reason for it. We have spent the last week in the countryside of Serbia, mainly based in a town called Sremska Mitrovica. Mainly, this time has been spent catching up with family and friends I have never met (or met a very long time ago), but who are very important to my family.
I didn't feel that in depth discussion of each visit would relate to the subject of this blog and I know this would have had very little relevance to many of you. However, it has revealed many things about the hospitality of Serbian Villages and the food and drinks associated with it.
Firstly, some background info. From anecdotal evidence, the unemployment rate in Serbia is currently near 50% and this is reflected in a very big way in regional areas. Driving through the various villages and towns, I noticed a large number of older people and very few young people. There are very few jobs available in these areas and many of the factories that had previously supported the regional economy are now sitting empty and derelict. The pensioners who have lived here most of their lives are surviving on pensions that are roughly in the range of $200 - $300 AUD per month. This may be barely enough to sustain a minimal existence for one person, but often this money is being used to support a household of people due to the lack of jobs.
To supplement their incomes, many of the homes we visited raise animals to support some of their food needs. Almost everyone has at least a handful of chickens to supply eggs and some raise pigs, cows and/or goats either to sell for extra income or to slaughter for food for winter. Also many households have much larger gardens than we are used to in Australia. This is still barely enough to support families that are at or below poverty levels.
One more thing that is very different to the way we know things at home is that many of these villages are made up of farming families. They don't actually have residences on their farms in most cases as their land is spread out in various lots, not all in one place. They head out in the mornings to work their land and come home at night. This means that instead of being spread out like many of our farm families are in Australia, the villages are a concentrated population of people who work the surrounding farmland.
Having said all that, every single house we walked into, we were offered shots of Rakija (often made in that particular family), coffee and food - many times a full meal. As much as we saw how poor these people were, they were also very proud of their home-made foods and would not accept any refusal. I can't say I felt hungry once in the last week.
Sorry for the lack of photos, but I don't feel quite comfortable about taking pictures of people's cooking inside their homes. Some of the highlights were: Rakija (of course) in copious quantities and varieties and many people offered to pack a bottle for us to take home to Australia, Sarma (cabbage rolls filled with rice and meat), Kulen (home made salami), chicken livers and giblets, snails and the cakes.
I did eat out at the local pizzeria and tried the icecreamery and both were sensational. The pizza base was delicious and thin, just the way I like it and the local salamis, hams and bacon really work well. The local specialty seems to be a combination of the above with a topping of sour cream, I recommend it wholehearedly, but don't expect the sizes we have in Australia, the small is easily larger than most of the medium pizzas in Melbourne and the largest size is close to a meter wide! The only note of discord here was that the tomato sauce they use for the pizza is actually Ketchup and they serve their pizza with a side of ketchup to add onto the pizza as you eat. I tried this once to see what it was like, but never again. For anyone coming to the area, the restaurant I sampled was Pizzaeria XL which is in the mall in the centre of town and the beer is great, with local 500ml beers only costing 90 dinars (about $2 AUD). The icecreamery of choice by the locals is called Sport and is in the same area. If you don't understand the name of the flavour, just try it anyway. They won me over when I couldn't make up my mind and the server took a very small amount from each flavour so that each scoop had about 5 or 6 flavours. I have no idea which were my favourites, but as a whole it was great!
Another highlight of this week is that it is right in the middle of cherry picking season. Almost every house we went to had a cherry tree and many had more than one. On a 30 degree day we went out to help one of the farmers harvest cherries from their orchard. This involved a group of about 8 or 10 people loading into a trailer towed by a tractor over land that you wouldn't be able to take a normal car through. With no suspension, this was a fun, but painful journey while hanging on for dear life. When we arrived, most of the group went about picking cherries, while I and a couple of others worked on building a fire to grill the meat we had brought with us. The beer was placed to cool under a nearby flowing spring of cool, fresh, delicious water. After we had built the fire, we placed the grill on top to heat and got cooking. On the menu were cevapi, kobasice, various salads and lots of bread. Not to mention all the cherries you could eat. To drink we had - yes, you guessed it - rakija, beer and fresh water directly from the spring.
There are plenty of green lizards running around and someone did say they spotted a snake, but don't anyone tell my dad, ok? I'm not sure that we were a huge help harvesting cherries as we only spent half the day out there and there were still plenty left on the trees when we left, but it was a fantastic day.
New friendships were made:
And we loaded onto the trailer for the trip back.
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