The daily lunch of my childhood consisted of soup or broth, meat, some vegetables and something sweet. Potatoes were a must. Regardless of whether it was baked, boiled, roasted or pureed, there had to be enough left over for dinner. We had lunch at one, dinner at half past eight. Potatoes were part of order. It never occurred to me that that order could be disturbed or violated.
Grandpa came every evening, my dad's dad. He would sit next to me, get a small plate and eat one potato. And that was in order. He would have dinner with his grandmother at exactly eight o'clock.
As soon as I became independent enough after the war to be able to at least somewhat do what I wanted, potatoes again became an integral part of my daily menu.
When we moved to Voždovac 49 years ago, a truck with 25 kilo bags of excellent potatoes would park in front of our solitaire in early autumn. It was cheaper than at the market, because one did not pay the stall, and probably not the tax either. He was happy to carry the bag to the apartment. It was later banned for "hygienic reasons", but that's why potatoes from Ivanjica malčica were sold more expensively than others at the nearby Dušanovac market.
So what's the problem then?
The problem is that this winter in Belgrade I did not manage to find honest, I would almost say, edible potatoes. I looked for it in the markets, in large and small supermarkets, as well as in private shops. Terrible. I would throw away half, half was somehow boiled or baked, but it remained tasteless. I don't know where it came from that they were selling to us and what our farmer in Šumadija or Banat was doing, where were his potatoes? Or how he ruined it? I know that in Serbia we have been buying garlic from China for a long time, but potatoes!?
I also complained in Weimar about the lack of good potatoes in Serbia this winter. I am there often, because next to that old town in Thuringia was the Buchenwald concentration camp, and I say for myself that I am apparently sentenced to life imprisonment there, because they invite me as guests every year, sometimes twice. I admit that now I am not sleeping "up there", on the hill, where the camp was, but in the luxurious hotel "Elefant". Thuringia is the homeland of the German potato. A friend there told me that his grandfather was able to guess from the taste of a boiled potato, from which vineyard it came.
Last week I returned from Vienna. I brought a bag of potatoes!
During the past two decades, I often traveled on the route Belgrade-Vienna, Vienna-Belgrade, by train, plane, van "from home to home", or by car. I would always bring something. It is an old custom to take something with you on a trip abroad, and take something back when you return. I brought brandy from Serbia, it was never a problem, but to my own country? It changed from year to year.
Gone are the bad times of wars and superinflation when you had to take almost everything with you: machine powder, margarine and butter, bacon, powdered milk and eggs, shoes and clothes, and above all German stamps, because there were no legal interbank services for us ordinary people. there wasn't. Afterwards, we already brought finer things, which we didn't have at home, caviar, salmon, and along the way we bought salami and goose liver in Hungary.
But potatoes!
In the supermarket "Spar" in Vienna, I found eleven types of potatoes, they were loose, for the customer to choose and put in a bag, then weigh, or packaged. It says whether it is suitable for cooking, baking, making French fries, puree or potato salad out of it, because it doesn't matter. Prices vary from 0,79 to 1,69 euros, that's approximately from 97 to 207 dinars, so, certainly more expensive than in Serbia, I have to admit that, but when I bought salmon or caviar, it was also about luxury. I took a package of two kilos of the species pan, convenient for both cooking and baking, at a price of 1,49 euros per kilogram, 2,98 euros, that sounds like nothing, but it's still 366 dinars. What should I do? You only live once. I didn't buy salmon, after all, it is also available in our better supermarkets, where there are no good potatoes.
Someone warned me that our customs officers will be suspicious that I am importing two kilograms of potatoes, they will wonder if there are no drugs in every potato? They will stop me until a dog comes to smell each potato individually. Bojazan was superfluous, the customs officer in Horgoš, obviously a good psychologist, just waved us through, after I answered that I had nothing for customs.
If, by my next trip to Austria, our supermarkets do not have young Italian potatoes, like in previous years, I will try to bring at least ten kilograms of Austrian potatoes.
However, who knows, maybe the government, which will emerge from the elections on April 24, will still fix our agriculture, so Serbian peasants will once again have excellent and cheap domestic potatoes on offer, like in the good old days.
