Needless to say, our traumatised vegetarians never returned to eat at Granny’s table.
Imagine our terrified vegetarians, listening to this foreign monologue peppered with “Organic! Organic!” delivered by an impassioned chef balancing half a carved kid in one hand and brandishing a knife in the other. How do they know if they’ve never tasted Balkan “organic”? Let them try! Let them try!” How could I serve vegetable water? I took the meat out after an hour so it is ‘meat-free’. I took the plates away and juggled apologising to our vegetarians (“Have you tried these lovely tomatoes? Did you know tomatoes are a fruit? These certainly are!” – pause for laugh…) and getting Granny to stand down with the meat platter. “Let them try it, they should try it, it’s good. Sheepish, Granny stirred the pot without meeting my gaze. My friend wasn’t convinced by my protestations. Granny doesn’t speak English but she understood perfectly what we were saying and didn’t intervene. I assured her it didn’t, convinced it didn’t. My friend inhales, frowns and asks if the soup contains meat. Granny ladles out the soup and I set it before our guests. Our vegetarian guests arrive, we take our seats at the kitchen table and lunch smells amazing, just like it usually does. “Granny, I’m certain they won’t be offended by the lack of meat! Quite the opposite, actually! Please, oh, please stick to the menu.” I thought we were on the same page. As far as I was concerned, we could have served tomatoes and everyone would have been happy as a clam.
“So what do I serve? Vegetables? And have our guests think we don’t know how to receive people at our table?”Ĭommunicating across the culture and the age gap, we finally agreed on a sufficiently elaborate meat-free meal. Granny giggled and replied, “Yes, dear, meat-free and organic.” “Granny, please prepare something meat-free,” I said. I tried especially hard to explain the term “vegetarian” when I invited my vegetarian friend and her vegetarian family to lunch one summer. As a result, she tends not to believe me when I use terms like: vegetarian, vegan, meat-free, gluten-free etc.
To this day, she still thinks I made up “organic” to mess with her. “Natural, pesticide-free food straight from the source,” I explained. I say “organic”, but the word has no resonance with Granny. Given the abundance of organic ingredients at their disposal, it would be a sin to even consider the alternative. My grandparents built their house from scratch, they made their clothes from scratch and, naturally, they make their meals from scratch. Granny belongs to a generation that valued process.
A Balkan tomato is a treat, a legitimate snack, and has unquestionable fruit status with its fragrant skin and its sweet, tart, tangy juice. One bite of a Balkan tomato and it all makes sense. Or, as my sister learnt at nursery: vegetables grow in the ground, fruit grows on trees. I looked into it, and according to the Vegetable Research and Information Centre, a vegetable is the edible portion of a plant: leaves (lettuce), stem (celery), roots (carrot), tubers (potato), bulbs (onion) and flowers (broccoli). Vegetable equals sustenance fruit equals treat. The tomato didn’t seem to have the chutzpah to claim fruit status. I was peripherally aware of the “Is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” debate but couldn’t understand the fuss over the boring little non-starter. Growing up in London, I believed that a tomato was a vegetable, a component of a dish but certainly not the star – the Goose, never the Maverick. But the food I love most – my vice, my love, my Achilles’ heel – is Granny’s homegrown tomatoes. The mushrooms are collected from the mountain forest that encircles the fjord. The cheese, butter and milk from grass and herb-fed cows is hand-delivered by Ana, whose family have perfected their dairy technique over generations. My grandparents live in a small seaside town in the Balkans where the fish at market was caught in the early hours of that morning, the beef is veal from that field over there and the oranges were plucked, leaves and all, from the tree outside the kitchen window. To elaborate: by “sunshine” she means the glorious setting of the Balkan countryside, and “love” refers to her unparalleled skill honed by decades of practising the ancient wisdom of her Balkan Granny predecessors. She claims: “Sunshine gets the ball rolling and love takes care of the rest.” Cryptic, isn’t she? The mysterious and enigmatic ways of the Balkan Granny have served me well in stockpiling anecdotes to regale my Western friends with. Each and every meal, snack and nibble is a gastronomic delight.