Winter food

Perhaps every human culture that developed in a temperate climate has some form of winter food. It is, after all, the dead season when nothing grows and there are no readily available fresh fruit and vegetables. Two-season cultures probably also have their version of winter food, for the lean months. Nature teaches us well.

One of Cris’s fondest childhood memories is helping his grandma can food for the winter — pickled gherkins and peppers, ground corn for what Italians call polenta, Romanians call mamaliga, and Bulgarians call kachamak, and jams made from any fruit, including watermelon rinds. When you have limited options, you can turn everything into a jam. Pretty much like alcohol, come to think of it.

One of Irina’s fondest childhood memories is the smell of red peppers and tomato juice simmering together for her mother’s liutenitsa (Warning: link to recipe purely informative. There are many different liutenitsa recipes across the country). It was the ultimate autumn-going-on-winter smell.

One of our current great joys is arriving in Constanta to the smell of sarmale, made with homemade sour cabbage leaves. Another is the sight and smell of the first jar of pickled peppers when we open it in early December. The anticipation is indescribable.

Sour cabbage is very popular in both Romania and Bulgaria. It’s probably safe to say it’s popular across Europe because it’s simple to make, it’s nutritious, and it can be really delicious, for instance if chopped and thrown into a pot with some not-too-lean pork, some tomato juice and a bay leaf or two, and left at a low temp for a few hours.

It’s a really versatile vegetable, the plain old cabbage. You can make a meal out of it or you can eat it in a salad, alone or in company. The surest sign winter is coming round here is when you start spotting trucks by the road to town with their trailers open at the back to reveal heaps of cabbages, ready to be salted, submerged in water and left in a cool place until they turn yellow and translucent, and ready for the table.

We had no luck with out cabbages this year, discovering they are a magnet for various pests. After months of trying to save them we jut gave up and left them to the caterpillars. But we are preparing for next year. There will be no mercy and, hopefully, there will be cabbages.

Peppers are another favourite, probably because the central Balkans are a good place to grow all sorts of peppers. The kamba bell pepper is the queen of winter foods — we don’t use it for anything else. Except Cris, who eats them raw as a garnish to sandwiches.

The long, slender chorbadzhiyska pepper variety (yes, it’s a tongue-twister. It means the master’s pepper, chorbadzhia meaning master in Turkish, a memory of Ottoman times) is also a favourite, normally on its own, pickled in vinegar, salt, and sugar. We ate all of ours fresh so there was nothing left to can.

Here’s how it’s pronounced:

Tomatoes are a classic but it’s only worth the effort if you’ve been lucky with the crop. We weren’t that lucky.

Then there’s cauliflower and there are few winter foods that taste better than cauliflower marinated in water, vinegar, and sugar, with a bit of salt. Well, maybe cauliflower boiled and then fried in batter is a close second but that’s not the kind of food this post is about.

You can mix all these vegetables together and make turshia or you can marinate them separately but the result is always great because it’s so simple to do it. That is, unless it’s really warm outside while you’re making the marinade and you wrongly assume it will hold for 24 hours without adverse consequences.

This is when you get sizzling marinade on its way to turning into something that may be fit for drinking by the desperate but not really fit for marinating. The good news? It can be fixed with a fresh dose of marinade. Which is what we did with our cauliflower. We have a suspicion it tastes even better thanks to the initial fermentation.

Gherkins and green tomatoes we marinate in vast quantities because we eat them in vast quantities, with a few carrots and some sliced celery heads. The best thing about these is you don’t really need to do anything much besides washing them. Peppers require a bit more effort to eviscerate and chop but that effort is absolutely worth it.

It’s really amazing what you can do with some vegetables, a few spoonfuls of salt, and some water. This is how we do the gherkins and green tomatoes. It is really impressive how that simple mixture of water and salt brings out the distinct taste and flavour of each vegetable.

Vinegar and sugar are for a fancier winter appetiser or side dish. For peppers, certainly. We haven’t tried marinating peppers in water and salt because we use Cris’s mum’s recipe and the recipe is followed strictly by the officer in charge of winter food, who is Cris. But some of us are sure that peppers would taste great even marinated with just water and salt.

If you really want to be fancy, you’d sterilise whatever it is you’re canning. Some pickled gherkin recipes, for instance, require sterilisation. So do liutenitsa recipes and ones containing easily spoilable vegetables such as aubergines.

A couple of years ago, we thought we could ignore this and just stuff the cooked aubergines and tomato puree into the jars while the concoction was hot, then turn them upside down for a few minutes, turn them back up and all will be well, as it is with jam. It wasn’t.

We left for a few days and when we returned a mess of stinky aubergine/tomato puree awaited us, still oozing from the compromised jars. And that’s why Cris is the officer in charge of winter food. Because he can follow recipes strictly.

So, as a decidedly non-fancy, can’t-be-bothered family, we stick to the water+salt basic recipe and the water+salt+vinegar+sugar fancier one. It all tastes great. And it lasts until spring. Maybe some day we’ll gather the courage and patience to recreate that liutenitsa recipe and maybe we’ll grow some watermelons we could use the rinds of to make a jam. Until then, it’s gherkins, peppers, carrots, cauli, merry all the way.