Gatimi Shqiptar - Albanian Cooking

I thought that I was never going to find Albanian food with much flavor after my training period in central Albania. For a nation that has been shaped by centuries of conquest and intersection of European and Middle Eastern cultures, Albania has emerged with remarkably bland food. Spice is rarely used, and even then with much restraint. You have to travel to cities and comb through the occasional European mart or specialty shop to find elusive items like ginger and red pepper.

Albanian food is also very high in cholesterol and sugar. Oil, salt, red meat (with most of its fat intact), bread, and sugar are the most important elements in Shqiptar cooking. Everything is deep, and I mean DEEP, fried. Even rice and spaghetti are fried before they are boiled.

But, the food is incredibly fresh because the vast majority of Albanians outside the big cities produce most of their own vegetables, cheeses, yogurts, preserves, condiments, wine, milk, dhale (half water, half yogurt, and sometimes a pinch of salt), etc. No added preservatives or hormones. Living in a community where processed food is essentially non-existent is something new for me. The lack of processing, the lack of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers go a long way for health… It is only after most food is cooked that it begins to lose its optimal nutritional value and that Albanians fall into two major health traps—acquired diabetes and hypertension.

In Leskovik I have found way more flavorful cooking than in central Albania, mostly the result of fresh garlic cloves, liberal use of black pepper, and a passion for wild oregano. Everything is a little pikante (spicy) here. My counterpart’s mother gifted me with several bunches of dried oregano from the mountain. She is a fabulous cook and makes a mean, mean stuffed eggplant dish. My stomach groans wistfully just thinking about it, sigh. And her pastiço, the Albanian version of macaroni and cheese (but heavier on milk and egg, light on the cheese), oh my. Serious soul food. Shpresa is always flying about her apartment, just two floors below mine, mopping the loosely-tiled floor and popping something in the oven.

Shpresa and Tomori (her husband, named for the highest peak in Albania) also love their byrek, maybe the quintessential Albanian specialty. Picture a savory, flaky, layered pie often stuffed with milk, wild greens, spinach, or sometimes meat, baked in a giant round pan and cut into wedges like pizza. The less oil involved, often the better the byrek. I also love byrek made with corn meal.

In Leskovik, everyone has a kopësht (garden) on the outskirts of town, wedged into empty lots between buildings, up at the base of the sharp mountain slope, or gracing the ruins of stone houses that were abandoned post-Communism for cement dwellings down in town. This mountain community is free of air pollution and all of our water is clean, straight from mountain springs (before the banking crisis in 1997, Leskovik was famed for its hot therapeutic springs). We drink water, opaque with oxygen, straight from the tap. The vineyards are lush, preparing for the September wine season. Cherry season just finished. I am overwhelmed with white cherry and apricot preserves, gifts from all of the lovely women in my building. It’s actually a bit dangerous – anytime I visit anyone’s house and am settled into a chair for the customary cup of Turkish coffee, a saucer of sugary preserves materializes at my side.

Shqiptar cooking, for all its liberal use of fat and sugar, is yum when prepared by the experts. And for those of us learning gatimi shqiptar, behold, freedom from recipes! Everything is to taste, everything is eyeballed, ho-hummed, an extra pinch of this maybe, and an extra dash of that. I have helped to make gjize, a white Albanian made of koss (yogurt) boiled down until lumps of squeaky cheese emerge from the yellow liquid and then can be strained through a series of cloths. Kind of like cottage cheese. I have also learned how to make the aforementioned stuffed eggplant dish, as well as stuffed peppers, and the Albanian macaroni and cheese. Next I hope to learn petka, an Albanian homemade macaroni liberally doused in butter and salt. It’s the perfect comfort food. We also have an Albanian version of a doughnut, called petulla.

I also participated in the preserve-making process during cherry season, mostly sitting on a three-legged stool next to a cow stall and manure pile pitting cherries into a bowl of water (and dead flies) between my knees. Behind our Communist-era apartment building is a maze of animal stalls made from a medley of salvaged materials; it’s a veritable shanty town of human ingenuity.

During the two weeks dedicated to preserves, the shanty town was humming and smoking with boiling vats of sugar, water, and pitted fruit on top of drunkenly leaning and blackened wood stoves. I sweated and pitted. The flies, which are ever present in a thick cloud, droned happily in pools of rapidly cooling sugar, and everyone had sticky feet for days. And all those gifted preserves I mentioned earlier? They arrived at my door in repurposed glass jars still too hot to touch.