Flat Sausage Fair

Approximately 15 years ago I was working as a lab assistant in the programming department of microassembly and object-oriented languages within the College of Applied Technical Sciences in Niš, Serbia. I was engaged with all five semesters and was teaching students from their freshman year to graduation, and every now and again, along with the board of professors, I was asked to attend their final exams, followed by a sort of social celebration in the form of a small festivity with a table full of food and drinks.

On one such occasion, a student who came from Pirot, one of the biggest cities of eastern Serbia, asked us if we had ever tried before a sausage called "vitamin bomb", which, he said, was one of the oldest delicacies from the region he came from. I spotted that one of the professors, who was actually known to have tried almost everything when it came to food and drinks, started nodding his head, but it was clear that the rest of us heard it for the first time. The student looked at the professor and said, "I am sure you never tasted this one," and pulled out from the bag a ... well ... something that looked exactly like a "horseshoe" in both shape and color. I glanced toward the professor who claimed that he tasted it before and saw that even he was surprised with the strange-looking sausage in the student's hands. The student glimpsed the same, warmly smiled, and explained to us what it is and how it's made. Today, almost two decades later, the "vitamin bomb" sausage is a recognized brand, and the simple translation from Serbian "Peglana Kobasica" is "Ironed" or "Flat" Sausage. Last year, the town of Pirot and its tourist organization created the first "Flat Sausage Fair", and yesterday, despite poor weather, we decided to visit the second fair made in honor of this great Serbian soul food, which is the mutual name for all those old recipes that survived centuries in their original forms.

But what is so special about this sausage that it earned its own fair?

The recipe is not the secret, although this is not a meal you can make in a couple of hours in your home; with a little enthusiasm, it is doable, and results could be extraordinary. From what I can find online, you need a great selection of various quality meats (cleaned and stripped of all fats and unwanted parts), ultra-finely chopped or minced and mixed with spices (up to 2% of different chilies, 2% salt, 1% garlic, and 1% pepper, followed by other suitable spices according to your taste). No water or any other liquids are welcome in the mixture. Now comes the interesting part. After filling is ready and wrapped into eatable natural sausage casing, sausage should be formed in the "U" shape and left for drying on the draft. The drying "chamber" must be very cold, with an optimal temperature around zero degrees or colder, with as low humidity as possible, and in the presence of great frost, keeping outside water from vaporizing in great scales. Usually with a bottle, sausages are pressed and ironed two or three times a week, after which they take the form of a horseshoe. Ironing is necessary for most of the unnecessary air and water to be ejected from the sausage, which ensures longevity. Needless to say, they are purely organic with no preservation of any kind, no additives or artificial colors, no heat treatment, and no exposure to smoke.

Since there is no strict recipe when it comes to ingredients, it is clear that with different mixtures of various meats and spices, they come in a wide variety of different tastes, and given the fact that they are made of and the nature of the preparation that has not changed from the times dating a couple of centuries before, in my humble opinion, I have to say that I haven't tried better sausage yet. And believe me, I have tried many. Even those advertised on large scales, like the white sausages of Bavaria or great Danish delicacies you can buy outdoors, are simply not worthy rivals. Furthermore, the energy value of the sausage is very high, and it is usually served in small dosages and sliced into tiny, a couple of millimeters chopped pieces. Best of all, due to the fact they contain almost no water inside, you can store them in a deep freezer, where they keep their original taste and shape even after a couple of months. Yesterday's fair was, like the year before, organized very nicely and with thousands of people browsing and tasting the specimens. We bought a couple of kilos of different varieties with different meat mixtures and spice ratios, and the winner for me was a hot, whitish, extra tasty brand. It was moderately hot, made out of four different kinds of meat (besides beef, they used the best parts of goat, horse, and donkey meat), and with a great mixture of spices. The casing is giving this particular one a whitish color, which is also pretty cool and unique.

Unfortunately, because of yesterday's weather and half a meter of snow outside our weekend house, we couldn't get to the fair earlier and see its social side, so I am including the video I made last year. Somehow and also to my taste, the jazz band playing last winter fits greatly to this particular fair and the advertising product.

Serbian Flat Sausage*
http://www.rostiljanje.com/gastronomske-manifestacije/peglana-kobasica/

Image Refs:
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/lokalna-samouprava/na-hiljade-turista-dolazi-na-sajam-peglane/
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/gradska-hronika/pocinje-prijava-za-sajam-peglane-kobasice/
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/lokalna-samouprava/ogromno-interesovanje

Refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NjN4KZ1zdo
http://www.peglana.com/english/index.htm
http://www.pirotskevesti.rs/zivot-drustvo/praznik-peglane-u-hali-kej/
http://fondazioneslowfood.it/ark/details/1707/pirot-ironed-sausage
http://www.tanjug.rs/news/113206/pirot-hosts-flat-sausage-fair.htm

Serbian Chevapchichi

"Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around, facing her back into the house. - Let's go have dinner. Vincent said he made us that Serbian cevapcici." - Eureka, TV Show.

The very last decade of the very last century of the previous millennium was very exciting in many ways. It won't be remembered by all the meaningless Balkan wars flaming down here for many years, nor by the final end of the communist era in this part of Europe, nor even by the birth of the European Union idea or the rise of the new world order we are all living in today. No, to me, it was the birth of the internet, email, the World Wide Web, social networks, instant messaging, blogging, and everything we are using in our homes on a daily basis the same way we do with television or radio or... the kitchen and all its appliances. Although the internet network and its services were invented many years before, it was the nineties when all started to go real worldwide and accepted by the majority of people everywhere.

Serbian Chevapchichi

By now you are probably wondering what the connecting point is with "Serbian Chevapchichi" and the internet, right? Well, it's simple. Let's get back to the mid-90s—I vividly remember those years simply because, with the commercializing of the network, computers started to be interesting by adding a completely new perspective to the whole idea. The potential was so great that anything we could think of could be possible and easily transferred to the web. I remember my first web page was about Jupiter's four moons, their images, and short stories about Galileo and the history of telescopes. Sadly, this was not what was popular in those days. If we exclude all the educational content, IT, and science stuff, the whole internet, besides email service, was all about two things. Cooking and pornography. Even today I am making jokes about how half the internet in those days was about amazing worldwide recipes while the other half was filled with naked women. Regarding the latter, I remember earlier this year I was watching "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson", where Craig tried to analyze a couple of astronomy images made by Hubble and other space telescopes with blogger Phil Plait. If you didn't see it before, try not to miss it on the net, and you will find out how Phil commented on Craig's astronomy knowledge in regard to the other half of the internet. The same is true with food; with tons of websites, forums, social media, and blogs, the internet successfully replaced cooking and recipe books. The only problem now is how to cope with tons of different variations of the same recipe. There are no secret ingredients today. Everything's online.

With that said, I am done with the long introduction, and now I am ready to go with the main topic. The food itself. Let's start with the post title. Initially I wanted to name the post with one of the Serbian specialties, and for me it was easy. It was the meal of my childhood; I remember all the visits to different restaurants with my parents on a weekly dinner, and "Serbian Chevapchichi" (ćevapčići) was always there. Here in Serbia and all neighboring countries, they are extremely popular. There are also variations of the same meal in Croatia, Bulgaria, and especially Bosnia, but they are all descendants of the "kebab", the meat dish that, like "shawarma," originates in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the history of this part of the world was pretty violent compared to, for example, northern Europe, where big conflicts somehow avoided their people on a great scale. Here, ever since the Middle Ages, back in the 14th century, the Balkan Peninsula was more or less under constant occupation, first by the Ottoman Empire, which lasted for more than 400 years, followed by several Balkan wars, followed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, followed by two worldwide wars giving birth to 50+ years of dictatorship by communism and post-communism turbulence.

The history of the area is important to understand many things, but in this particular case, its imminent influence on Serbian cuisine. I am not saying that the Serbian national dish doesn't exist, just that the majority of the recipes suffered irretrievable change under the foreign influence over so many years. Like "Chevapchichi" sausages, many other recipes have Turkish and Middle Eastern flavors; others, on the other hand, 'suffered' changes, especially by German, Greek, Hungarian, and other influences. All the great recipes and flavors of all the foreign influences combined with all our Serbian heritage also gave the people here a very special culture related to food, preparation, consummation, and restaurant service. There is a story (and even a fork-shaped monument you can see above) wherein in the city of Niš, in southern Serbia (Roman Naissus), back in the 12th century, during the royal dinner in honor of Frederick Barbarossa, who was on a 'holy' crusade with his army, his host Stefan Nemanja, Serbian Grand Prince of the time, used forks, knives, and other kitchen aids, while Barbarossa, in a 'Robin Hood' style, enjoyed all the royal meal with his hands and fingers. Of course it is hard to tell if this was true, but this is what is mentioned in some old tales and stories, and supposedly the monument itself is shaped like the fork based on those old unwritten narratives.

To be only fair, historically relevant is that the meeting did happen and some treaty was signed, but Nemanja didn't join the German army to Constantinople and the crusade itself after that point, and Barbarossa never consummated this alliance as well. After all, it all happened in the well-known, dark, and religiously divided Middle Ages, which is very hard to understand. Nevertheless, and just because of the illiteracy of the time and not so much historically proven facts and texts, and especially because each nation writes its own truth in their own history books, I do like these times because of this hint of mystery, speculations, and old fairy tales. The old church where this meeting supposedly happened and where Barbarossa's army made a camp still stands, and its own history is full of mysterious stories as well. If you'd like to know more about it, hop to the story Fairies of Naissus with more old tales about the local neighborhood.

Meeting with Barbarossa in 1189*

But to get back to the worldwide dishes—as a Serbian, I can't be too objective when it comes to judging or comparing different cuisines to Serbian, but I know one thing—eating just one same food every day is not much fun at all. I am also far away from being some food fanatic, but every now and again, and again, and... again I really want to try something new. To satisfy this need, I do two things. I cook, and I order various different meals from the menus of domestic and international restaurants here and during my travels. To be honest, I am not a great cook simply because I always foolishly think that I can do better and never follow recipes to the word, and often my masterpieces end in the trash bin, but from time to time I get something extraordinary out of the oven, making me proud of myself, especially when the meal is a product of my own experiments. In addition, Viktor and I in recent years started one special thread for this blog and YouTube channel with our selection of food we liked and prepared.

Chevapchichi is one of the Serbian BBQ dishes we simply couldn't avoid, and finally, and in contrast to later commercial presentations of all Serbian food I embedded, what follows is our own small video with our own recipe and step-by-step instructions on how to make chevapchichi sausages in the shortest possible way and with our way to try and preserve all the Balkan's touch and taste. It's not little effort, I know, but the result is definitely worthwhile.

Besides five different meats, it's not that obvious what exactly goes into the mixture, so here is our own recipe that originated from Jana's Chilli Pepper Travels blog but with our twist. Minced meat includes beef, lamb, pork, turkey, and bacon. Combined, there was around 1 kg of the mixture, and for spices, we used 1 onion, 3 cloves of garlic, and 1 tbs of all of these: oregano, cornstarch, turmeric, paprika, salt, black pepper, and brown sugar. The quote from the beginning was from the sci-fi TV show "Eureka", which aired 2006-2012, and the central gathering in many episodes was in the town's great diner called "Café Diem", and its chef Vincent once selected "Serbian cevapcici" as a daily special. He made it from lamb patty, paprika, and garlic and literally described it as "a little hunk of Balkan heaven". However, and in a nutshell, for a dish so widely prepared, there is not just one recipe out there. Instead, different people and restaurants use their own (secret) ingredients, and little sausages can be very different from one place to another.

My blog is really not a promotional piece of any kind. This is not what I am doing here. It's just a public journal of mine, and I never intended to use it for some commercial purpose. However, this is my chance to break this principle with Serbian food. I have to admit that if I wanted to do research about all the Serbian national food, that would probably go far beyond this blog, but luckily, the guys from the National Serbian Tourist Organization last year did a tremendous job with their promotional video they called "Soulfood Serbia". I embedded it next on the post, and even though it is rather long (about 12 minutes), I am encouraging you to find the time to watch it. Preferably with an empty stomach—it will be good for your gastronomical urges later. Besides, the video is made in great quality, and it is describing the core of Serbian food history pretty well, and also it covers only genuine Serbian food, the kind that survived all possible influences over the centuries.

Well, at the end, all I can add is that enjoying food is one of those things that's occupying almost all of human senses, and remembering all the occasions, where and when it happened, has the power of bringing back all good memories of all occasions and people we shared all those dinners with. With me, Serbian chevapchichi have been very high on the list ever since my childhood and no doubt will be here and around for many years ahead.

*
Kosta Mandrović - http://staresrpskeslike.com/
Stefan Nemanja - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Nemanja