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Slovenia

Slovenia: Brodet

There are recipes that seem to wander all over the landscape before settling down to become associated with a specific region. Brodet is one of these.

It looks to have started out life on the Italian side of the Adriatic Sea as brodetta, a fairly basic fish soup. But as it traveled around, it started to pick up ingedients: tomatoes here, onions there, some wine vinegar somewhere else. The broth in which the fish was initially simmered became more complex, something more like the court-bouillon of classic French cooking. And then the dish crossed the water to the eastern side of the Adriatic and associated itself with all kinds of different fish: bonito, eel, flounder, dentex, red mullet, sea bream, John Dory. The soup's probably not done with its travels yet: brodet is known as far away as Corfu.

Ideally, brodet should evoke a kind of Adriatic bouillabaise -- the best of the day's catch, simmered fresh in a flavorful stock. Its long residence in the region is suggested by the fact that brodet is often served with that favorite south-central European side dish, polenta. One hint: many brodet recipes suggest that the soup should never be stirred -- this being the best way of keeping the chunks of delicate fish intact. The furthest one may go, in some versions, is to pour fish and stock gently from one pot to the next.

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Slovenia: Prekmurska gibanica (Poppyseed, Walnut and Apple Strudel Pie)

Prekmurska gibanica is an interesting combination of cake and pastry, and hails originally from the Prekmurje region of Slovenia. It restates a favorite theme in central European baking -- the layered sweet strudel, often with poppy seeds involved (as in this variation) and stuffed with sweet jams, fruit or fruit compotes, nuts, and/or dairy products (in this case cottage cheese).

Some descriptions of Prekmurska gibanica describe it as a pie. This is probably because of the bottom layer, which is sometimes made of shortcrust pastry -- possibly a remnant from the earliest versions of the dish, which were devised before refined sugar was available. Honey would have been the only sweetening in those versions, and a more solid bottom layer (more solid than strudel dough, anyway) might have made sense.

Those versions of Prekmurska gibanica also included dried grapes as one of the main constituents of the filling. The present version, however, uses cottage cheese, poppy seed, walnut and apples, and the dried grapes (in the form of raisins) turn up as part of the cottage cheese filling, having been first soaked in rum. This version of the recipe is well enough known and liked in Slovenia to have been declared one of the fifty national "birthday cakes" for the European Union's 50th birthday celebrations in 2007. It's so popular that it appears on one of the country's stamps!

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Slovenia

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