Ajvar Is Life

The story of a humble and versatile Balkan dish.

With Aida Ibišević, Irina Janakievska, and Vjosa Musliu. Featuring music by Fakat, FK Basket, Meraque, Mr. Ajvar, Tonci Huljić & Madre Badessa, Typol, and Yasserstain.

Listen: “Ajvar Is Life” (Episode #103)

Bonus Extras: “Ajvar Is Life” (Episode #103)

Extended, ad-free version of “Ajvar Is Life” (Episode #103).

Transcript: “Ajvar Is Life” (Episode #103)

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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is proudly brought to you by the Yugoblok kitchen. Yugoblok is where we connect about Yugoslavia and it’s where Yugoslavia connects us. Yugoblok is podcasts, articles, translations, publishing, events, shop, as well as a global social network community. Visit Yugoblok.com to get a taste and join our table today.

[JINGLE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your chef Peter Korchnak.

It’s become an annual tradition here at Remembering Yugoslavia that before the holidays we make a side trip to the kitchen. We’ve browsed cookbooks, made sarma, deconstructed burek, and toasted it all with rakija. Today, this year, we’ll eat Balkan caviar, commonly known as ajvar.

Before we roast the peppers, let me give a shout out to that caviar of humanity that is HERO members of Yugoblok. Thank you and welcome Alisa, Brandy, Carlos, Chuck, Damir, Iris, Jasmina, Lidija, Maja, Marko, Miran, Nicolette, Ognjen, Olja, Petra, Stašička, Vukašin, and Wes. You are the true heroes of my soul. It is thanks to the support of people like you that this podcast and all the other yugostuff I make sees the light of day for all to enjoy. 

Plus HERO members like you can listen to the extended version of this episode, featuring full songs and extra extra stories.

So if you are listening and want to hear more, if you love what you hear and want to support that by putting your money where your ears are, if you’ve been meaning to join but haven’t had the time, now is the best time. Give yourself the gift of Yugoblok membership for the holidays, whatever you celebrate—or not. Only you can give yourself the exact thing you want. Give yourself the gift of Yugoblok membership for the end of the year and join Alisa, Brandy, Carlos, Chuck, Damir, Iris, Jasmina, Lidija, Maja, Marko, Miran, Nicolette, Ognjen, Olja, Petra, Stašička, Vukašin, Wes and hundreds of other Yugoblokniks around the table. There’s room for everyone and the place is better with you.

Go to Yugoblok.com/Membership and come on over today.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: One thing you’ll find at our table is ajvar. Ajvar for me is one of those things that is always there, part of the culinary scenery, so normal and ever present it feels like it has no mystery. Which is exactly why I decided to look into this staple of Balkan cuisine. I mean, there’s a story in every dish, and ajvar is no exception.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: The accepted wisdom is that ajvar is the Balkan caviar. And the reason it’s called that is because it was a replacement of the real caviar. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Irina Janakievska is Remembering Yugoslavia’s chef in chief and a staple of our culinary adventures. She gave us the history of burek and we cooked sarma with her here on the show and ćevapi with somun at Yugoblok. She is the creator of Balkan Kitchen where she shares recipes and stories with the world, on Instagram and most recently in her own eponymous cookbook. So when I thought of ajvar, I thought of Irina.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: Historically, along the Danube River, you had a very significant and economically important caviar production using wild sturgeon, but this petered out due to overfishing and so on.

This became replaced with something that was more readily available, peppers, aubergines in the region. And it used oil, which at the time was also significantly expensive, so it was sort of a luxury item. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Not only was oil expensive, peppers weren’t actually sold at markets, according to gastroheritologist Tamara Ognjević, speaking for the BBC. 

[SOUNDBITE]

The word itself comes from the Turkish hayver, which may have come from the Farsi khavyar, which means caviar and was as a word likely imported to the region with the Ottomans. The original meaning of the word ajvar in Serbian was caviar of sturgeon (ajvar od morune), dating back to the 15th century. 

The word ajvar in the contemporary meaning spread at the end of the 19th century, when Belgrade restaurateurs began using the word as a marketing trick: targeting customers familiar with the sturgeon caviar, they instead called the then-expensive pepper ajvar the same thing. 

IRINA JANKIEVSKA: Belgrade was booming in the turn of the 19th century. You had people from all over the region coming to Belgrade to seek their fortune. You had the new restaurants popping up in Belgrade. And I do believe that there was quite a lot of, you know, people from Eastern Serbia and North, modern day North Macedonia, coming to Belgrade, starting the restaurants and serving these specialities that they they that were essentially, poor people’s food, you know, peppers aubergines. Yes, maybe were seen as a luxury in areas where they didn’t grow, but in the rest of the region, they were sort of the thing that you grew abundantly without much effort, because of the climate. 

PETER KORCHNAK: And, it was restaurants that had the grills, which were necessary for making ajvar but not yet widespread. 

[SOUNDBITE – “Arabic Ajvar” by Meraque]

PETER KORCHNAK: “Arabic Ajvar” by Mèraque. They and every other band you’ll hear today kindly granted permission to play their music here for you. So buy their music on Bandcamp! Links to listen and purchase this and all other songs you’ll hear in this episode are at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. 

By the way, the track’s title “Arabic Ajvar” reflects the mixed personnel of the band, with one member from North Macedonia and another former one from Syria. 

Ajvar brings people together!

PETER KORCHNAK: So what is ajvar? Well, it’s a little complicated. The basis for ajvar is red peppers.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: The peppers that make up ajvar, Kurtovska kapija, or ajvarki or ajvarusha grow in the region that is now North Macedonia and Eastern Serbia, around Leskovac.

They are heart shaped, long, red, pointed bell peppers, and importantly, they have thick skin and very dense flesh, so very little liquid. The density of the flesh is very important.

PETER KORCHNAK: There are two kinds of ajvar that now have protected designation of appellation under the Lisbon Treaty, which enshrines a system providing protection for names that identify the geographic origin of products.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: There’s Macedonian ajvar, contains the red peppers I just mentioned, so Kurtovska kapija, aubergines, salt, and oil, and that’s it. And it becomes ajvar by roasting, charring the peppers and the aubergine, peeling them, mincing the flesh, and then, very importantly, a secondary cook. So the ajvar is then cooked with oil, until enough oil is absorbed and the moisture in the ajvar is reduced. It is then jarred and preserved with salt. 

As a North Macedonian, for me, the ajvar that I grew up eating is one with aubergines and red peppers. 

Leskovački homemade-style ajvar, the same peppers are used. They’re also charred and grilled and minced but the difference here is, in the secondary cook, you use vinegar. So the preservation for Leskovački ajvar has vinegar and salt. And no aubergines. 

PETER KORCHNAK: According to the ethnologist Sladjana Rajković, speaking for the BBC, while Leskovac was always known for its peppers, it traditionally mostly produced dried and ground sorts. As we’ve heard, ajvar arrived to Serbia first in Belgrade; it was an urban delicacy. Only then, and particularly after World War II, did it spread down to Leskovac, a process facilitated by the price of oil dropping as well. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Now Janakievska loves Macedonian ajvar as much as her compatriots from the band FK Basket. In the song “Ajvar”, they sing, “Mom, give me ajvar. I love ajvar very much.” 

Buy FK Basket’s music on Bandcamp! And hear the full version of the song and every other song in the second serving of this episode, that is the extended version.

[SOUNDBITE – “Ajvar” by FK Basket]

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s actually difficult to say what ajvar is in terms of food category. 

It’s a spread, it’s a relish, it’s a dip, it can be a sauce, a standalone snack, I’ve seen it described as a chutney… It’s all of these things and it is so much more.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: It’s delicious and everyone should try it. I call it Balkan salsa.

[LAUGHTER] 

PETER KORCHNAK: My second chef in Remembering Yugoslavia’s kitchen today is Aida Ibišević. She too is an 80s child. She is from Sarajevo and lived for some 20 years in Washington, D.C. In 2014 she started the food blog Balkan Lunch Box, to share recipes of the former Yugoslavia cuisine with her friends, and also as a way to spread the word about the Balkan cuisine as something that’s beautiful and delicious and a positive thing coming out of the Balkans that enriches the world.

Ibišević eventually moved back to Sarajevo. We spoke on the first snow day of the season. I believe she still had some jars of homemade ajvar in her pantry.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: It’s just one of those things you can’t really define it. It’s not really a relish, it’s not really a spread. It’s just, once you taste it, you know what it is, and you put it on everything. 

I do it on bread, on uštipci, these little like fried breads. I put it in different sauces. I put it over mashed potatoes, with meze, those little charcuterie boards. You know, anything you can think of, you can really, you can eat it any way you want. You can— sometimes, like, if it’s good, I’ll take a spoon and eat it right out of the jar without anything. You can use little crackers.

There’s no right or wrong way to eat it. Just not eating it is the wrong way.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: My favorite way to eat ajvar is on really good quality bread with beli sir, belo sirenje, white cheese, and that’s it. Maybe olives. 

I also do sometimes do this, you know, classic diaspora thing of using it as a sauce. So if I’m having a dinner for myself, I’ll stir it through pasta, again with cheese. 

So carbs with ajvar and cheese, I think, is probably where I’m heading. You can use it as a sauce for meats. I mean, obviously it’s used iconically to have with grilled meats. You can use it as a base for, I don’t know, making things like stewed eggs or braised eggs—fry it and then fry some eggs in it. 

But fundamentally, just eat it with a spoon out of the jar, and enjoy.

PETER KORCHNAK: “The only important thing to remember is that it is a delicious, addictive, and incredibly versatile vegetable spread that has the potential to unite the region in its universal adulation of it,” writes Janakievska in her cookbook The Balkan Kitchen: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of the Balkans.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: Every single family in the region has their own version of ajvar. 

Now there are different kind of family methods and and all equally valid. It’s all a matter of preference. 

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: There’s always that underlying competition, especially, you know, in my grandmother’s generation, because she was a homemaker, and it was one of those things that you did, since home was kind of your domain, your thing had to be the best. 

But today’s generations, there isn’t so much competition, as much as appreciation for the process that goes into it.

As far as a specific recipe, yeah, we do have a specific recipe, but it doesn’t vary too much from family to family. Like, you can’t really invent anything different. You may put a little bit more of one ingredient or the other, but more or less, you know, you kind of have a process that you have to go through to make it.

PETER KORCHNAK: The Ibišević family makes it with eggplant.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: The ajvar that we make is made out of red peppers, that are meaty with as little water content as you can get to because they have to be roasted and then cooked after that. And we make it with eggplant. Eggplant gives it a little bit more of a sweetness, and that’s why we prefer it. But you can definitely make it without.

In Bosnia, most people make it with eggplant, I would say.

We do oil, some sugar and salt. Sometimes we’ll put a little bit of garlic in, but when you put garlic in, it lasts a shorter amount of time, so it’s easier to just open up a jar, dice garlic and put it in afterwards. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The ajvars we’ve been talking about so far were mild. 

But there’s also a spicy version, containing an addition of hot peppers. Not to be confused with ljutenica, which also contains tomatoes. 

“Why mild ajvar when you know I love the hot kind?” asks the Bosnian band Fakat! Buy their music on Bandcamp and then follow the instructions in the song: “Go back to the store, grab a couple of beers and cigarettes and a soda pop for yourself.”

[SOUNDBITE – “Ajvar” by Fakat!]

Ajvar in Cookbooks

PETER KORCHNAK: The first mention of ajvar in a cookbook was in Great Serbian Cookbook by Katarina Popović Midžina, published in 1877, in Novi Sad, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: The recipe is similar to what I think of as pindjur, which is a fresh ajvar, so it’s not preserved at all. 

It’s roasted peppers and aubergines. You have to soak them in ice cold water, and then you have to peel the skins with a silver spoon. And then there’s this interesting didactic instruction on how you can peel them with if you do not have a silver spoon, but silver spoon is preferable, And then you sort of mince them, mash them together in a pestle and mortar with garlic and onion, salt, vinegar and oil, and that’s how you serve it. So it’s almost seen as a fresh preserve to be served. This is what I would understand to be more of a salad. 

And there’s very elaborate instructions on how you serve it, half a page dedicated with instructions on how to serve it. So it’s absolutely, it was absolutely seen as a luxury. 

So it certainly goes back to this point about it would have been seen as a caviar, because we’re talking about treating these vegetables like royalty, you know, to peel them with a silver spoon. 

So I can see how a food writer at the time felt the need to codify how to treat this luxury item.

PETER KORCHNAK: There’s more about ajvar in cookbooks through the ages in the extended episode.

PETER KORCHNAK: Like other quintessential Balkan dishes, it’s impossible to say who ajvar quote unquote belongs to, that is which nation, or a member of which nation, invented it and hence can claim it. 

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: I always steer clear from assigning a nationality, because I think a lot of food stuffs predate the formation of modern nation states, including Yugoslavia. 

The reality with ajvar is that you need the peppers for it, and the kind of peppers that are best suited to ajvar, as I mentioned, grow in very specific areas in the Balkans and are a very specific varietal. 

It sort of, to me, doesn’t make any logical sense for ajvar to have come from anywhere other than areas where peppers grow very well and abundantly. And those areas happen to be, as I mentioned, North Macedonia, Eastern Serbia, potentially parts of Croatia, and obviously, now it’s spread, Kosovo as well grows good peppers, again, similar climate on all sides of the Šar mountains to grow really good peppers.

You have to think of it also in the context of what was considered Serbia in those days. Macedonia didn’t exist until, until Yugoslavia, really, despite its best efforts and revolutions. 

That’s why it’s very complicated to assign nationality to dishes because the borders shifted, and what was considered Serbia, what was considered Croatia, what was considered Macedonia, all of that changed significantly throughout the 19th and 20th century as a result of the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire and its withdrawal from the Balkans. 

PETER KORCHNAK: To wit.

The Croatian food writer known for deserts, Andrea Pisac, features on her website Croatia Honestly, the article “Authentic Ajvar Recipe: How To Make The Famous Croatian Spread.” Pisac’s ajvar does contain eggplant.

In 1997, the Slovenian company Živilska industrija raised Macedonian eyebrows when it sought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to trademark the word “ajvar” in the German market.

And in 2020, the British singer Dua Lipa, whose parents are from Kosovo, aroused controversy with her appearance on the show The Hot Ones.

[SOUNDBITE]

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: In the fallout of Yugoslavia, in the rush to claim identity, in the rush to claim the mantle, there was an awareness that food could be the thing that allows countries to arrive on the map. Eco tourism, food tourism. 

Our food is excellent. Obviously, I’m biased, but I think our cuisine is exceptional. It’s such a unique culinary melting pot. It’s such a confluence of influences from all over the world that it’s a very unique and under explored region, and therefore there was this rush to claim food and protect it. 

Ajvar in the Winter

PETER KORCHNAK: What everyone can agree on is that the good people of the Balkans use ajvar as a way to preserve peppers for the winter.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: In ex-YU, there’s this type of food that’s prepared for the winter called zimnica. Zima means winter, and it’s basically a way of preserving everything that you can find during the summer months and fall months, for the winter months and well into the spring, until we can have, like the new harvest. Because back then, it wasn’t like, you could go to the grocery store and get strawberries in December, right? 

So ajvar is one of those ways of preserving peppers as well.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: Ajvar is the iconic preserve of zimnica. You cannot have a Balkan table in winter, in autumn, winter, early spring, without ajvar. And you know, God forbid you run out of ajvar before, before summer, because that is a tragedy. And if you do, everybody has the lady who makes ajvar, who might have a couple of surplus jars. So there’s this kind of unspoken black market of late winter ajvar procurement going on in case you haven’t made enough for to last you until the next season. 

Ajvar is not to be confused with the other big hitters of the zimnica armory. So you will have other preserves that are like ajvar, but if you use anything other than kind of peppers, aubergines, so if you use, for example, tomatoes and apples in the mix, or, you know, anything else, then they become other things. 

[SOUNDBITE – “Ajvar” by Typol]

PETER KORCHNAK: The Polish beatmaker Typol with the track “Ajvar.” Buy Typol’s music on Bandcamp!

Ajvar Is Vegan

PETER KORCHNAK: As a sign of the times, ajvar has been making rounds on food blogs and websites, particularly those of the vegan persuasion, including the BBC’s Already Vegan column. Yes, ajvar is vegan! 

Even the Croatian food giant Podravka, the maker of Vegeta, has jumped on the bandwagon: it’s marketing its ajvar as a vegan product.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: The perception is that our cuisine from the region is very meat heavy, and to a certain extent, that’s true. However, a large part of the year, a lot of people across the region spend fasting and eating posno, whether whether religious or not. You know, we have an incredible variety of vegan, naturally vegan dishes. Simply, as I say, because of the climate. 

From Vardar to Triglav, you have incredible produce. So a lot of dishes from the region are naturally vegan. I believe it’s a sort of the zeitgeist of the moment in terms of marketing, as you say, to make people aware of that. Look, we have all these amazing products, or we have all these amazing kind of heritage, culinary heritage that is naturally vegan. 

PETER KORCHNAK: An adapted recipe on New York Times Cooking is one thing, TikTok is another. 

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: You can see the Balkan breakfast trend on TikTok. Everybody’s suddenly acquiring random jars of what looks like ajvar and mispronouncing it.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all we’ll say about that.

Now as you’ve heard so far, ajvar is very much a regional thing, and it’s pretty straightforward. 

The life of ajvar in the West is a much more complicated story. 

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: Anybody who is Balkan and lives around the world and still maintains some kind of line with their family back home, I would say, knows of of this problem, I call it the kufer problem, which is that every time you go home and you have to go with two suitcases, one full with presents and one empty, because the empty one is going to come back with, well, both of them are probably going to come back with jars of things. A majority of the jars were ajvar, of course, rakija, of course, probably sour cabbage leaves, of course, probably cookies, but always the jars of ajvar, always the jars of slatko. I suppose it’s the lifeblood of being a Balkan, I suppose. 

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: “My mother makes the best ajvar in the universe,” says the male protagonist of the award-winning film “Ajvar” by Ana Maria Rossi, released in 2019. The opening credits show an explanation of what ajvar is, a popular pepper-and-aubergine relish “commonly found in the suitcases of Serbians living abroad.” The film is a breakup story of a Serbian couple living good lives as immigrants in Sweden. Aside from the end of love and marriage, the other theme of the movie is homesickness, and jars of homemade ajvar make for a powerful symbol of home.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s inevitable that there will come a time when there shall be no more homemade ajvar in your pantry. If you live abroad, this poses a particular challenge.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: The problem with ajvar in the US is that you can’t get the right peppers. And we’ve made it with bell peppers before. It’s just not the same. 

Sometimes you can get them at farmers market. 

But my recommendation is to everyone who you know, to anyone who’s trying to do it, if you can get some seeds and just plant the peppers yourself. If you have a garden, you can do it, obviously. And if you have a decent, sunny place, I think that’s the easiest thing to do. Or to look at your farmers market and explain what kind of pepper— 

In the US, it’s generally called bull horn peppers. That’s kind of the closest you can get to. In the Balkans, there are about 10 different varieties, maybe even more. 

And you need people also. You need several people to help you with it, because you will hate your life if you try to do it by yourself.

Peeling is the worst thing in the world? If you want to punish yourself, learn patience and be humble, roast some peppers, like 20 pounds of them.

Well, you can make it a shorter like a smaller batch. But the thing is, since you’re already doing so many steps, you might as well make a big batch. Just have some friends over. Don’t tell them how complicated it is. Get some wine, some rakija, and get it going.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: I do smuggle peppers, yes, but sadly, I can only ever food traffic enough to make maybe one or two jars. 

But luckily, since I’ve moved to London, which was 20 odd years ago, there’s a lot of kind of Balkan greengrocers popping up, and Turkish green grocers and Mediterranean delis. And, you know, areas of London that have markets that, for a very short time of year, have the ajvar peppers available. And so when that happens, I am the mad lady that scours the local greengrocers and buys all the red peppers, and I make my own and it’s obviously incredibly expensive to make 60 kilos of ajvar here. So it’s only ever a small batch, but it’s a small batch just to keep the tradition going. And I do get my son involved in peeling peppers and aubergines. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Speaking of smuggling. In the song “Ajvar” by Tonci Huljić & Madre Badessa—buy their music!—the protagonist, a young Macedonian man, is traveling to Croatia, in the European Union, with homemade ajvar in his bag and gets stopped at the border. 

“What’s in the bag, weapons or drugs?” “Come on, Mr. Customs Officer, I peeled peppers for four days, it’s really good, try a little.”

[SOUNDBITE – “Ajvar” by Tonci Huljić & Madre Badessa]

Ajvar in the Supermarket

PETER KORCHNAK: Whether you run out or your neighbors or friends and family run out, or you never had the homemade stuff in the first place, at some point you’re going to have to go shopping. 

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: You make this ajvar, and you have a lot of it, and then you eat it, and then by January, you’re out of it, so you start buying it at the store. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The reality of living in the diaspora, or just generally outside the Balkans, is that ajvar is a supermarket product. But as with anything else, the stuff you buy at the store just doesn’t compare.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: The problem with factory produced ajvar is two things. One is that they have to, you know, quicken the process, and they often don’t roast the peppers. I suspect that it’s probably mostly cooked. And if you don’t roast the peppers and eggplants, that’s not good. It just simple that the taste is not there. 

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: You need to be very careful about the ingredients list. If all that is listed on the ingredients list is peppers, salt, and vinegar or some kind of other preservative, then you’ve not had this secondary cook. So the ajvar might be quite kind of a thin they might have just boiled the peppers and preserved them with vinegar. 

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: Another thing is that you still have to have people peel the peppers, and I think for a lot of them, they just kind of grind them without peeling, and that makes it kind of watery as well. Sometimes these bought, store bought ajvar will have this, you know, orangey liquid that’s kind of disgusting.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: Good indications of good quality tend to be things like oil, and if you can tell that the ajvar has a bit of char so like black bits, it usually means that the peppers have been properly roasted and peeled. And if there’s oil, that means there’s some kind of semblance of preservation to make it more flavorful. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: In the award-winning, true-story, Kosovan film Hive, by Blerta Basholli, released in 2021, a widowed woman starts a business making ajvar and honey. It’s a struggle.

[SOUNDBITE]

The boy Yassterstain runs into a different sort of a problem when he is buying ajvar at a store. 

“Five letters, one color, this jar is mine alone, I reach for it but now it’s yours too,” …. All that the girl he keeps thinking about has to do is look at him and he’ll give up his ajvar. But all ends well because she goes for the mild ajvar, which is for weak people, while he needs the hot one. “Ajvar, five letters, one color, it’s mine, a jar full of serenity.”

[SOUNDBITE – “Ajvar” by Yasserstain]

Ajvar as a Symbol

PETER KORCHNAK: So that’s ajvar as food. But this wouldn’t be a proper Remembering Yugoslavia podcast story if there were no mention of memory. 

You’ve already heard hints of this, but I’ll say it again: Ajvar is also a symbol. 

VJOSA MUSLIU: Throughout our experience as work but like as a collective working together, we understood how certain codes, cultural codes, certain foods, certain games were very similar for all of us, irrespective of whether we grew up in Novi Sad, in Banja Luka or in Gjilan, for instance. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Vjosa Musliu is a member of the Yugoslawomen Plus collective. She hails from Gjilan, Kosovo, and works as an assistant professor of international relations at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. You may remember her from Episode 60, “Performing YU and EU in Kosovo.”

Yugoslawomen Plus is a group of six women scholars from the post-Yugoslav space working in the Global North academia rising up through their work against incorrect and imposed Western representations for their home region of the Balkans. 

In the collective’s logo, each member is represented with a different-colored pepper. “In the Balkans, peppers are an institution [and] a staple,” write Yugoslawomen on their website. “Peppers for us are home, childhood memories, and a culinary culture that unites us all.”

VJOSA MUSLIU: And one of these elements was ajvar, something that our communities, our neighborhoods were religiously committed to. We have very vivid and fond memories of playing in neighborhoods that smell entirely of pepper and vinegar towards the end of of September. And on top of that, ajvar is delicious and we share our passion for for the relish as a whole, as a collective.

Ajvar, Europe, Yugoslavia are concepts or tropes. It’s what you make of it. What we find in ajvar, as a collective is fond memories of our childhoods. Let us not forget that there are certain tint of nostalgia is also there most of our childhoods, all of our childhoods of the member of the collective were disrupted either by wars or forced migration, etc. So it’s also some sort of, I think, a longing for a sense of, of an innate home through food. Food is a big part of, of the cultural code of all the people in the Balkans and the Mediterraean. So it’s in a lot of ways food, but also pepper related dishes are our love language, if somebody from the region hands you a jar of either, you know, call yourself lucky.

PETER KORCHNAK: So maybe maybe one way to deal with this. Or another way to deal with this would be to all make your own ajvar recipe and then just put it all together and make one master meta ajvar.

VJOSA MUSLIU: That could work, I guess.

PETER KORCHNAK: Or it could be terrible, who knows. Whatever the recipe, whatever the ingredients, whatever the container, whatever the label, ajvar stirs up memories and evokes home.

AIDA IBIŠEVIĆ: The smell, the taste, the texture, it just takes you right back to those times when, you know, your mom or grandmother or sometimes even the entire family, because it is a family affair to make this thing, it’s quite complicated if you want to do it the right way. It’s one of those things, it takes you back.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: When everybody comes together, it’s this wonderful kind of communal, collaborative thing where everybody bonds, everybody stands around the pečnica and roasts peppers and, you know, and it’s your education,  it’s your culinary education as a child, this thing that you enjoy so much, you appreciate it, because, you know, you know, you don’t sit there eating an entire jar of ajvar in one go, because you know what it’s taken to make it. And equally, when you open a jar, you carefully, you know, keep it in the fridge and press it down so that it doesn’t go off. Because, again, every spoonful of homemade ajvar is precious.

It’s this incredible ritual of coming together, of enjoying the produce of the land, of celebrating it, of preserving it for winter. It’s such a part of the culinary landscape of the Balkans that it’s difficult to imagine it without it.

IRINA JANAKIEVSKA: As I say, at the root of it, ajvar is an incredibly humble thing. It sort of defines our cuisine in a way that few other things do I believe. Yes, what is a Balkan household without ajvar? Ajvar is life.

[BACKGROUND MUSIC – “Paprika Čoček” by Mr. Ajvar]

PETER KORCHNAK: Humble peppers inspired the track “Paprika Čoček” by Mr. Ajvar that you’re hearing underneath my words right now. Buy Mr. Ajvar’s music on Bandcamp!

I’ve tasted homemade ajvar here and there in the Balkans but I seem to mostly travel there in late winter and spring, by which time homemade is all gone.

Here in Oregon, I buy ajvar at European grocery stores, which are mostly run by Ukrainians or Russians (or Russian speaking Ukrainians as the case may be). 

My wife often complains I buy jars of ajvar with all the excitement of a boy only to have it go moldy in the fridge. That’s because they mostly suck, to be honest, especially the big brands. The Podravka brand is available, ZerGut, Biljana, Mama’s… Some of them I’ve tried, others are still in the basket. 

No matter, we make do and if second or third or fourth best is the only option, I’ll take it. 

I’ve been putting ajvar on quesadillas instead of salsa. I’ve mixed it in with tortellini instead of pasta sauce. And I’ve enjoyed some as a side with ćevapi made from Janakievska’s The Balkan Kitchen: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of the Balkans.

Not being from the Balkans, not having grown up with the stuff, I don’t have the same personal connection to ajvar. It’s a foodstuff from over there that allows me to armchair travel, and one that’s inexpensive, meatless, and indeed versatile. As varied as the quality of the supermarket product can be, it’s also kind of a fun project to find the best commercial ajvar out there. 

The quest goes on.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening and eating. 

Get a second helping of ajvar with more stories and music in the extended episode, available exclusively to HERO members of Yugoblok. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, the transcript of this episode as well as the extended episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. 

Additional music courtesy of FK Basket, Fakat, Meraque, Mr. Ajvar, Tonci Huljić & Madre Badessa, Typol, and Yasserstain. Buy their music! All the links are at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

[SOUNDBITE]