183 Palacinke & Cheesemaking: Nick’s Quest to Honor Baba S…

The Storied Recipe

183 Palacinke & Cheesemaking: Nick’s Quest to Honor Baba Saveta’s Legacy

November 07, 2024

Our story begins with Nick’s memories of Saturday mornings with his cousins, consuming endless stacks of Palacinke, Balkan-style pancakes eaten with cheese or sugar (or both - and don’t knock it until you try it, because I did, and then I had to eat my words. Literally!).

As we trace the makers of Palacinke back through Nick’s lineage, Nick introduces us to his great-grandmother, Baba Saveta, who lived her entire life in the craggy mountains of Montenegro.

Though they never met and only overlapped on this earth by two years, Baba Saveta’s story, character, and expertise have left an indelible mark on Nick. Baba Saveta raised five children in a home hand-built by her husband, who she married in a love match disapproved of by her wealthy family of birth, living through war, hardship, and a century of radical change.

The difference between starvation and survival was the cheese Baba Saveta made twice daily during the summer months in her little mountaintop dairy, scrubbed clean with ashes each spring. Baba Saveta’s skill with cheese has become a particular point of connection for Nick, who now works as a cheesemaker in California. In today’s episode, he shares a great deal about the fascinating process of cheesemaking, particularly from the perspective of Baba Saveta, who did so much with so little.

In moments of daily work—tending his garden, curating cheeses, folding laundry—Nick reflects on this great-grandmother he never met and what she passed on to him. Today, I join Nick in honoring Baba Saveta’s values of self-sufficiency as well as her enduring spirit, wisdom, and love - and I ask, with him, how we can carry her legacy forward.

One note about this episode! Nick’s first shared his story with Alison Kay of Ancestral Kitchen, who was just recently a podcast guest in Episode 179, What Happens After Happily Ever After? Nick submitted this through Alison’s new portal on the Ancestral Kitchen website, where she is collecting memories, documents, recipes, and stories of those who cooked ancestrally. If you have anything to add to this repository, I’m putting the link in the show notes. Thanks so much to Alison for sharing Nick’s story with me - thank you to Nick for his time and this beautiful story - and thank YOU for beig here!

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Nick's Original Tribute to Baba Saveta, Submitted to The Ancestral Kitchen Repository

My great-grandmother Saveta (Sah-vet-a) was born in 1909. She had my maternal grandmother in 1943, in a house with no electricity and water that came from a well a long walk down the road. She came from a well off family, compared to most people in her region of northern Montenegro, and was the first person in our family village to have a cast iron stove and not cook over an open hearth in the middle of the room. It was purchased by her father when she ran off with my great-grandfather Bašo (Basho) to be wed. He had been a worker on her father’s farm, and they had fallen in love.

Baba Saveta was the main character in most of my mother’s stories about her childhood visiting the village. She was a wonder woman. She could spin wool, weave cloth, care for and milk animals, make cheese and other dairy products, cook anything from seemingly nothing, help with butchering and put up the meat, help with the hay and grain harvests, all things my young suburban brain could barely understand a single person knowing. She is surely the reason I found interest in rural living and real food.

We still make some recipes that she did. In spring, we make a spread from soured cream, mashed young cheese curds and finely sliced green onions to eat with hot bread or baked potatoes. Many of my cousins’ favorite way to eat eggs are “Baba’s eggs,” where a pan of salted cream is brought to just scalding, whole eggs are added and the whole lot is gently mixed together over the stove until an unctuous, bright yellow mass forms and is eaten piping hot with chunks of bread, preferably together taken from the pan it was cooked in. As cold weather approaches, we put smoked pork ribs to simmer, and add diced potatoes to the broth along with a roux made flour added to onions fried in lard, enlivened with bright red paprika, and plenty of soured cream to finish. Her potato soup is one of our family’s true comfort foods. My great-grandmother was apparently well known for making savory filo dough pies called pita, filled with either brined cheese and egg or cream and egg. She passed this knowledge down to my grandmother, and while my mother never really learned the art of how to make the paper-thin stretched dough by hand, I was able to convince my grandmother to show me and keep the tradition going, in spite of her wanting to show my girl cousins (all called sisters in Serbian) before showing me, though none showed interest. I like having that connection with Baba Saveta.

Baba Saveta had a little dairy that served as a smokehouse in the winter, and would be scrubbed sparkling clean with ashes in spring when the cows and sheep would come back into milk and dairying would begin for the year. All of the animals would be milked in the morning and evening. The still-warm morning milk was made into full fat cheese immediately. The curd was ladled into cheeseclothes, tied up, and put between boards on sloped tables with pristinely cleaned rocks kept for years for this purposed, probably soaked through with whey and full of friendly bacteria. The resulting thin, pressed curd was sliced into pieces, heavily salted, and put into wooden buckets and barrels made by her husband and would make their own brine to age until needed. The evening milk would be scalded in a large copper kettle, and portioned out into long wooden bowls, similar to American dough troughs or biscuit bowls, hewed by my great-grandfather from logs, to sit overnight to form a thick clotted cream called kajmak (kai-mak) in most of the Balkans, but skorup (sko-roop) in our regional dialect. That could be eaten fresh, or could be salted and packed into containers like the cheese. My mother always cherished memories of Ivandan (Eevahn-dahn), St. John’s Day, on June 24th, when Baba Saveta would make daisy wreaths and put them over all the doors of the different buildings, and would serve the fresh skorup with fresh bread as a treat. This surely had pagan roots from the early Slavs settling the area, and lasted well past the conversion of the Serbs to Eastern Orthodoxy. The skim milk from the production of skorup was made into a cheese called prljo (per-ly-oh). It was a sharp tasting, lean cheese that was stored in hide bags made from carefully skinned lambs. It was a food to keep the wolf at the door at bay, something that could keep starvation away if everything else lovely was long gone from the cellar. Baba Saveta made yogurt, apparently the most sour, mouth puckering and apparently bubbly yogurt ever. Perhaps she let yeasts get into her culture. She would occasionally churn butter in a tall, narrow wooden churn, and would always clarify it. We call clarified butter maslo (mah-slo). Apparently, it was not loved by many of my living relatives as food, as it often was very aged by the time it was on the table in a meal, but Baba Saveta mostly used it in a cure heated and mixed with honey for respiratory issues, and to comb into her hair before washing it. It works wonders to clear lungs and cure coughs, and my family in Montenegro used it for Covid relief in 2020 with rapid results. Interestingly, when I've researched the combination, Indian tradition says that the pairing of ghee and honey is toxic for the body. I find it fascinating how certain cultures will coevolve and agree on some things, and find others things to be complete opposites.

Baba Saveta knew where to gather wild strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, hazelnuts and various herbs for tea. Despite being an ideal spot for foraging mushrooms like chanterelles and porcini, those apparently were never brought into the house. I have heard from other people from our area of Montenegro that they were eaten so much during the war that many people shunned them after. For Slavs, people in Montenegro are often very mycophobic, gathering the mushrooms just to sell to co-ops that sell them to countries like Poland and Russia. She also knew where to get wild apples, pears and juniper. She would make “waters” from these, putting them each into different containers and covering them with water for weeks. She would add some sugar before serving, but they would most likely ferment with the wild yeasts present on the skins. I was very pleased to find a version of the juniper water called “smekra” in Sandor Katz’s book, almost the same as what I was told about our “kleka” (kleh-kah), just a different dialect’s name. The only other non-dairy ferment that I know Baba Saveta made was whole-head sour cabbage for winter.

My great-grandparents bought their flour to make bread from a local mill, but they grew wheat and rye as well, plowing with oxen and harvesting with scythes. I don’t know all the uses they had for them, but I do know that they ate a lot of soaked and boiled grain cooked with smoked lamb or pork. They did not always have pigs, I think it was hard with the terrible winters there to keep breeding stock, and I imagine there were often not scraps to feed to another being. They usually had veal at some point in the year, and occasionally would eat one of Baba Saveta’s barnyard hens as a special meal. My mother claims that her grandmother could make one of those chickens feed something like 20 people after being made into soup. How a tough old bird like that could be split that many ways is beyond me, but I trust that this woman could accomplish anything, let alone this.

I’m not sure how my grandmother’s family made it through WWII. The war ravaged our area of Montenegro, because many of the partisans were based nearby in the mountains and the occupying Italian troops were terrible to the locals. My great-grandfather was temporarily in a camp in Germany for being a Slav and an early communist while Yugoslavia was still a kingdom. While he was gone, Baba Saveta had to manage a young family and a farm by herself, and deal constantly with the occupiers. Animals were hidden in the high mountains to keep them from being on the Italians’ plates, and crops were burned. She would peel bark off of birches to scrap the inner layer to feed her children when there was nothing else to eat. When there was something to bake into bread, more often then not, the Italian soldiers would see the smoke, come to her house, and take the bread, even half-baked, out from the oven and eat it in front of her as a sick show of dominance. I’m sure that even the hard life with no modern conveniences and the substinence pantry that they worked tirelessly for seemed like an embarrassment of riches compared to the starving war years.

Baba Saveta lived about twenty years longer than her husband, until 1997. She was able to stay in the village until 1996, because there were plenty of relatives within walking distance to help her with her garden and livestock as she grew older. I’m told she never turned gray haired, and while she is stooped in the few pictures I’ve seen of her, her face is radiant and surprisingly unwrinkled for a woman in her 70s and 80s. She attributed much of her health to eating a clove of garlic every day, and chasing it with a shot of plum brandy called rakija (rahk-iya). Her son finally decided that she need to be moved to an apartment in a town an hour away from the village where he lived, and she was given her own apartment. She passed away at 88 six months after. I really think that being removed from her community, her way of eating and daily routine, her home of six decades was what made it so that her body figured it was time to retire. One of my greatest wishes in life was that I could have met her, and I don’t know what I would give for just an hour to talk to her and ask her everything that’s popped into my head over the years. But even a full day wouldn’t be enough time. It’s enough to be from her stock and to carry on whatever traditions she passed down, and it’s good to be content with that.

Attached is a picture from the early '70s (I think) of my great-grandparents for reference, the frame was carved by Bašo. It's still in the house he built in 1930, owned by my mother's cousin now. The story is absolutely free for use, I would prefer that the photo is not be included without me knowing the context if it was ever to be used.

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