Balkan Culinary Nationalism and Ottoman Heritage
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Kevin Kenjar March 5, 2007 Balkan Culinary Nationalism and Ottoman Heritage Of the many and varied vestiges left by the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe, perhaps the most prominent stamp has been left in the kitchen. While borders shift and empires come and go, sometimes as quickly as it takes for a despondent diplomat to affix a seal onto a treaty, culinary traditions are often slow to change due to the nature in which they are promulgated. Culinary traditions are often passed down along a familial, and historically maternal, line, with each new generation learning the recipes, eating habits, and tastes of their ancestors. This almost genealogical reproduction of culture, combined with the regional specificity that has historically limited cuisine prior to the advent of consumerist culture, has made culinary tradition a prime candidate for national sentimentalists. In the desire to portray ‘national culture’ as something unique and externally bounded, culinary traditions have gained powerful symbolic value; national dishes not only serve as the expression of the national spirit, but the very substance with which the national spirit is fed. However, due to the relatively recent diffusion of romantic nationalism into the former Ottoman lands in Europe (i.e. the Balkans), not to mention the duration of Ottoman rule, many of the culinary traditions deemed as “national” are not particular to a specific nation, but rather relatively common throughout the lands of the former empire. However, taking into consideration that it is a common theme in the nationalist rhetoric of the Balkan states that the Ottoman era was break in continuity, or rather an interruption of the historical development of these nations, the following problem becomes apparent: How can a national dish, seen as an expression and nourisher of the national spirit, be a vestige of the Ottoman imperial era, the same era generally marked by the repression and starvation of the same national spirit? A closer examination of the national cuisines of the Balkans will demonstrate that this inconsistency is accounted for in a variety of ways. The Spread of Culinary Traditions: The Flux Between Center and Periphery Culinary practices, be they recipes, eating habits, cooking utensils, etc. are transmitted in much the same way that other cultural practices are spread, i.e. through a dialectic between dominant and subordinate carriers of these traditions occurring along points of socialization. It is important to stress the dialectical nature of this transmission, as the dominant carrier does not simply pass on these practices, replacing the culinary practices of the subordinates. In other words, the widespread view that the common culinary traditions in the former Ottoman Empire are simply of “Turkish” origin is not only anachronistic, but erroneous as well. The Ottoman elites may have disseminated a particular practice to one part of the empire, but this is not to say that this practice was not adopted by the Ottoman elites from another part of the empire. For example, kaymak, a thick, mildly fermented, clotted cream, may well have been introduced to the Balkans by Ottoman bureaucrats or merchants, but only after they (or their predecessors) had developed a taste for its Arabic analogue, qishta. The actual origins of kaymak, and most culinary traditions for that matter, are nearly impossible to trace, and such a task is clearly beyond the scope of this paper. For the purposes of this paper, let it suffice to say that kaymak, with its geographical range stretching from the Balkans to Bangladesh (and now widely available in Western Europe and the United States), most likely isn’t an invention of either the Bosnians or the Turks, despite being enjoyed by them both. 2 Assuming that the initial transmitter of a particular culinary practice, be it a savvy Ottoman chef in kitchens of the Sultan or an absent-minded peasant who forgot to take the milk off the fire, cannot be found, let us now turn our attention to how a practice, once introduced, can be disseminated across as wide of a geographical area as the Ottoman Empire and ultimately become a culinary tradition. Given that dialectical transmission of these culinary practices, the most important aspect of the carriers is mobility. It is the mobility of these carriers that would allow these practices to be carried from one part of the empire to another. To continue with our previous example, let us imagine that kaymak was entirely unknown in the empire prior to an Arab merchant introducing it to a tribe of Kurdish nomads. Perhaps the nomads, having taken a liking to it, presented it to a visiting Bektashi dervish making his way from a distant turbe shrine to Constantinople, where he subsequently introduced it to his dervish brothers in his Order. Once this key transmission from the periphery to the center has been made, the particular culinary practice gains wide exposure. As the center, i.e. Constantinople, served as the highest point of socialization within the empire, the culinary practice, once firmly established, would be transmitted to a wide variety of highly mobile carriers, such as merchants, dervishes, priests, janissaries, bureaucrats, etc. The transmission of culinary practices, as outlined above, can theoretically occur rather quickly, e.g. in a matter of weeks if transmitted by a well-traveled dervish. Being confined at this point to the cosmopolitan metropolises and mobile elites of Ottoman society, these culinary practices would be limited to what we would now think of as haute cuisine. It is only when they are transmitted to, and widely adopted by, the more 3 sedentary peoples of the empire that they can become ubiquitous culinary traditions that would later serve as the basis for national cuisine. This, above all, requires time. Variation: Recipes, Religions, and Regions Given the time, distance, and quantity of carriers involved between the introduction of a culinary practice into the broader empire and its adoption by the local, sedentary peoples who would later form the core of a horizontally stratified nation, it is both understandable and expected that there would be a degree of difference between the original practice and the one adopted into local culinary tradition, as anyone who ever followed a recipe precisely only to be disappointed with the result can testify to. The reproduction of culinary traditions will undoubtedly vary not only within the empire, but also within a single village or family, or even when reproduced by single chef. Of a Romanian national specialty, ghiveci, Lesley Chamberlain writes, [Ghiveci] is a ratatouille-style medley of vegetables, sometimes including meat, or mushrooms, and potatoes, and eaten hot or cold. It is said each family has its own ghiveci recipe and all good cooks know instinctively what is the right proportion.1 The next instance of culinary variation to be examined is that produced by the socio-religious divisions in Ottoman society. The Ottoman Empire, far from being a religiously homogenous society, was comprised of three primary religious groups, i.e. Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Both Islam and Judaism contain a set of religious restrictions on the production and consumption of food, halal and kashrut respectively, the most prominent of which is the total ban on the consumption of pork. Thus, within the culinary milieu of the empire, a sharp distinction could be drawn along confessional 1 Lesley Chamberlain, The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 39. 4 lines. As the Muslims, with their dominant social position, and Jews formed a significant part of the mobile classes of the Ottoman Empire, the diffusion of pork based culinary traditions would almost certainly have been stifled, as evidenced by an almost complete lack of pork dishes in the shared culinary traditions of the Balkans. Indeed, the religious distinctions over the issue of pork played a significant role in the transmission of culinary in the Balkans. Concerning this, Alexander Kiossev writes: In spite of all the similarities in eating habits, in spite of the solid penetration of Turkish-Persian cuisine throughout the peninsula, there was a widespread prohibition against members of one religious community eating together with members of other confessions. The similarities, the influences and even the fusion of the cuisines were usually not mentioned at all; what mattered was that Christians ate pork and Muslims didn’t. Against the backdrop of this archaic attitude (the food others was deemed ‘dirty’ and repellent; in popular folklore, the image of unclean alien food a stable, repetitive stereotype) the emblematic food differences delineating religious identities were much more important than the similarities.2 Kiossev may be overstating the separation of culinary culture, for even though such a “fusion of the cuisines” may not have been discussed, the transmission of culinary traditions undoubtedly occurred. It is important to note that such a prohibition would almost certainly not have extended to coffee, as the ever-prevalent coffee visit played a key role in Ottoman culture, and the tradition of drinking strong, thick, and sweet unfiltered coffee, often accompanied by sweet delicacies such as baklava, halva, or kadaif, is found in every former Ottoman country3, and continues serve a point of socialization between even the most divided religious communities in the Balkans, such 2Alexander, Kiossev, “The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities, Acts of Identification,” Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 174. 3 Chamberlain, Food and Cooking, 424-426. 5 as Bosnia.4 Though religion certainly played a role in the transmission of culinary traditions, it should be noted that religious affiliation, like borders, could change overnight, while the deeply embedded culinary traditions, transmitted in an almost genealogical fashion, were much slower to change.