At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Slovenia

Ana Tominc

Thursday afternoon may not be the best day to visit a busy family during their meal together, but it is one of those weekdays when the weekend leftovers have been eaten and fast-cooked or convenience foods may appear on the menu. While trying to convince her four-year-old daughter Zala that the chocolates Ana just brought her are to be eaten only after she had finished all the soup, rice, chicken, and salad, Zala’s mother Katja tells Ana that she had returned from work early, hoping to dine at 4:30 p.m. She had less than half an hour, but at that point she had already started cooking rice, which takes about half an hour, and had also cut the chicken breasts into small pieces.

Katja has come to the Italian/Slovene bilingual Adriatic coastal town of Koper/Capodistria from an inland town near the Slovene-Croatian border, where her parents settled in the late 1970s as migrants from other former Yugoslav republics. The home food of her youth was a mixture of Ottoman cooking that her mother brought with her from the Serbian region of Vojvodina, such as oven-baked pasulj (beans in tomato sauce with pork), sarma(parcels of meat and rice wrapped in cabbage) and stuffed peppers, and the dishes she learned from women’s magazines and her Slovene colleagues at work. Katja, the older of the two daughters, started cooking when she was 13 years old, mainly as help to her mother who, upon her arrival home, could simply finish the food Katja had started to prepare. Miha, her partner, on the other hand, was born in Koper to parents who also migrated to this coastal town some 30 years ago from a town in northeastern Slovenia in search for work. He can cook, though contrary to Katja, he learned on his own because in his home, he only cooked when they had “barbeque day” and even then only when his father wasn’t at home.

Albala

A young Slovenian family eating their evening meal. (Courtesy of Ana Tominc)

Today, Katja no longer cooks the dishes that identified her family migrant home and instead embraces new recipes that she sees prepared on television or creates new variations from those learned from her mother. Similarly, Miha prepares only certain recipes that his mother would have cooked, such as polenta, buckwheat, or corn žganci, which are seen as “proper Slovene home cooking.” He mainly prepares dishes such as pasta carbonara, roasted meat with potatoes, and pancakes that his mother would have regularly served too. According to him, his and Katja’s cooking is much simpler than his mother’s, who would have cooked dishes that require more time-consuming techniques, such as breading of steaks and marinating, while also adding that their cooking is “healthier” because they no longer use cream in sauces or cook with a lot of fat. Occasionally he still lunches at his parents’, though mostly when Katja is at work and he doesn’t want to waste time cooking for only him and their daughter. This also gives his parents an opportunity to see Zala more often, while she gets to taste “more complicated” dishes.

Katja and Miha are an example of how young people increasingly live in postsocialist Slovenia: with little job security and relatively unstable income, in rented accommodation or in a redesigned part of the house their parents built in the 1960s and 1970s when Yugoslav socialism still offered many opportunities for an ordinary worker. Like many of their generation, they are not formally married but live in a relationship recognized by the state as equal to marriage in rights. They represent the generation that lived their teenage years through the 1990s Balkan Wars after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and their 20s in the time when Slovenia joined the European Union (2004) and, after the start of the financial crisis in 2007, decided to start a family.

Their kitchen is a small U-shaped corner of a rented apartment, with stunning views of Koper Bay, that extends on one side toward a small rectangle dining table, which at the time of my arrival hosts a pile of papers and bills, toys, and a laptop playing Slovene and other international popular music. At the table, there are two chairs and a special height-adjusted child’s seat. In the corner, there is a computer desk with a comfortable wheeled chair that is only used for dining if guests arrive.

While Katja cooks, their daughter plays in the attached living room with Buksi, their small mixed-breed dog. They run toward the door when Miha arrives home from what was a work shift longer than usual. “So do you cook every day?” Ana asks Katja, knowing that she too works in shifts. Katja, searching for noodles in one of the cupboards to finish the clear beef soup that she cooked on Sunday in expectation of a busy week, says that it all depends on who comes home first. Katja often prepares soup in advance and freezes it, because, as she says, it is the only way to have home-prepared soup during the week; she then defrosts it in the microwave and cooks in noodles that she buys in the supermarket. The clear beef soup—juha, or župa as it is called more commonly in the Slovene dialects (from German die Suppe, meaning “soup”)—is a lunch starter that almost every person in Slovenia would recognize as an essential part of a Slovene lunch. Its preparation is certainly time consuming, as it requires cooking beef (or chicken) meat and bones in a large pot of water with vegetables and herbs for three to four hours. This yellow, watery soup with fatty rings floating on the surface is then strained into a smaller pot, and very thin noodles or tiny pasta are simmered in it until tender. On the day when it’s cooked, soup beef is eaten as part of the main course together with roasted potatoes and vegetables, such as spinach, and, if there is anything left, in cold salad with onions.

In Slovenia, lunch (kosilo) is the heaviest and main meal of the day. The word refers to the meal that is eaten in the middle of the day and normally almost always traditionally contains soup and the main dish. Dinner (večerja,deriving from večer, meaning “evening”) is always eaten in the evening and has no specified permanent structure. But as the working days are becoming longer and lunch is eaten later and later in the afternoon, the main meal of the day is becoming more of an evening meal (therefore dinner), which is often still structured as lunch, with soup as a starter and (normally) a meat dish to follow. This is increasingly changing, as weekday meals tend to only be composed of one course due to lack of time.

Katja’s clothes reflect the informality of a family home. Wearing an old green T-shirt with pink tracksuit bottoms, she doesn’t have to worry about “getting dirty” and hence wear an apron. These are the clothes in which she spends all her home time, which includes eating, cleaning, cooking, and watching TV. Likewise, her partner, who upon return first changes his work clothes to something more comfortable, believes that it wouldn’t be practical to eat in work clothes for fear of food stains.

As the soup is slowly boiling and the noodles are being cooked in it, Katja also prepares chicken and rice, following a recipe she appropriated herself. She learned a simple chicken recipe with salt and pepper from her mother whereby chicken is simply fried in oil, adding the seasoning in the end. Now, she also adds rosemary because she has it growing on the balcony and coriander—a spice that is not regularly used in Slovenia—because she once accidentally bought it in the supermarket and now likes it. Instead of olive oil, which she would have normally used, she recently switched to coconut oil. She bought it in a local supermarket because she had read that it is healthier than olive oil. Two months ago she decided to lose some weight, so the whole family is now subjected to a more “healthy” diet, which also includes rice. She is preparing a special mixture of “three rice”—black, brown, and red rice—sold premixed by the local Zlato polje (Golden Field) as a healthier alternative to the usual white rice.

The ingredients for this meal were bought in the supermarket, though Katja tells Ana that often her in-laws bring them fruits and vegetables that grow in the garden surrounding their house and even meat—sausages and salamis—that they source from a farmer they know in the vicinity of Koper. In Slovenia, such (family) networks are an important safety net for young couples and families with modest incomes, as they provide not only free care (for example, for children) but also homegrown and home-produced food.

After half an hour when the soup with noodles, the rice, and the chicken are ready, Katja summons Zala, who is playing with the dog in the living room and occasionally stopping by in the kitchen to see whether the food will soon be done. She is now told to help set the table (but only after she washes her hands!) as the mother brings plates and cutlery from the cupboard and positions three sets of plates on the table: a deep plate for soup, which is laid on top of a flat plate for the main course. It is Zala’s job to set the napkins, spoons, and forks, which she places without any rule, one to the right and one to the left of the plate, though both forks and spoons are laid to the same side of the plate. No tablecloth or mats are used except for a mat that is will be used to place a hot soup pot on and is laid in the middle of the table, accompanied with the ladle. No glasses are set, though the usual drink is either water or wine and beer.

As Katja brings the pot of soup—the same pot in which the soup was being cooked—to the table, she calls Miha, as the dinner is ready. The dog sits near or under the table, ready to catch any food that comes his way, but is told to go to the living room, an order he doesn’t readily obey. Though he normally eats special dog food from the tin and “is not really hungry at any time,” he loves begging for food under the table and won’t move away until the table is cleared and there is no more hope for a taste of his family’s meal. Any leftovers are eaten the next day from a lunch box.

Katja explains that she never brings all the dishes together to the table because the table is simply too small. And hence, there are days when she portions the meal onto plates in the kitchen just to avoid having to bring everything to the table. Today, however, she starts dividing the food onto plates before Zala and Miha are even seated; Katja only portions the food for the child, while Miha takes it for himself. This order, whereby whoever cooks also brings food to the table and serves it, is certainly not how it used to be in the primary families of both Miha and Katja. Miha, for example, tells Ana that it was his mother who used to cook and serve all the food unless it was “barbeque day,” which was the duty of his father. To make it easier, his mother used to be seated closest to the kitchen so she could go to the kitchen easily. Unlike now, the seating order was fixed, with him always sitting opposite his brother and mother opposite their father.

Eating the soup brings to the forefront certain personal preferences. Like many children, Zala likes to eat her soup with kroglice, little crispy balls of fried dough that soften once soaked in the soup. She adds them to her plate from a small bowl using her own spoon, which had been placed on the table by one of the parents, and is told to stop when her plate seems to contain almost nothing but balls. Miha, on the other hand, dislikes a soup that is too thick and complains that there are “too many noodles.” As a consequence, she is the only one not to finish the soup. As they eat, they talk of the events of the day and other people they spent time with, such as coworkers in the job or brother’s new scooter. Importantly, they also teach Zala how to behave at the table by either asking her questions they deem appropriate for such an occasion (Do you like the soup? What did you do in the kindergarten?) or correcting her behavior (Eat the soup with spoon, not hands. Put your leg down.).

Seating Arrangements

Formal dinners such as weddings and banquets are perhaps the last remaining place where we expect to be told where to sit, but it was once common practice to have name cards and seating arrangements decided by the host beforehand. The logic was that certain people would strike up a conversation or should be kept apart for some reason. In some cases, men and women were intentionally seated next to each other but not husbands and wives. On the other hand, even within families people will have their favorite spot where they always sit, and in many households it become a rule that peo- ple keep their accustomed places at the table.

As they finish, the soup dishes are cleared. Miha stacks them, and Katja takes them to the sink. Despite a relative flexibility of the rules and roles, certain rules still seem to apply. The soup is eaten from a soup plate, which is followed by a flat plate. Ana asks if they ever use the same plate for the soup and the main meal, to which Katja answers with a large amount of self-irony, “We never eat from the same plate—we are fini [posh] people.” A large smile and an ironic look when she refers to their own “poshness” suggests that she is perfectly aware of the possible interpretation of this habit as a middlebrow attempt to appear sophisticated but does not seem to care: this is how they ate when she was young, and she is determined to teach her daughter the same manners.

The second course—chicken, rice, and salad—is brought to the table by both Katja and Miha while Zala played with her fork at the table. No specific tools are used for serving the dishes or indeed cooking them. A simple stainless steel spoon bought in a supermarket as part of a larger set is used for mixing the soup while cooking, and a similar fork is used for chicken. The mother places rice on Zala’s plate and asks Miha, who is just searching for a spoon with which to serve the chicken, if he would portion it for her. And as with soup, there seems to be no general rule as to whose job this is: whoever sits closer to the pot gets to serve the food. For chicken, the task seems to fall to the father, who starts serving Zala and ends with himself. In the meantime, Katja announces that the rice is a bit overcooked but at the same time seeks for approval from her partner as to whether he likes it or not. Salad, made of seasonal vegetables such as tomato, cucumber, onion, and basil and dressed with vine vinegar, salt and pepper, is being placed at the center of the table. Despite Katja’s insistence on changing plates for the main meal, the expectation for the salad is that it will be eaten from this common bowl, which includes Zala even though she can only just about stretch her hand to the center of the table. In Slovenia, portioning the salad to separate plates is often perceived as unnecessary work in terms of later dishwashing but also, more important, as a distancing from the comforting domesticity of everyday food sharing: allowing a guest to share the salad from the common bowl may suggest that the guest has been accepted into the family not merely as a newcomer but as part of the family.

In the background, pop music from the laptop plays almost unheard as the family eats, drinks, and negotiates over what to eat and how much—mostly with Zala, who finished eating all the chicken but none of the rice and refuses to continue. Both parents try to give convincing arguments as to why rice should also be eaten, from the idea that it is delicious to reminders of the fact that she does normally like it and examples of how “Mum and Dad also eat the rice” and that she would be hungry had she only eaten chicken. What finally wins is her mother’s promise that if she only eats one forkful of rice she would be allowed to have chocolate at the end of the meal, which is a message consistent with her promise at the time she received the chocolate. Katja fills the fork with rice and passes it to the daughter’s hand. Even though Zala makes faces, she finally manages to finish. She finally helps herself using fingers as she picks separate rice grains that have fallen from her fork to the plate in front of her.

There is an expectation that everyone should sit at the table until the end of the meal. In order to convey this message, Miha, who finishes his meal first, moves from his corner wooden chair to a more comfortable computer seat while still sitting close to the table, patiently waiting for Zala to finish her rice. When she is done, she immediately jumps off her chair and sets out to find her chocolate box while her parents both clear the table. She offers chocolates to everyone, even the dog, and is then told off for this, because “a dog should not eat sweets, and I have told you this one million times.” Except for this no other dessert follows the main course, and the meal closes with a playful and rather funny argument as to who will clean the dishes since the dishwasher is broken. They are finally left in the sink, and Ana is offered a coffee: this is their way of finishing the lunch and of starting a relaxing evening with the family.

Clear Beef Soup with Noodles

1 pound of beef “for soup”

1 onion

1 tomato

1 carrot

Parsley

Salt and pepper

1.In a large pot with a capacity of 4 quarts, add all the ingredients and cover with 3-4 quarts of water.

2.Bring to boil and then cook slowly for about 3-4 hours.

3.Strain and add small pasta/noodles.

Herby Chicken and Tomato Rice

Chicken breasts cut in pieces

Salt and pepper

Powdered garlic

Coriander

Rosemary

Coconut oil

Rice

Tomato pulp

1.Fry chicken pieces in oil. Add salt, pepper, garlic, coriander, and rosemary and cook until done.

2.Add some water to create sauce.

3.In a separate pot, cook rice and tomato pulp in water until tender and all the water has evaporated.

Recipe reprinted with permission.