Bulgaria
Garden salads, sheep's-milk cheese and the yogurt Bulgarians gave the world — Balkan home cooking with a shot of rakia.
Sit down at a village mehana and the meal announces itself before the mains: a shopska salad — tomato, cucumber and pepper under a snowdrift of grated white sirene — and a small glass of rakia, the grape or plum brandy raised in a toast to your health. This is a garden-and-dairy country, its table built on sun-ripe vegetables, beans and the tangy yogurt (kiselo mlyako) that Bulgaria gave the world, cultured here by a bacterium that carries the country's name.
The cooking rewards patience. Peppers and aubergine are charred into lyutenitsa relish for the winter; meat and vegetables bake slowly in a clay gyuvetch; a mixed grill of kebapche and kyufte smokes over coals. Mornings start with warm coiled banitsa, filo layered with cheese and egg. Pour a glass of dark Mavrud, the country's own grape, and eat like the seasons still set the menu.
- Shopska salad (tomato
- cucumber & white cheese)
- Banitsa (cheese-filled filo coil)
- Kebapche (grilled minced-meat rolls)
- Kavarma (clay-pot meat stew)
- Lyutenitsa (pepper-tomato relish)
- Kiselo mlyako (Bulgarian yogurt)
- Rakia (fruit brandy)
