When getting to know other cultures, we get a complete impression only when, along with knowledge of their history, art and traditions, we taste the taste of a national dish. The traditions and customs of a people are very well illustrated by the smells and tastes of local food. To a large extent, it is also a sign of national identity.
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, our people received numerous printed cookbooks. Among them is Cook of forgotten dishes Dr. Bela Steinbach and Anna Rečej, published in Veliko Bečkerek in 1914.
READ: WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK TRADITIONAL RECIPES OF HOME SERBIAN CUISINE
Today, a century later, Miodrag Ilić he spent a year researching the traditional home-made dishes of Serbian cuisine.
-In international frameworks, there is standardization of traditional food, i.e. traditional dishes and ingredients. Several large European projects were dedicated to the standardization of traditional dishes such as TRUEFOOD, BaSeFood and EuroFIR. In short: traditional diet is an established practice and there are specificities in the preparation and consumption of food that originated before the Second World War. So, before anyone convinces you that a dish is "traditional", ask your grandparents if that's true or look for reliable pre-WWII records about it. In any case, it doesn't mean that you won't like that dish even if it's not really traditional, you just have to be precise in the terminology - says Miodrag Ilić for I love Zrenjanin.
- We call home cooking - continues our interlocutor - everything that was created by the work of amateur cooks, housewives, hosts in a family environment. With all due respect to the culinary profession and professionals, much more food is prepared in households, in the home kitchen. And local cuisine, the food culture of a nation, is part of the intangible cultural heritage. In order to ensure better preservation of this type of cultural tradition and warn of its great importance, UNESCO created a list of intangible cultural heritage. As a part of national and cultural identity, baptismal glory is also on the list. In the future, the basic task of all of us is to support any action that will lead to placing as many traditional dishes of local cuisine as possible on the UNESCO list, in order to preserve them from oblivion.
In the past, excellent housewives preferred to keep their recipes rather than share them with other cooks. We were interested in how difficult it is to find old recipes today?
- Such recipes are hard to come by, because many are not ready to share them publicly. So far, I have not been able to determine whether it is a question of jealously guarding a family tradition or fear of public criticism... Regardless, there are plenty of published cookbooks and magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, on the basis of which anyone interested can find what interests them. Personally, I prefer books written and published by ethnologists, as a kind of testimony of the life of that time. Simo Trojanović and Jovan Erdeljanović, Ph.D., with their colleagues, left precious records in their books about the food culture in these areas.
Serbian traditional domestic "cuisine" was also influenced by other nations. In Vojvodina, they were Germans and Hungarians. So, if Sosa cooks rinfleisch for lunch on Sundays, is it a traditional home-made dish?
- It IS a traditional dish. And the influence of other cultures is normal for all nations. Even the ancient Romans, as great conquerors, suffered the influence of the cultures they conquered. Of course, they also spread their influence on conquered peoples. It's always a two-way street. However, we should not allow discussions by "experts" about the fact that there is no national cuisine and that it is all the influence of other peoples and cultures. This is simply not true.
Together with his wife, with whom he runs a website about recipes and food culture, Miodrag Ilić concluded that there are few books about traditional cuisine and nutrition that are both historically and ethnographically documented. This is exactly how the idea and concept on which Miodrag's serious and exhaustive research is based were born.
- Of course, if there were no collaborators, all of this would have taken much longer, and for that I am especially glad, Ilić points out. - The ultimate goal of the entire research was to publish a book about traditional recipes and traditional cuisine, which everyone could read and gain, at least a basic picture, of the food culture in Serbia. A book Traditional recipes of Serbian cuisine has recently seen the light of day. We are extremely proud of that. The book was realized in cooperation with the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and with the support of a company.
Ilić chooses cooking as a topic because it is fundamentally both the most popular and the most intriguing topic, and he deals with it in the most professional way from the point of view of an amateur, as he says. And the numerous recipes he was surrounded by inspired him to wear an apron.
- I have prepared several dishes according to old recipes and many of them have become close to my heart (and J's stomach). Donuts for example. We can say that they are one of the favorite treats of people from this area, especially children. The donut recipe is from the book Cook of forgotten dishes which was printed in 1914 in Veliki Bečkerek (today's Zrenjanin). What could be better than delicious donuts based on a 104-year-old recipe! Try it and...enjoy!
Source: ilovezrenjanin.com portal
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