Slovenian Recipes

My grandma used to make us a sweet, beignet-like treat we called by their American name: Angel Wings.  Slovenians call them flancati (flan-tsa-tee) or sometimes pohanje. She twisted strips of dough into fanciful knots and shapes and plunged them into a simmering pot of oil. (Back then, it might have been Crisco, perish the thought!) They emerged brown and crispy, ready to be mounded on a plate, buried in a snowstorm of powdered sugar, and inhaled by a tribe of hungry grandchildren. I don't do deep-frying.  So I figured angel wings would remain a distant childhood memory. Then I spotted a recipe for baked flancati.  I figured it couldn't possibly be legitimate.  But it turns out the recipe came from  More Pots and Pans,  another cookbook put out by the Slovenian Women's Union of America.  So I figured it was worth a try. The recipe, I realized, was simply a variant of the rich pastry dough, made with either sour cream or cream cheese, that i...

Menu Cevapcici III with Lamb and Pork Pita Chopped Red Peppers Greek Yogurt Green Salad (Almost) Kasha Mediterranean Salad This was another dinner for a sad time. We were on the East Coast for a memorial gathering to honor a dear old friend.  He had died six weeks earlier, after months of declining health.  We were staying in the home he had shared with his wife, also a close friend of ours. Once again, cevapcici seemed like a good choice.  To accompany it, I decided to make kasha Mediterranean salad, an unusual dish that was the creation of a Slovenian-American Facebook friend named Josef. It seemed like an ideal warm weather dinner.  Everything could be made in advance, and the cevapcici could be prepared on the outdoor grill our friend often used. We went to the modest grocery store in her small New England town and had a few challenges. There was no ground lamb available, but the store's butcher eventually agreed to grind up a package of ...

Menu   Chicken Paprikash II Latkes (Jewish Potato Pancakes) Applesauce and Sour Cream Green Salad My husband had invited a co-worker and her spouse to join us for dinner.  The date happened to fall on a Tuesday.  “Don't worry, “ he assured me, “I already told them to expect a Slovenian dinner.”  In his mind, it wasn't even a question.  If it was Tuesday, it had to be Slovenian. There was just one stipulation. His young colleague had a food request: Potato pancakes—or latkes, in the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition she and my husband share.  He had mentioned preparing them, a few months back, and she had been impressed, or maybe just nostalgic.  So all I had to figure out was a main course that would go well with potato pancakes.  It shouldn't be too difficult.  I had come to realize that Slovenian and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking styles have a lot in common.   So this would be my first official attempt at a Slovenian-Jewish fusion dinner....

Menu Meatballs with Cheese (Uštipci) Ajvar Pita Coleslaw Crispy Kale Cevapcici would have been an ideal choice, but I wanted to branch out.  So I turned to a new source I had just added to my cooking library:   The Yugoslav Cookbook by Olga Novak-Markovic, issued in 1985 by a publisher in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia. This once-glossy cookbook wasn't quite as “vintage” as my trio of Slovenian American cookbooks from the 1950s.  But it was an historical document in another way: it was an artifact from the final  years of Yugoslavia's existence.  That multi-ethnic country began to unravel just a few years later.  The first of the constituent republics to break away was Slovenia, during a ten day war for independence in June and July of 1991. Months earlier, I had borrowed the book from the library of the Slovenian Hall in San Francisco.  A few weeks ago, I had located a copy of the hard-to-find volume for sale through an online bo...

Menu Beef Goulash II with Sauerkraut Polenta Green Salad Brussels Sprouts Strawberry Shortcake It was a Monday in late June, on what would have been Week 24 of my Slovenian cooking project. For the second time in three months, we were in Florida, staying at the home of my husband's father and stepmother. But this was a bittersweet time, because our unplanned trip had been triggered by the death of my husband's mother. My father-in-law's birthday had been the previous day.  There hadn't been a celebration. But today, my husband and I wanted to do something to observe his special day.  We offered to make a belated birthday dinner. "I could make a Slovenian dinner," I said hesitantly. But I wasn't sure how my offer would be received.  My father-in-law is a fine cook who didn't start to slow down until he passed eighty.  During our spring visit, he had shared his special recipe for kreplach, a traditional Jewish dumpling with a strong resem...

Menu Caraway Meatballs Polenta Coleslaw The foundation for this dinner was a recipe called "Spaghetti and Meatballs" in  Woman's Glory: The Kitchen, the classic cookbook published by the Slovenian Women's Union of America.  When I first saw the recipe, I figured it must be one of their standard American recipes, or perhaps Italian-American. But then I took a closer look.  Caraway seeds, cheese and bacon? That was not a typical American take on spaghetti.  It might not be traditionally Slovenian, but those were the unmistakable flavors of Central Europe. So I made a mental note: This dish would be a good choice on a week when I was short of time, or didn't feel up to the challenge of an unfamiliar Slovenian specialty. Months later, the time arrived. On Tuesday of Week 23, I didn't want a cooking challenge.  It was a sad time at our house.  My mother-in-law had just died on that June day.   My husband got the call from his stepfather earl...

Menu Mineštr a (Slovenian Minestrone) Coleslaw French bread Suddenly that Slovenian minestrone seemed like a perfect choice.   Easy comfort food.  And I had almost everything on hand.  So why not? I made a few changes in the recipe from that 1950s cookbook.   As usual,  I used olive oil instead of lard or drippings. I was a little more generous with the vegetables.  As a short cut, I used canned beans instead of cooking them from scratch.  At least they were those genuine, hard-to-find Roman beans.  Instead of canned peas, I used frozen. The recipe called for smoked sausages or chopped ham.  I used smoked chicken apple sausages from the butcher shop around the corner. 1 medium onion, chopped 1 large clove garlic, minced 2 T. olive oil ½ head cabbage (part green, part red) sliced 2 smoked chicken apple sausages, sliced 1 can Roman beans (borlotti beans) 1 c. baby carrots 1 medium potato ¼ c. fresh parsley cherry tomatoe...