A Grilled Meatball
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 But it was an historical document in another way: it was an artifact from the final years of Yugoslavia's existence.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...