Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 4 - Croatia

Intro

Going south once again we come to a country that was once part of Hungary. Well, most of it, kind of.

The modern borders of Croatia actually map onto at least three Austrian-Hungarian provinces: Croatia proper, which contained most of the inland bits of modern Croatia proper (red) as well as Slavonia (purple) and Vojvodina (now in Serbia); Dalmatia (blue - give or take a few islands) and Küstenland, which was historically called the Julian March and centred around Trieste (now in Italy), a lot of the south of this including Istria (green) and some coastal bits of Croatia proper (red) is now Croatian.

We’re getting to the tangentially related history really early this time, everyone. We’re doing really well!

The first of these was Hungarian during the dual monarchy, the second was initially Austrian but became part of Hungary in the very early 20th century and the third of these remained Austrian up to the dissolution of the empire in 1918. But the messy reality of history, rendered into two paragraphs and a map, somewhat buggers up my pretentious link between the two posts, doesn’t it?

Anyway, I’m cooking Croatian because I went to Dubrovnik when it was popular but before it exploded in popularity after Game of Thrones really got going. And I generally liked the food. At least in Dalmatia it’s a bit like Italian, but not identical. Lots of seafood.

The book

This time I’m cooking from a book I got while in the country and, for the first time, a book with multiple authors. This is Croatia at Table by Ivanka Biluš, Božica Brkan, Cirila Rode as well as Lidjija Ćorić - the last one’s printed in my book (published 1996) but not on the website so I assume she must have done something horrible to upset the Alfa publishing company.

Slightly bashed and scuffed after a decade of property moves but in decent nick compared to last week’s book.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

Croatian food has a large coastal-inland divide (with one showing a lot of Italian influence and the other a lot of Austrian/Hungarian) and I wanted to represent both sides of it within one meal, rather than spreading out the cooking over two posts. Much as I like Croatian food that seemed excessive.

The first dish I picked out was sataraś (a lightly cooked mix of onion, peppers and tomato with Croatia’s distinctive Vegeta seasoning) - a recipe from the earlier section of the book, focused on inland cooking, which nevertheless had a bit of a Mediterranean touch. Also it looked easy and I was pretty certain I’d pick at least one complicated recipe down the line.

The second was black risotto - as this very coastal dish was one of two dishes my partner remembers particularly fondly from our holiday in Croatia.

Finally for something a little more in-land I decided to make a plum strudel as a dessert. Yes, I did forget to consider the implications of making thin pastry from scratch as a beginner baker - how did you guess?

As a brief diversion I also seriously considered but rejected the following recipes:

Bear paw cookies (the recipe inexplicably uses cups despite all the other recipes being in metric, in the Hungarian post I baked with cups and I couldn’t take the stress of that again!)
Green maneštra (essentially a Croatian take on minestrone) - two ingredients were too much of a pain to source for me to proceed:
One was collard greens, which I’d never heard of and didn’t know how to source, turns out “collard greens” is US English and the UK English name is cavollo riccio/curly kale - so probably doable with a trip to a larger supermarket or a posh one like Waitrose in hindsight.
The other problematic ingredient was smoked mutton - I reckoned I could probably find mutton or smoked lamb if I put my mind to it but finding smoked mutton was probably unrealistic. I still don’t know where I could get this.
Fine goulash - a lamb goulash that strays quite far from the Hungarian version. Paprika is absent and the accompaniment is pasta rather than galuska or potato - either a variant on macaroni or a style of pasta totally absent from Italy called fuži (the nearest analogue I can think of is penne but it’s still quite dissimilar in shape).
Given the uncommon pastas called for I’d either have needed to make some from scratch or do a fairly imprecise substitution - I had a vague inclination to not have any red meat or poultry in this post so ultimately I decided to just drop this recipe.

Even though I didn’t make these I think the goulash, and to a lesser degree the maneštra, say something interesting about Croatian cuisine and the heavy, and sometimes mixed, influence from their neighbours.

So far as adjustments go this post is being written further from the cooking itself than usual but from memory:

The sataraś recipe was followed faithfully.
The black risotto recipe had only one conscious alteration by myself (increasing the amount of scampi to match the amount I purchased) but, truthfully, it was a bit of a mess. Instructions for cooking the rice were totally absent, fortunately the other risotto recipes had (very vague) instructions and I’ve made risotto before so this wasn’t too big of a problem, but effectively I went quite far off-script.
Other ingredients (Vegeta, bay leaf, lemon juice, lemon rind (zest?) and parsley) had no amounts specified so I had to guess - sadly I don’t remember how much I used in this case. A lemon slice appears in the methods section of the recipe out of nowhere so I’m guessing probably about three quarter’s of a lemon’s worth of zest and juice! Finally the recipe specified an amount of shellfish without saying if the weight was of shellfish in-shell or shelled - rereading it the recipe implies the former is required but I used the latter.
Curiously the recipe also specified the importance of using refrigerated rather than frozen squid ink while refraining from mentioning what variety of rice to use, so I defaulted to arborio as the standard risotto rice. Finally I also performed my usual substitution of asfoetida for garlic.
The strudel recipe was followed faithfully save that the dough stood for longer than stated in the recipe (due to the practicality of cooking several things at once) and I had to guess at the amounts of three ingredients (lemon zest, rum, cinnamon) as none were provided - one lemon’s worth and quite a lot judged by eye, respectively. I also made a slight adjustment to the method of stretching the dough, to be shown later.

Cooking

In this case both savoury dishes required serving pretty quickly after cooking and so were done in parallel, to finish at roughly the same time.

This is just to say I have photographed the plums that were on the freezer top and which I was probably saving for later on in the post. Forgive me they were so incidental, so in the shot and so not worth the effort of moving.

This is our starting point for the sataraś. There is a little bit of sugar in there, yes, which is often a bit alarming in savoury food (unless is Chinese, where it seems pretty ubiquitous) but not much is needed for this recipe. It’s not Croatian sweet and sour.

For those wondering what Vegeta is it’s an all-purpose seasoning with mostly dehydrated vegetable powder and some MSG. Apparently it’s used quite a lot across central Europe, though I’ve never personally seen any recipes using it outside this book. I’m fine with MSG, as a biologist I couldn’t really see why anything beyond the sodium itself would be an issue health-wise for most people, so I quite like Vegeta, though I’m going to struggle to find out what to use the rest of the bag on!

These vegetables are all roughly cut and the various powdered ingredients combined with the tomatoes. And that’s it until cooking.

In line with the dodgy recommendations in the last post’s cookbook I have decided to substitute the breadcrumbs in the strudel recipe with rice pops.

Apparently I only took one photo of the risotto prep work ahead of cooking so a lot of prep is condensed into one image here! On the counter-top you can see cuttlefish (frozen, left - apparently an unusual purchase, as the fishmonger hadn’t sold any for a year), squid (fresh, to the right), chopped parsley with asfoetida (top left), lemon juice and olive oil in the background and behind them frozen (and thawed) cockle meat and scampi. The squid ink is hiding between the Vegeta and the bag of rice and the wine is mixed with water. I hope everything else is self-explanatory!

As I didn’t know this ahead of time it’s worth mentioning that preparing a squid from scratch is far less effort than the equivalent process for a fish. Simply remove (and retain) the tentacles, being sure to not burst the ink sac, then pull out the interior contents of the body cavity. After this cut away the “ears”/fins and remove any membrane layer entirely - the squid can now be cut as desired. The cuttlefish preparation was similar in nature but a fair bit easier.

In this case I have about twice as much of each as needed, so they are bisected and the spare half frozen - rather than attempting to cut aesthetically pleasing cephalopod rings.

The rice is also parboiled off-camera - nothing too exciting there.

It’s all kicking off now.

Once the onion is soft the squid and cuttlefish are added to the risotto pan to cook for ten minutes. Nothing yet happening with the sataraś in this picture.

By the time the peppers are ready to go into the sataraś quite a lot has happened in the risotto pan - the water, wine, Vegeta, bay leaf, lemon juice and the mysterious lemon slice are all added to cook for half an hour.

Everything else goes into the sataraś pan, the rest of its cooking time is simply reduction. The risotto is actually between steps in this photograph - the timing to add the ink is left a bit vague in the recipe but I added it around this point while the scampi is still frying in the background (said scampi will later be added into the risotto for five minutes before anything else goes in).

Everything’s now ready - with the herbs and seasonings added to the risotto along with the shellfish and rice, these final ingredients all cooked very briefly.

No dog tray this time, nothing I can do.

Is finished. I’m pretty sure these two dishes aren’t commonly put together but I was pretty happy with both, taste-wise. And given this is a photo of black food taken with a phone camera the aesthetics could be a lot worse!

Now out of my areas of strength and into baking.

Once again I took too few photographs - but here we have chopped walnuts with lemon zest, sugar, cinammon and rum (left), some toasted breadcrumbs (centre) and a lot of chopped plums (right) - in the background there’s dough and some butter ready for melting later on.

This is what the dough looks like pre-stretching. Utterly unremarkable looking but it took a lot of beating to get to that stage.

Many methods for making thin pastry - strudel, filo or phyllo (if there’s any difference between them!) - seem to involve hanging the pastry whereas the method this book proposes involves lightly rolling it, drawing it out on a horizontal surface until nearly transparent and then simply cutting off any thick edges. The baking paper underneath was my partner’s idea and made rolling up the strudel easier later on.

At this stage I have to give the book credit - for all its imprecisions, inconsistencies and omissions I simply assumed this would be the step I’d mess up but the book’s instructions carried me through a difficult process rather well. The bit I mess up is later.

Here we go! This is where things get messy - in rolling up the breadcrumbs, walnut mix and plums into a strudel it was very difficult to not break the pastry as the plums were simply too big. By the time this had become apparent it was too late - although in hindsight I could have done more to deal up the strudel at the ends even at this stage.

So, predictably the strudel looks a bit awful.

I put a little lipstick on the pig and there we go - an ugly, but finished, strudel. And, surprisingly, it actually came out very well in terms of taste and texture - it solely falls down on the aesthetics. Even the pastry feels thin enough.

It’s fortunate that it ended up tasting nice as the recipe ended up being for two strudels, and with a lot of stewed plum and walnut mixture left over!

What I’d do differently

The main courses both turned out as well as I could reasonably expect, if I was to be very fussy I’d say I might make a couple of changes to the risotto:

Attempt to cut the squid and cuttlefish into rings while still dividing them into reasonably equal halves - as I still have the other halves in my freezer this probably will have to wait until attempt three at the earliest.
Truth be told they didn’t taste vastly different so it’s also tempting to just use one squid or cuttlefish and omit the other.
I found the shellfish to have a bit of grit to them and that the dish didn’t really bring out anything special in the cockles. Not much that I could do with the former problem but I may attempt it with mussel meat instead of cockle meat in future, which is also more likely to crop up in this kind of risotto in Croatia itself.

The strudel, on the other hand, could use some adjustments:

Next time round I think it’d be necessary to set aside a bit more space to stretch out the dough - the pastry is thin but could be thinner!
Also the plums were far too big and broke the strudel dough, I assume the book assumed I was working with smaller plums so I would either try and source some or cut my fruit to a smaller size than the book suggests.
Otherwise I think it’s just a case of practice makes perfect.

My view on the book

As I may have said more or less said explicitly this cookbook has a lot of problems - inconsistent localisation (not every recipe being metric or not making a firm decision on what dialect of English to translate into), gaps in the recipes and even some points where the translation is actively confusing.

As an example the sataraś recipe refers to the peppers as paprika, 500g of paprika would be a lot for 400g of tomatoes! I can see how this happened, as paprika is made from capsicum peppers and paprika is the word for a pepper in many languages, but it still shouldn’t have got through a proof read. A recipe on the next page refers to “champignons (or other mushrooms)”, which is harder to explain or justify. Did the translator think champignon referred to a specific variety of mushroom?

This was first published in 1996 and I did buy this new in 2010 - so that’s enough time to fix translation issues and it’s odd that they’re still there. Frankly, it’s more than a little frustrating to have to navigate around these problems and it does mean that a completely novice cook probably couldn’t reliably use this book.

Fortunately everything I’ve ever cooked from it turned out great but it did require a bit of nous to fill in the gaps. So I have very mixed feelings - a cookbook where everything works well is rare and a great product but a cookbook where you need to guess at amounts is, frankly, amateur. I’m not quite sure what a cookbook with both characteristics is.

On the broader aspects of what makes a good cookbook the picture is similarly mixed. With the non-cooking content of the book the ups and downs are readily apparent.

The design of these sections is clearly lacking - the photos themselves are good but a lot of the graphic design is, shall we say, of it’s time and seems more evocative of a well-designed 90s website than anything else. I personally don’t mind that and am game for some 90s/00s internet nostalgia but it’s still jarring seeing this kind of graphic design in a book, let alone one printed in 2008 and purchased in 2010. Also that line spacing is an unforgivable sin regardless of decade - my apologies to the poor editor who now must be burned at the stake but I don’t make the rules.

On the other hand the actual content is good, wide ranging, and though I’ve not sat down to read these sections in their entirety, the English flows well and is both clear and fluent. The patchiness of the English in some of the recipes is entirely absent here. The content covered is wide and interesting and, amazingly, doesn’t outstay its welcome. This is a book sold in tourist hotspots, I got mine within Dubrovnik’s walled city, and it’s likely intended to have a dual function in educating tourists about Croatia in general - I could easily forgive it rambling in these sections on history and culture but it doesn’t, there’s about five times as much about food as on the introductory segments. A nice split.

Often this feels like two books - as if the introduction and longer spiels about the food were translated (or even written) by someone totally different to whoever worked on the recipes. Similarly the style of photography in the introduction and for the actual food are vastly different - both old fashioned but in very different ways:

If the introductory pictures seem of the 90s then the food photography seems of the 70s. All lush spreads, out-of-fashion crockery that was once fancy, unnecessary but thematically appropriate items surrounding the food - all attempting to convey a sense of sophistication but really just looking dated. Again this is not without some retro charm and it’s better executed than food photography of the actual 70s (by my experience) but the results are still highly variable - I’d say the photos of the Hvar octopus and the risottos look quite nice but that the pork fillet with lemon spread looks thoroughly unappetising.

An upside of this photographic style is that you have an idea of what almost everything should look like, as most of the recipes are photographed together on the same table and virtually no space is lost for photos of things that are not food. After some books lacking illustrations, this is nice, even if you’re not a fan of the particular style of photography used. However I do think these images sometimes crowd out the space for the actual recipes and I do wonder if this spacing issue is responsible for some of the idiosyncrasies of the recipe text - particularly as this book was translated into many languages and I expect every version has the same amount of space set aside for the body text of the recipes.

Overall - if you find this book, buy it and use it then expect to be frustrated but, if you’re not a complete novice, to be able to make something nice from it. I’d hesitate to recommend it given it’s simultaneously a very high- and a very low-quality effort but I’m not sure if there’s a better option for Croatian food. And, at the end of the day, Croatian food is worth trying.