Ajvar Is Life*
The story of a humble and versatile Balkan dish.
Burek is a pastry dish comprising thin layers of dough and a variety of fillings—a quintessential Balkan breakfast staple, late night snack, or anytime-anywhere fast-food delight, really. Burek is also a metaphor that varies across the former Yugoslav lands. Burek is food is life is culture is politics is burek.
There was Yugoslav cuisine the same way there is European cuisine. At best, Yugoslav cuisine was an amalgam of cuisines of Yugoslavia’s constituent peoples, all of which can, in turn, be easily subsumed under a grander umbrella of Balkan cuisine.