House Wine and the Family Beesness

This is Borivoj Živanović showing off some of his family's accolades.  His "great, grand, grandfather," Professor Jovan Živanović, is considered the Father of Modern Serbian Beekeeping.  Diplomas are framed and flanked by wine competition awards.  We visited the Živanovića estate in Sremski Karlovci with the purpose of visiting their in-house Museum of Beekeeping, dedicated to Borivoj's accomplished ancestor and the methods he employed.  We had no idea that the family had been (more than) dabbling in viniculture and wine making for over 200 years.  Their family legacy is one of wine and honey.  When we arrived, Borivoj and his father, Zarko, were hard at work in the backyard.  The son spoke English, so he'd be the one to give us a tour - but first he had to go deliver some wine to a restaurant.  Over to a sunny patio we were directed to have a wine tasting while we waited. Who's complaining? 

That familiar smell of fermenting grape hovered in the fresh air.   Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, Cabernet and then the wine that most people come to Sremski Karlovci for - Bermet.  It's a fortified wine along the lines of vermouth made only in this town at the edge of the Fruska Gora wine region.  A few local families, including the Živanovićs, have passed the recipe down amongst themselves, giving only a laundry list of 20+ herbs and spices as a hint.  We tasted the white (figs, vanilla and pinewood jolted out - very sweet) and the red (spicier, maybe cinnamon?)  Bermet was served on the Titanic - and while "on the Titanic" may not be the best words to use in an endorsement, it obviously means that Bermet was among the finest wines of its day.  As for the honey - delicious.  One was deep brown and strong, the other was different and stupendous.  "Acacia," Borivoj said returning.  Then, he unlocked the Beekeeping Museum.

Beekeeping is something that has become an interest of ours on this trip - like spelunking.  They're both something we will forever associate with Europe.  There is apiculture in America - Merlin's father kept bees - and caving, but both seem to be more abundant over on this continent.  It was actually in Slovenia that we fell in love with caves and hives.  So, it was fitting to go to our second beekeeping museum ever in another former Yugoslav country.  The museum was tasteful and interesting and presented with love.  Old manuals, diagrams and instruments - a honey extractor from 1876, a steam beeswax melter from 1881 - were all on display.  Our guide had such an easy understanding of the process, an ingrained respect for every item in the museum and what it represented.

Borivoj explained that Jovan had single-handedly brought modern beekeeping to Serbia.  "Modern" meant utilizing removable trays and moveable hives.  Above you have the old way of keeping bees, that gnome-hat contraption made from wicker and covered with clay.  In order to harvest the wax inside, one had to destroy the hive and the colony.  The faux house next to it is Professor Živanovića's creation called "Amerikanka" (American Lady).  This was a nod to the fact that "everything new and modern was coming from America."  In goes a tray with the comb and out you can pull it once all covered up with honey.  The bees survive to live another day.  What's more, it allowed beekeepers to move their hives safely to different pastures.  You want the taste of acacia?  Bring the bees out to feed somewhere they'll have all the acacia nectar they can stomach.  

The reiteration of the phrase "and you no have to kill bees" showed the great-great-grandson's esteem for his ancestor.  The Professor, who came to beekeeping late in life, had immediately contemplated the ethics of the process.  All the intellect and fervor he'd previously lent to academic papers and textbooks about the Serbian language (his career beforehand) he applied to beekeeping.  Yellowed issues of the magazine he started, "Serbian Beekeeper,"  were piled up in a glass case.  This church-shaped hive had been decorating the family garden since 1880 but was now too valuable to keep outside.  Another jewel of the museum's collection was the oldest photograph in all of Serbia.  It was a portrait of Josim Živanović, Jovan's father.  Before he become worthy of his own museum, the Professor's father and grandfather had already made a name for their family with their wine. 

Along with keeping his bees and teaching everyone else how to do it properly, the Professor kept up the family wine business and wound up passing both down to his descendants.  Borivoj is a fifth generation beekeeper and a seventh generation wine maker.  In truth, his father is more into the bees and his focus is more on wine.  It's a busy time right now. The steel contents of their 300 year old wine cellar, the oldest in the town, are in the process of being transferred over to newer, bigger, more modern digs.  The wooden barrels will stay put.  What a family to be born into, what tradition.  Heady and sweet.

Hello Dunav, Our Old Friend!

Hello again to the Danube, that murkiest and longest line in our travels.  The last we saw these waters was almost a year ago, in Budapest, where the shores were thick with cruiseships and overhung by cathedrals. We caught sight of the river again in Belgrade, where the banks are lined with floating dance clubs that glow and bob in the evening light.  It’s exciting to come back to it, like meeting up with a familiar coast or turning onto a much-driven road.  In Serbia, the great river is called the Dunav, and we’ve been tracing a rough route along it for weeks.

In Belgrade, we ate a big dinner with a group of Americans in the old water quarter of Zemun.  Once a separate town, Zemun is now one of the oldest parts of the capital, and perfectly sunset-picturesque on a summer night.  Old houses – older than most in bomb-flattened Belgrade – house a yellow-lit universe of fish taverns and cafes.  The clientele is well heeled, the area has a reputation for Mafioso money and flashy cars, the view up the water towards the city proper is enchanting.  We feasted on pike perch, catfish and carp from the Dunav as the light faded, then walked along the waterside promenade in the dark.  The blue-black water sounded like a thick emptiness beside us, the far side was lost in the night.

In Smederova, sticks were driven down into the mud and fishing boats were moored among them, tangling lines and looking cheerful in the morning sun.  We were told that it was possible to swim, and I don’t doubt that people do, but at this point in its journey the water is a little suspect.  At its genesis, the Danube is a well protected water source, but as it leaves Austria, regulations dwindle.  Although some of the worst dumping is prohibited in Serbia now, the Dunav is still sometimes treated like a moving landfill.   Still, the locals love to fish, and their roaring outboards cut white wakes in the surface when they go out.  We’d see them nestled together far out on the surface, two or three in a cluster, lines dropped in opposite directions, cigarettes burning.  Some fished from shore, but their luck was worse.

Smederova is Serbia’s steel town, and it’s where we noticed the barges the most.  As far as we can tell, barges come in two types: those churning upriver and those gliding down.  Their engines are unnoticeable except in the calmest and stillest moments when a slow growl can be heard, almost like a tremor in the earth.  Shipping is the lifeblood of the region, the reason why the Dunav remains so important here.  Dock cranes and derricks sprout up along the banks like huge willow groves, railroad depots sit rusting, trucks belch exhaust and wait for the goods that have come up or down.

Riblja Čorba is Serbia’s version of halászlé, a soup we ate a lot of in Hungary.  It’s loaded with paprika, which turns the fishy broth a bright red.  In Sremski Karlovski, we ate a big pot of it sitting by the water, dipping coarse bread into our bowls.  At “Dunav” (the actual, obvious name) restaurant, the carp in the soup was as fatty as pork belly, and floated around as soft clumps of flesh, barely held together by a few bones and skin.  It was delicious, a mix of decadent flavors; the fish was mellow and oily, the paprika was smoky and earthy.  The whole dish reminded us of river silt in an appetizing way – a stew of reeds and heady scents, the kind of dark place where enormous fish lurk for years, growing rotund and slow.

Sremski Karlovski is a quiet town of wine growers and rickety tractors in the north of Serbia.  There are beautiful old houses, out of place with the agricultural aura, that date to the Hapsburg period, when Karlovski was the political center of Serbs in the monarchy.  It’s pretty, with cheerfully painted houses and a few ornate churches, but it seems to have turned away from the Dunav.  The riverside here is forested and featureless – only a line of water running through the great plain.

Novi Sad, a few miles upstream, was much more connected to the water, with bridges thrown across to the far shore and a higher vantage – to look out over the Dunav (or the Danube, the Duna, the Donau, the Dunărea…) is to look at a constant of many millennia.  The first seed of the name came from the pre-language of Europe – dānu, a word so ancient that it has become a part of almost every continental language, means “river.”  In Europe, the Danube is the river.
In Serbia, the floating restaurants and clubs that are popular on the Dunav are called splavs, and they're a way of life in Belgrade.  We wanted to eat at this one in Novi Sad, but found it abandoned.  The footbridge from the bank had collapsed, the interior looked gutted - there were still a few cases of empty beer bottles on the deck, but that was it.  We ate in town, on dry land.

Berries & Cherries

It was impossible not to notice the cherries at Kalenić market in Belgrade. It was like all of our thought bubbles that read "It feels like summer," were manifested right there in the red, shiny, orbs. We wanted to buy some, we really did, but we'd just eaten about a pound of fried fish from the market's fishmonger and were already carrying the ingredients we'd just gathered for our tomato paprika Kačamak. Everyone else was buying cherries in bulk along with slender, pointed strawberries. A little helper, not much higher than the market table, embezzled berries from her family stock when no one was looking. Women in kerchiefs and men in coke-bottle glasses manned the stations. Shriveled, wrinkled and old, their presence made the fruit look even riper.

Many of the fruit vendors were obviously from outside the city, their shoes still had countryside clinging to them. Behind most of the market stands were the carts, suitcases and boxes employed to make the trip in. They say that if you don't have a chance to make it outside Belgrade, Kalenić Pijaca can give you a glimpse of life in the country. Sure enough, when we left Belgrade and headed for Smederevo, the scenes from the market stretched out before us. We had no idea we were driving through "Little California" - Zaklopača - one of the most famous fruit producing regions in Serbia.

Orchards stretched out on either side of the road. Tractors putted behind us. One of the few non-farm-vehicles we saw was a black BMW. A ladder stuck out the back, in amongst a trunkload of cherries. Ladders were propped up against trunks all over. People were hard at work. An absolutely ancient woman bent over a row of strawberries. I'm not convinced she'd be able to straighten up if she wanted to after a lifetime of working a patch like that. Cropland covers about two thirds of Serbia and even with three quarters of that land focusing on grains, fruit is still produced in massive quantities. In fact, one third of the world's raspberries come from here.

85% of cropland in Serbia is owned by private farms. So, you can count on hand-picked, insecticide free fruit grown by people who have been in tune with their land and their plants for generations. Along with their perfect microclimate, the villages around Zaklopača also have the Danube right there to their north. The Balkan fruit basket has been sending produce upriver to industrial Germany for centuries. Recently, the cherries and berries of Serbia are beginning to get more attention from big juice and frozen food companies. They're heartier varieties, more flavorful fruits, they freeze better and keep their flavor longer than a lot of the competition.

Plums are probably Serbia's most famous fruit, raspberries are definitely their most plentiful, but it's hard to argue with cherries and strawberries. In Belgrade, we'd told someone about going over to Kalenić market and they immediately asked, "Did you buy cherries?!?" I'm pretty sure I lied and said we had, embarrassed to have passed up such an obviously beautiful bounty and not wanting our decision to be any comment on the fruit's irresistibility. On the road, we were able to make up for it.

We parked and bought a kilo of each, cherries and strawberries. It was more than we needed, really, but the women shook away our pleas to stop adding more to the bag. The price was for a full kilo and they weren't going to short change us even one little pit. I mean, bit. We drove away happily weighed down and began to eat right away. We remarked on each one, sweet or sour, ripe or riper. Oo, I just got a good one. The corners of our roadmap were stained red by my fingers. It felt too early to be indulging in fruit like this. Only May? Spitting cherry pits out our open windows, we christened the roadside "Summer."

Belgrade Underground

This is Big Gun Powder Storage. The man-made cave, built by 16th century Austrians beneath the Kalemegdan Fortress, began life as a warehouse for gunpowder - hence the name. Once it was cleaned out and excavations around Belgrade began to unearth Byzantine and Roman sarcophagi, gravestones and statues, it became a display room. A lapidarium. In 1999, modern Belgraders left their own mark on the space, re-purposing it into an illegal nightclub. Named "Big Gun Powder Storage," of course. Their fossilized chewing gum spot the floor. This was the third stop on our tour of "Underground Belgrade," and our guide had finally gotten the full attention of 9 groggy Brits who'd been up until 8am clubbing on a boat in the Danube. Beer in hand, they were (admirably) surviving. "This was the greatest club in the world," he told them, "the DJ would play right on this 2,000 year old altar!" You can imagine the acoustics.

Belgrade is situated right where the mighty Danube meets the Sava and the Balkan mountains meet the vast Pannonian Plain. It's an ideal place for a city, except for the fact that everyone else is going to think so, too. Even a layman like me can figure out that there are two ways to defend yourself from invasion. You either position yourself at the highest point possible or burrow underground. With Belgrade positioned as it is, its back up against the mountains, the two great rivers 383 feet below and layers of easy to carve limestone beneath, they were able to do both. As a result, there are miles and miles of tunnels, bunkers, dungeons, posts and cellars below the city of Belgrade. There's a labyrinth of over 1,000 years of subterranean war strategy that remains mostly undiscovered.

Nowadays, this is the only type of warfare going on below the city, beneath  Cirila i Metodija Park. We'd walked down one of many stairways marked "Underground" in that familiar gothic font mimicking Paris' "Metropolitain" signs and found dozens of computer gaming rooms. Some wore headsets, all were engaged in some sort of battle that kept them glued to their seats and screens in these virtual underground command stations. This is the site of the first and only subway station built in Belgrade. The plans for the underground railway had been grand, but were quickly interrupted. It was 1995 and people were about to have more pressing reasons to go underground than building an expensive subway system.

Vuk's Statue Station, as it is called, is a big ole white elephant. It looks and feels exactly like a subway station, the metallic walls, public benches, signs pointing to the platform and the bathrooms. These days, the escalators drop you down to a platform that's being utilized as a stop on the Zemun - Pancevo train. I'm not exactly sure how that works, but we had to run up a down escalator when a guard informed us that only ticket-holders could descend. When we mentioned the experience to some locals over dinner that evening, there was some miscommunication.  This led to the suggestion that we should look into an "Underground Belgrade" tour if we wanted to see the system of passageways beneath the city.

They say that to see anything over 250 years old in Belgrade, you must go underground. Unfortunately, there isn't all that much of an opportunity. Lack of funding and squabbles over personal property prevents any sort of tourist infrastructure - you've gotta make things safe, put in staircases, employ guides, etc etc etc. Just deciding which in the multitude of networks to focus on would be an enormous endeavor. Access to a few sites has been allowed for tour guides, but it never really gets too deep (in either sense of the word). This doesn't make the tour less interesting, just sort of a tease. Ours included a room with some Roman remains, a wine cellar, Big Gunpowder Storage and this post-World War II bunker.

Celts, Romans, Huns, Byzantines, Ottoman Turks, Austro-Hungarians, Germans and everyone else wanted to lay claim to Belgrade throughout history. It wasn't all that far-fetched of Tito to think that Cold War Russia would come knocking on their door. Men were stationed in these small bunkers around the clock for years, waiting for an attack that never came. They were manned with cannons, but - of course - there was now also the threat of nuclear attack. "This is why they kept some water in these lead boxes." Our guide pointed at the cases below the stairs. "Like anything would survive a nuclear explosion. So stupid." He shook his head and laughed.

"So stupid," had been Dina's comment, too. She's the young woman who'd recommended an underground tour over dinner. Her utterance was in response to a recent Roman aqueduct excavation and the decision to simply cover it with a layer of concrete. "They say that now it will stay better protected for someone to open up and explore later. So stupid!" she repeated. Our guide began the tour with a power point presentation of everything he was once allowed to show tourists, but cannot anymore. Natural caverns, an underground river, another shelter-turned-club. He spoke of passageways that joined government buildings, German command stations and excavations that were named "Roman" simply because they were old. The presentation took place in a basement built around the remains of a Roman fortress. An ancient lead pipe juts out of the wall.

Our final stop was the wine cellar.  Dating back to the 19th century, it is now a bar. Before going in/under, I looked across the river at Zemun, a town that predates Belgrade but is now considered part of the city. I'd read that homeless people had started living in the neighborhood's underground tunnels. Over unlabeled bottles of wine, served alongside liters of Coca Cola, our guide reminisced some more about the "totally illegal" parties at Big Gun Powder Storage and other caves. "During the [NATO] bombing, young people felt they had no future. There was nothing to do but play music and dance." Like the ancient well-diggers and today's homeless, the builders of bomb shelters and secret passageways, those club-goers at the end of the 20th century found what they needed to survive in Belgrade's underground.

Castle Hunting: Smederevo

Smederevo Fortress was the end of the line.  When the Ottomans captured it, in 1459, after decades of trying, it marked the fall of the medieval Sebian state – the country wouldn’t exist again for four and a half centuries, the region would remain tightly within the grip of Istanbul.
After the Battle of Blackbird's Field in 1389, Serbs began a slow drift to the north.  Uprooted from their historic homeland by the Ottomans, they pushed into unfamiliar territory, creeping right to the edge of the great Mittel-European plains.
In the year 1428, after thirty years of instability, the Serb leader Đurađ Branković began work on a new capital and stronghold on the northern edge of what had ever been considered Serbian land, right up against the Danube.  The fortress was his country’s last hope.

Visiting Smederevo is a terrific experience.  Not because there’s much to see – there are no narrow passages or elaborate gatehouses, nothing remains of the residences, the castle grounds are filled with sycamores and a bumper-car tent.  It’s interesting only because of how solid and massive it is.  Through years of bitter siege by the Ottomans, the fortress was hardly dented.  It survived entirely intact until 1941, when a German ammunition store blew up near the south wall – the adjoining town was almost completely destroyed in the blast, debris traveled as far as ten kilometers away.  Amazingly, the castle wasn’t damaged much – there’s a big hole in the wall, but that’s about it.
The Ottomans certainly knew how strong these walls are.  It took them four attempts, huge batteries of canons, hundreds of thousands of men and years to take Smederevo.

Sitting at the crux of two rivers – the Danube and the Jezava – the walls form a rough triangle.  The third side was also once protected by water, after a moat was dug along the walls there, and the inner keep has a separate moat.  The walls – they’re about a mile long, altogether – enclosed a small city and palace, and were anchored by large defense towers.  Because the land here is flat, the fortifications had to be very tall to create any kind of height advantage.  Because they were built specifically to defend against the Turkish gunpowder weapons, they needed to be extremely sturdy; the walls themselves are about ten feet thick.
The crenelations have begun to shift in some places, and some of the towers have adopted a drunken lean.  The land underneath the foundations isn’t very firm, and the walls relied more on breadth than depth to “float” in the riverside earth, but inevitably some tipping has begun.

The Danube was both a border for the Serbs and a last resort.  Đurađ Branković was afraid that the Ottoman army would gain control of the waterway and be able to push their way up and around his diminishing territories (which eventually happened).  Hoping to retain a connection with central Europe and the Black Sea, and to hold the gateway westward, he decided to build his new capital where the sultans would have to either capture it or travel overland to the north.  Also, the position made it more difficult for the Hungarians to travel eastward, which made the Ottomans happy and probably held off an attack for some time.
Amazingly, the entire fortress was built in just over two years.  Branković and (in particular) his wife gained a tyrannical reputation, working and taxing their remaining subjects mercilessly to complete the project.

A tenuous calm began in 1434, just after the castle was completed and before it had been tested.  Branković agreed to marry his eldest daughter to Sultan Murad II to guarantee that the Ottomans wouldn’t invade – but the peace lasted only five years.  In 1429, Murad led 130,000 troops up along the Danube, determined to wipe out the Serbs and reopen direct confrontation with the Hungarians.
Smederevo withstood the initial assault, but three months of siege and starvation eventually made the defenders give in – a period of complicated negotiations involving the Hungarians returned the castle to Branković a year later, though.  Mehmed II himself, fresh off his conquering of Istanbul, tried to recapture the fortress in 1453 and 1456, but was repelled both times, even though he had many more men than the Serbs.
Though the Sultan couldn't topple Branković's castle, the rest of Serbia was devastated by the raids, with over fifty thousand people killed or taken prisoner. At this point, Smederevo sat almost completely alone – all the other castles and fortresses of Serbia had fallen and the country existed only symbolically, reduced to nothing more than a tiny force in a big fort.

The modern town of Smederevo has encroached right up to the walls – there’s a railway station on one side, the Jezava has been redirected and only a concrete inlet borders the castle on the east.  Men and boys fish here, or sit with their girlfriends to kiss. A huge crane stands sentinel off the southwestern tip, part of a barge loading station.  Like most castles, it wasn’t until recently that the citizens of town began to appreciate what they have.  Renovation work has begun, hoping to shore up the more damaged walls and prop up some of the towers, but (in contrast with the two year long construction) it’s going slowly. There’s not much money for projects like this in Serbia.

We stayed in a little pension not far from the walls and were able to walk around the castle both at dusk and dawn.  Barges pass by all day, cutting smoothly and silently through the brown water.  There’s a rough track around the inner perimeter, and joggers and walkers circle slowly.  It gave some sense of scale – even the swiftest runners took a long time to make the loop.  Wandering, we could feel somewhat alone.  The leaves and branches thickened away from the center, it felt almost wild.  The walls are high and wide enough to block out the sounds of town.

The twenty-five towers are probably the most impressive part about the castle.  Each stands about seventy feet tall, though up close that figure is hard to believe.  So heavyset and broad, their bigness actually makes them seem shorter until given some perspective.  Climbing up the stairs of the keep takes a long time, the view out over the river and the town is surprising – we felt very high up all of a sudden.

Reduced to a few thousand men, the Serb forces huddled in their stronghold until 1459, when the Ottomans finally captured it for good.  When Smederevo finally fell, there was nowhere else to go.  Serbia became only a vague region within the empire.  Mehmed II fixed up the walls a little and the sultans kept the fortress operational for a while, but the frontier had pushed eastward rapidly and the castle didn’t remain important for long.  It sat unused for centuries, but didn’t deteriorate much – it was too well built, too thick to collapse.

Gypsy Kitchens: Serbian Tomato Paprika Kačamak

A woman in a small Belgrade market overheard us talking about “kačamak” and interrupted with her own recipe.  “Put corn in water on fire and then…”  She trailed off and made a motion with her hand like she was shooing us away.  “Kačamak,” she said, and shrugged.
The woman is right.  It’s one of the simplest dishes in the Serbian repertoire, but it isn’t and doesn’t need to be boring.  Essentially the same thing as grits or polenta, Serbs usually eat it as a sweetened porridge for breakfast. Other varieties turn the cornmeal into a firm cake or a kind of hardened, simple bread.  Some recipes use milk or yogurt instead of water, and a lot of cooks add cheese, lard, ham or bacon to the mixture.  The most common addition, though, is potato – it’s what separates Serbian kačamak from other polenta-like dishes.
We wanted a cake that was flavorful, vegetarian, savory and distinctly Serbian.  This is a non-traditional dish that mixes ingredients and elements from a handful of traditional varieties: tomatos from the greenhouse, coarse paprika, leeks, parsley, sheep cheese.  Also, beautiful, pink-skinned fingerling potatoes.

Kačamak begins with cornmeal (the genitive element), but the cooking process begins with everything else.  At the market, we bought dark, shiny dried peppers in a bundle.  They were mild and tasted of the Hungarian plains to the north – the kind of low-intensity, woody peppers that have given this region its primary flavor.  Chopped small, they added flavor more than heat, and a pleasant sweetness.  To give our cake a little more spice, we also used a more fiery type of paprika, already ground into flakes and sold to us in a loosely-tied bag.  In America, one could use a combination of paprika and ancho-chili powder, or something similar.  Or, of course, the recipe could forgo spice altogether.

We found a wonderful Serbian cheese called “zlatarski sir” to add to our cake.  It’s a semi-soft, sharp, sheepy cheese that releases salty liquid from its holes and smells strongly of the barn.  Substitute feta as a poor approximation, or any other strong, soft sheep cheese.  A blue sheep type like Roquefort would be interesting.
The main divisional line between types of kačamak is drawn by comparing the fineness of the cornmeal.  Finer, white meals are typically used to make more-breadlike versions or very uniform mush.  Coarse, yellow corn is used for gruels and cakes.  It cooks easily.  It's a tactile process. You can tell when it's done by the movement of your spoon.

The potatoes we found were yellow-fleshed, bright pink and deeply flavorful.  About half the market vendors were selling them, piled up in glistening heaps on their tables.  The sellers kept them fresh and damp by sprinkling water on them from dirty plastic bottles.  They had already been cleaned and de-eyed when we bought them, their ruddy-cheeked skins scrubbed and ready to eat.

Before you can cook the potatoes, though, immerse yourself in the more vibrant flavors and smells of cooking alliums and spices.  Begin with a little olive oil (or butter!) and one big, chopped leek.  Sautee until beyond fragrant, adding the spices along the way and working them into the oil – how much you used depends, as always, on how spicy you want the meal to be and how powerful your ingredients are.  When the onion is satisfyingly softened and on the verge of browning, add in two medium tomatoes (chopped casually into whatever size chunks) and a few cloves of diced garlic.

Cook the mixture however you’d begin a favorite tomato sauce – we kept it very simple, softening and bleeding the nightshades, letting the mixing sugars of leek and tomato caramelize a little, waiting until we could smell the cooking garlic.  Towards the end of this process, add in about a half cup or a cup of fresh parsley.  Things don’t have to be cooked well – they’ll have plenty of time.  But it’s a good thing if the ingredients seem irresistible right then.  That’s the best part about cooking – it’s also a process of building the appetite.
The next step is to ruin everything by dumping in a quart and a half of water (color diluted, heady scent diminished, bits of pepper and parsley floating palely).  With the water, add two cups of loosely cubed potatoes (skin on or off, it’s up to you).  Bring to a boil and then simmer rapidly for half an hour or so until the potatoes are very tender when pricked with a fork – they should be cooked, in other words.

When the potatoes are done, add two and a half cups of cornmeal to the water and keep boiling.  Make sure to stir the liquid well as it cooks and take the opportunity to smush the bits of potato as much as you can in the process.  The Serbs use a special tool called a "kačamalo" for this mashing and stirring – it’s a four pronged, wooden implement that’s something between a crusher and scraper.  The point is to loosely break up the potato and assimilate the two starches into one mixture without letting it stick on the bottom of the pot.
The cornmeal should soften and begin to congeal within a few minutes, the whole pot should be orange with tomato and spice, the bubbles should become bigger and more purposeful (volcanic, maybe) as everything thickens.  If there’s not enough water, add a little.  If, after about twenty minutes of stirring, the mixture seems nowhere near thick enough, add a quarter cup more cornmeal (and more if that’s not enough).  When you sense that it’s done enough, add in your cheese.

The density of this batter is difficult to describe, and it might be hard to get it right without guessing.  Basically, it should be difficult to stir and seem almost ready to hold it’s shape.
Pour or scoop everything into a greased, pre-head pan and cook over high heat for a few minutes until it seems the underside might be about to begin actually frying.  Then, remove from the heat altogether and let cool for an hour.  Carefully flip the kačamak cake out onto a plate when you think it’s hardened enough.  If it’s too soft, it’s not really a problem – it’s still good if it’s broken up or a little loose.
Here’s the recipe:

Tomato-Paprika Kačamak Cake
Ingredients:
3 cups coarse, yellow cornmeal
2 cups chopped fingerling potatoes
2 medium tomatoes, cubed
1 leek, cut up
4 cloves garlic, diced
¼ pound semi-soft sheep cheese
1 cup de-stemmed fresh parsley
Spices derived from peppers
Olive oil or butter
Salt
1 ½ quarts water


Method:
-In a large pot, sauté leeks in oil for a few minutes with the spice.  Add tomatoes and garlic when onions are cooked.  Cook at a nice simmer for a while until everything is sweet, thick and delicious.  Add the parsley.
-Add potatoes and water.  Bring to a boil and then cook at a rapid simmer for about half an hour, or until potatoes are very fork-tender.
-Stir in cornmeal.  Break up potatoes with a wooden or slotted spoon, or lightly with a masher.  Keep stirring as meal breaks down and thickens, making sure to keep the bottom of the pot clean and un-stuck.  If the mash thickens too quickly, add a little water.  After about twenty minutes, begin adding cornmeal until the mixture becomes very thick and seems about to become cake-batter like.  Use good judgment and trust yourself to guess.  Stir in the cheese.
- Serve the kačamak as is, as a hot polenta, or pour into a greased saucepan and cook over high heat for a minute or two, until it seems the bottom might be about to begin frying.  Remove from heat and let cool for about an hour, or until firm enough to slice or plate.

Before we found kačamak, it seemed impossible to cook Serbian vegetarian dishes.  Serbs themselves might dismiss it as peasant food, but we were in love - it's both decadent and light, flavorful and versatile.  The cake reminded us of a savory, moist corn muffin made large, something you could use for a hearty sandwich or a starch alongside a meat, fish or salad.

Check out all of our recipes.

Museum Night in Belgrade

On the main pedestrian boulevard, this young girl waits for her turn at the telescope.  She has probably walked along Knez Mihailova Street more times than she could count.  Just yesterday, her patience may have been tried in almost the same spot, waiting on line for ice-cream or at the check-out of Gap Kids.  But in a moment, she'll look up at the sky and feel like her feet are planted someplace entirely different.  This is Museum Night in Belgrade, an evening when things that are always there - that gallery next to Zara, that museum you maybe visited on a school trip years ago, the stars - take center stage.

This is the 9th Annual Museum Night in Serbia and it's gotten bigger each year.  In the capital, 70 museums and galleries open their doors to the public from 6pm until 2am and at least 100 exhibitions, performances, events happen in and around them.  It's not just a Belgrade thing - about 65 different cities in the country take part in the one-night-only event.  The idea is to promote culture and get people in the doors of museums.  In this part of the world, the best way to get anyone to do anything is to make it an all night party, of course!  It's kind of like the visual equivalent of a music festival (which Serbia also happens to know how to do very well).  

I wish they had something like this in New York.  How many times did a visitor see more of the city's museums in one trip than I had in my lifetime?  My sorry excuse: "When it's always there, it's hard to get yourself to go out and do it" a.k.a. I took opportunities for granted.  That's what I loved most about this event in Belgrade.  That night, everyone had a little "tourist" in them.  People walked around in groups, clutching leaflets and consulting maps.  This was especially nice for us - foreigners in a big, exciting city on Saturday night.  We not only knew what was 'happening,' we felt like we fit right in.

We bought our tickets from the Cultural Center that afternoon and spent a long time staring at the guide that came with it - a little worried about being able to find Museum Night.  But when we stepped out our door, Museum Night found us.  Even though my mom told me never to do this, I got in the back of a stranger's van.  This was outside of Radio Belgrade, which had set up a mobile recording studio (said van) for the festivities.  Where there weren't traditional "museums," other things popped up.  Happenings occurred.  

The theme, this year, was "Neon Lights," so we could only assume that these dancers were part of the festivities.  There really was this blending, oozing of exhibition into the streets between museums.  Instead of the sort of scavenger hunt I was expecting, the whole Old Town was attending "Museum Night" whether they chose to or not. And this was hardly your average required museum tour.

Gallery windows hung on darkened buildings like a painting on a wall.  Streetlamp display lighting and a windowsill frame.  Looking in at a woman looking on at a framed poster, I felt part of this strange  continuum.   Sort of like Norman Rockwell's Triple Self Portrait, except with a viewer instead of an artist.  While I wondered what was happening inside the grand museums all over the city - of which there are many - I preferred this sort of window shopping-gallery hopping.  You really could make the evening whatever you wanted it to be - which isn't usually something you associate with "going to a museum."

All night long, people stood on line outside of the Princess Ljubica house for their turn to get in.  One large man in a suit checked tickets at the gate, another manned the entrance allowing a handful at a time to cross the threshold before abruptly closing the door once more.  It was like the konak was transformed into a club.  Something about the scene just felt so.... Belgrade.  I mean, one of the most famous alternative clubs here is located in the basement of the university's Electrical Engineering Faculty building.  It's a certain, unique brand of cool.

As the evening turned to night into late night into early morning and businesses on Knez Mihailova turned off their lights, the galleries between them looked bigger.  Unmissable.  I can't say I noticed this art museum any of the dozen times we walked right past it.  They became a lot like those stars everyone was taking a turn to look at.  Bright, white reminders of what is always there and always worth exploring.

Author's Note:  In case you were wondering, we'd already titled another post Night at the Museum.