Mom demanded that I learn all the housework, including cooking. Her reasoning was: If you don't have to work, you should know how to command.
I learned, I wanted to - I didn't want to, the only thing I didn't master was commanding. But, (un)fortunately, I came to love many of those jobs, especially cooking.
With modern appliances it is much easier to cook and knead than it used to be. I still remember how I beat egg whites or filling with a wire: my hand fell off, and my mother watched and kept repeating "more, more", because "she has to dig".
Going deep into the "third age", my aunt gave me a fat old cookbook ("I don't need this anymore"), in which the recipes for dishes with chicken begin like this: Clean the feathers from the slaughtered chicken, to gut… But what is it according to the way Mongolian horsemen used to tenderize meat: under the saddle, while riding.
In the old days, the wall above the stove was decorated (and protected from stains) by an embroidered cloth called kuvarica. Rather than the relationship, it is remembered by the accompanying messages. Here are two of the many: Cookbooks, say less so your lunch doesn't burn; A wise woman must know how to love and cook her husbandAnd a message to my husband: Why are you looking at the pot now when you didn't give me money.
My colleague brought me a notebook with her mother's recipes, a nice old lady from Sombor town. Under each of them in large letters was written "Death to fascism - freedom to the people!" They were recorded, obviously, after the Second World War.
I have entered several dozens of recipes into the computer, but still more often I open a worn notebook with about a hundred recipes written down, mostly written by who gave them to me: Roll with ham - Neda, Pretzels - Jula, Grilijas štangle - Đurđa, etc.
I don't know how a few sentences about Mustafa Golubić got into that notebook, it must be that I heard something about him and hurried to write it down, and I didn't have the other one at hand.
Although... It's not that his activity has nothing to do with the kitchen and cooking, in the other, figurative sense, where Golubić was just one of the cooks, like many before and after him.
In some already forgotten times, before smartphones, we often met, sometimes in a bar, more often at home. We knew who liked to eat what, so the hostess prepared it. My friend Mića Paunović dug into me on one occasion, saying that at lunch at my place, he found out why beans are called hunting beans: You are hunting., you hunt, so grain!
Under the influence of friends' criticism, in the meantime I even learned to cook Jokai Mora beans, a specialty of that Hungarian classic. Not even like a hunter's, at least not mine, although there are at least some beans in it. There are 200 grams of it, and the rest is the smoked knee, debreciners, a bunch of green, black and garlic, so when all that is fully cooked, homemade pasta the size of a fingernail is added and a spoonful of sour cream is added to each plate. Ouch! (Since 2005, More's 150th birthday, a cooking competition has been held in Hungary to cook this bomb dish.)
In the novel Sinbad returns home Sandor Marai also dedicated several nostalgic pages to food. "Lunch was a holiday, a pious representation of life in three acts, soup, meat and cake", "a ceremony during which not only the stomach will be filled, but the soul will be satisfied". "The homeland lived in the memory of the deeds of the ancestors", but also in the smell, taste and uniqueness of Hungarian dishes and drinks.
Oscar Wilde wrote somewhere that after a good dinner one can forgive anyone, even relatives, and Bernard Shaw admitted that there is no love more sincere than the love of food.
Apart from the mentioned (and unmentioned) writers, many other people from the pen also dealt with food in their books. Let's say, "Pistalo does not fail to taste every dish characteristic of the climate in which he found himself, to describe its taste", observes Mihailo Pantić, and Aleksandar Genis claims that the cheese he ate with the shepherds in Armenia "absorbed the quintessence of the mountains: the aroma of wild grasses, and the nectar of mountain flowers, and the dew of the meadows...".
In correspondence with Goran Marković, Rajko Grlić reveals that there are several in the library cook, and among them Libero Marconi's One Hundred Crazy Lunches, from where he transcribes: The rooster for this lunch must weigh at least four kilograms, to be a good singer and a great loverThere you go!
At the end of last year, the poet Miodrag Raičević, who is in favor of the book, died By a Serbian writer collected recipes from 120 writers, so a "real culinary, literary and linguistic feast" was created - the writers attached a story written in the language of their region along with the recipe.
Raičević learned to cook in Belgrade because in his native Podgorica it was a shame to enter the kitchen, his mother did not allow him. M. Raičević's book is no longer available in bookstores, it is sold out. The price on Cupinda is a nice 1.990 dinars. If.
When the first Chinese restaurant opened in Belgrade, two of my friends struck up a conversation. One was delighted: "You eat well, but you get hungry quickly." To which the other, single, will say: "I, by God, would not like to eat like that".
Tastes are, of course, different. But anyway, death to fascism, freedom to the people!
