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Join us in The Delegates Lounge, an independent podcast on world affairs based in New York City at the United Nations, the hub of global insights in plain sight. We hope you’ll come back often to listen in on some fascinating conversations hosted by J. Alex Tarquinio, a veteran journalist who writes essays for Foreign Policy from her office across the hallway from the UN Security Council chamber.
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The Delegates Lounge
Dining with Diplomats: Midsummer Edition 2025
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Welcome to the third edition of "Dining with Diplomats," a series that explores the intersection of food, culture, and diplomacy. In this edition, we'll journey across Europe to discover the diverse celebrations marking the summer solstice.
Swedish Consul General in New York Erik Ullenhag takes us through the significance of the Midsummer holiday in Sweden, where the celebration rivals Christmas in importance. After enduring months of winter darkness, Swedes embrace the nearly endless daylight with maypole dancing, traditional songs about jumping frogs, and a feast featuring fresh potatoes, herring, and sweet summer strawberries. Later in summer, communities gather for crayfish parties, a tradition deeply rooted in Sweden's lake culture.
Our voyage continues to Romania, where Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Andreea Mocanu reveals how geographical diversity shapes regional cuisines. Mocanu shares childhood memories of her grandmother's dawn-to-dusk black cherry jam making and age-old food preservation techniques.
In Bulgaria, UN diplomat Svetozar Dimitrov guides us through a progression of seasonal celebrations, from March's Baba Marta Day to the ancient practice of barefoot walking on hot coals in the Strandzha mountains. Bulgaria's refreshing summer cuisine features a cold yogurt-cucumber soup and kyopolou, a roasted eggplant spread that captures summer's bounty.
Greek and Spanish traditions round out our Mediterranean exploration, with the ancient origins of spanakopita and the cooling comfort of Córdoba's salmorejo, described by one cultural officer as "sunshine in a bowl."
Speakers:
J. Alex Tarquinio (host) is a resident correspondent at the United Nations in New York and co-founder of The Delegates Lounge podcast. @alextarquinio of @delegateslounge on X and @thedelegateslounge on Instagram.
Erik Ullenhag (guest) is the Consulate General of Sweden in New York. He was formerly a Swedish politician and ambassador to Jordan and Israel. @erikullenhag of and @swedennewyork and @SweMFA on X and @erikullenhag of @swedennewyork and @swedishmfa on Instagram.
Andreea Mocanu (guest) is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Romania to the United Nations in New York. @andreea_mocanu1 of @RomaniaUN_NY and @MAERomania on X and @mfaromania on Instagram.
Svetozar Dimitrov (guest) is First Secretary at Bulgaria’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. @BGmission and @MFABulgaria on X.
Credits:
The pieces of music introducing and concluding the Bulgarian segment are mentioned by the guest.
“July Morning” by Uriah Heep
"Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin" sung by Valya Balkanska on NASA’s “golden record” sounds and music of earth on the Voyager spacecraft.
All other music: Adobe Stock
Welcome to the Delegates Lounge. Pull up a chair. I'm Alex Tarquinio, a journalist based at the United Nations here in New York City and your emcee for this podcast featuring some of the most influential minds in the world today. Settle in for some riveting tete-a-tete, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back.
Speaker 1:This is the third edition of our ongoing series Dining with Diplomats about the significance of food in diplomacy. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to the first two editions in December that feature a dozen diplomats from around the world. You can find recipes from all of their countries at the link in our show notes. In this episode, we're looking at midsummer celebrations in Europe. We start, naturally, with Sweden, where the midsummer holiday has an importance on a par with Christmas. We're joined by Erik Ullenhag, the Consul General of Sweden in New York, where thousands are gathering in Rockefeller Park to mark the summer solstice. The Consul General, who insists we call him Erik, is a former member of the Swedish Parliament. He went from politician to diplomat in 2016. Since then, he has served as Sweden's ambassador to Jordan and Israel, before taking up his post in New York last year. Eric delves deep into Scandinavian history and the cultural significance of the Midsummer holiday and, of course, the food. Here's our conversation. Welcome to Dining with Diplomats.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:This is the Midsummer Edition, so we're very pleased to have Sweden in the house to explain the importance of the Midsummer holiday tradition in Sweden.
Speaker 2:Midsummer is one of the biggest holidays in Sweden and the big holidays in Sweden are most often connected to light. The reason is simple. We have four months in the winter where we hardly see the sun, so midsummer is celebrating the lightest day of the year. And you could also see, if you visit Sweden, that we pay the price in the winter that we hardly don't see the sun, and then we have in the summer where the sun is up all the time. Similar is actually Lucia, another Swedish tradition, that is in December, where from the beginning, italian saint is coming with the light because that's the darkest time. So these are two of the biggest, I would say, swedish and quite specific Swedish traditions.
Speaker 1:In fact, I asked a Swedish friend and she said that it is as important as Christmas. It's like a second Christmas.
Speaker 2:The second Christmas is different if you see such a tradition, because Christmas in Sweden is very family oriented, while Midsummer is more gathering your friends and having two kids myself. I'm super happy if they're with me in Midsummer. But it could also be a way for a Midsummer party and it is one of the traditions that actually today is connected christianity and religion. But from beginning is not the christian tradition. It's a very old tradition celebrating the light and also celebrating that you could have the harvest and the food coming in in the summer well, in fact, you mentioned saint Lucia in December, but there is also a saint associated with midsummer, isn't that right?
Speaker 1:It's St John's holiday.
Speaker 2:It's a St John's holiday that is connected to midsummer, but if you ask an ordinary Swede, they won't speak about St John's, they will speak about the midsummer pole that you dance around. That sad to say. Uh, not mention so many christian connections to midsummer. It's more a way of celebrating life and the feeling that that light is coming back well, the midsummer holiday is much older than christianity.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's there's some theories that it goes back almost to the the late stone age and the beginning of agriculture in europe. Um, and it is so in that sense it's very tied, isn't it, with the planting and the beginning of agriculture in Europe? And so in that sense it's very tied, isn't it, with the planting and the growing season.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's tied to planting and the growing season and it goes as you said. It has much longer historical roads than Christianity in itself. But of course, as all countries then adopted and got Christian and left the old belief system behind them, you today then have a Christian connection as well, because this was a very strong tradition already before Christianity and of course the church then goes in and you also have a religious part of it today. But the roots are not Christian from the beginning. If you were a traditional, you should collect seven different flowers and if you put these seven different flowers under your pillow you could be able to dream about the woman or man that you will fall in love in life. So that's still a tradition that is there.
Speaker 1:Some of the folk traditions. Obviously people don't. I would assume that most people they don't necessarily believe that, but do they still do it as a cultural practice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and many kids do it. It depends on the family. It's not everyone for the moment, but it's still quite a living tradition. We also have this way of making flower circles that we put on our head mostly today. I would say it is a celebration of that shortest night. That is hardly not a night in sweden, because even in in middle in central parts of sweden the sun is up almost to 11 or half past 11 and then it goes up again half past one in the morning. So if you sit up at the midsummer night you hardly notice that the night came actually, and that's what people are celebrating. A lot of the music in Sweden, traditional folk music. Everett Torb is one of our national biggest poets for songs, a lot about summer and a lot about midsummer, and collected these seven flowers you could find songs about and then Dancing Around the Maypole.
Speaker 1:But Dancing Around the Maypole, isn't there a lot of folk songs? I mean, are there traditional folk songs associated with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have. When you dance around the maypole, you have certain songs that are interesting for a foreigner because they are only connected this uh, maypole, uh. So, among other things, we are singing the dancing frogs and jumping around and and if you come to battery park in midsummer in new y, we have 6,000 people coming and I think last summer we had 5,000, 6,000. Mostly Swedes, but other people come. And the interesting thing, always when people live outside the country, their traditions become even more important. And we keep that really Swedish, and you could see us dancing and dancing frogs or jumping frogs.
Speaker 1:Well, so your summer is a very short season in terms of the length of the season, but very long growing days. We spoke with the Finnish foreign minister, actually for our first dining episode, and she mentioned that the berries were so sweet because the sun almost never set. So during those few months the berries are sweet and perhaps there are other foodstuffs that you have associated with summer that grow particularly well in those long days.
Speaker 2:What you need to have from a midsummer table if you're in Sweden is actually potatoes. Fresh potato in the summer is amazing. My youngest daughter we have been living abroad for some time she always, when she comes home in June, july, is waiting for the fresh potatoes that are coming.
Speaker 1:Is there a special preparation? Is it potato salad Cold, or are they served hot or warm?
Speaker 2:You could have it as a salad, but mostly you have fresh potatoes at the table. So you have fresh potatoes. You have the strawberries that is a short season but, asnish foreign minister said, very sweet strawberries during this time and, with all the respect that they doesn't taste so much the rest of the year when you import them, but, but these weeks they're amazing. So potatoes on the table, uh, strawberries on the table. Traditionally also we have herring uh, that is scandinavian dish, some loves it, some don't like it. Uh, you also have pie called western western bottom pie, cheese pie, and you have it, to be honest, also to fill your stomach.
Speaker 2:Okay, you could fill your stomach with, with, with the potato, uh, but if you have for the summer, for for the midsummer, herring and and salmon normally smoked salmon or salmon in different forms, uh, or gravatlax, uh then you need something to also fill your stomach. It's also big in another swedish tradition and that's the crayfish parties that are huge in august, also connected to the summer, and if you only eat crayfish you normally lose more calories than you get in. You eat in the crayfish together with, traditionally, some kind of snaps of vodka and of course, then you need the Westerbottom pie, then to get some food in your stomach. Basically, I love the pie but it's complimentary to what you feel is the main food. You normally combine it with some kind of pie.
Speaker 1:So crayfish, herring and smoked salmon. I'm getting a sense that in the summer that the fishermen go out and spend those long days on the water.
Speaker 2:You know the herring is not fresh. It's different recipes. You could have it's different recipes, you could have it with mustard, you could have it with dill, you could have a lot of different things. And these the people in Sweden that loves herring could have three, four or five different types for a midsummer table.
Speaker 2:Crayfish is interesting because of course you could buy it in the shop, but the tradition is that we have a crayfish fishing season in August normally, where you really would like to go to a place where you fish your crayfish yourself. So you put it, put down the cages, you get up the crayfish, you prepare them a couple of days and then you cook them, and then the nights are getting longer. So then normally you have it with with some lights in the garden, but still able to sit outside because the the the sun is going down maybe nine o'clock in the evening instead of 11 o'clock, but but you feel that change. You have the crayfish and that's also part of this traditional swedish summer, depending on where you are in the country those swedish meatballs, for example.
Speaker 1:Are those a traditional midsummer dish, or is that more for the winter holidays?
Speaker 2:The Swedish meatballs normally have on all these events. You have them for Christmas, you have them for midsummer. Lucia doesn't really connect with food. The 13th of December, it's more gingerbread cookies, it's Lusseband, that is Luciacia bun, that is a lot of saffron. So that's more connected to to sweets, that tradition. And also, when it comes to cake, we have the princess cake, for example. It's big in the summer. That is marzipan and and cake and and cream.
Speaker 1:That is marzipan and cake is it? Is it a frosting of marzipan or is it inside?
Speaker 2:It's over the cake and it's very beautiful. You normally have a rose on the top. It's less sweet than the American version of marzipan. You could also get it where it's almost plain marzipan without sugar in it.
Speaker 1:And what is the cake? Is it a vanilla?
Speaker 2:cake. It's quite fluffy cake, traditional cake bottom, and then you have some jam in it, normally strawberry jam, and then you have some cream in it as well. You have something in the north of sweden that is very exotic in the way. That is certain kind of herring or fish that is actually rotten. So in the northern part of sweden that's huge tradition, but that's more local. I haven't just eaten it once. It's okay, I'm representing Sweden, so I should say it's great. The problem is that the smell is really problematic, so you need to be in the north and eat it outside.
Speaker 1:It's like Lindberger cheese, where it's tasty but the smell is a bit off-putting.
Speaker 2:And the thing is when you have people from the north moving down to Stockholm or Malmö or somewhere else and it doesn't happen so often, but but it could really be a fight between neighbors if they have this celebration of the surströmming, as we say in sweden, this kind of fish and open the can because it's canned and the smell is all over the house. So you should be outside and you should be at a place with not so many people. But that's more a northern tradition.
Speaker 2:I did want to get you to describe your favorite dishes, which don't necessarily have to be midsummer I personally really am a fan of crayfish and that tradition and that's also going back to my family, that we were able to fish our own crayfish. It's going back to childhood memories and that the kind of celebration you get when you're fishing to get it. I'm also a big fan of Swedish fresh potatoes. It is the best potatoes in the world actually. You just eat it with some butter and then salt and you don't cook it for so long because it's so fresh. Also, salmon. My Norwegian colleague might say it's more Norwegian, but for us it's part of the Swedish tradition.
Speaker 1:The crayfish. I'm very interested because you said you would fish for this or you would catch it as a child. But first of all, where do you fish for crayfish and how are they caught? Is it by a net?
Speaker 2:It's a really interesting question. What you have is normally in small lakes and we have a lot of small lakes in finland and sweden finland is also big crayfish uh or in small rivers. You can get them and then you put the cage down, uh, with. You fish some fish before this kind of fish that you don't eat. You push, you put the fish in the cave, you trick them to go in a little bit like a mousetrap, but bigger.
Speaker 1:How do you do that? You put something in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you put something in so you have the cave that you can go in, but they climb the net and then they are inside a box, a little bit like lobster, and then you pick them up and you can have 12 to 14 crayfish in one of these cages. And if you want to keep them my brother is big in this he's doing this every summer if you want to build up storage of crayfish, you actually keep them. It's not so nice. You keep them in a eating potatoes actually and you have them alive you have them alive until yeah you have them alive until for them to grow a little more.
Speaker 2:You could have them alive for 10 days, and then you boil them and then fatten them up yeah, and then you, you put the black crayfish down and it became red. And we have one of the big swedish poets, that poem saying no one die as cruelly as the crayfish because they die alive.
Speaker 1:And you said they're black and then they turn red in the water, but they're black before you throw them in the water.
Speaker 2:And then you serve them with dill and normally in the Swedish tradition you drink them with schnapps or vodka. The liquid tradition is a little bit going down in Sweden. I would say it's more white.
Speaker 1:I always picture that when I was in Sweden and at the summer house. Many families have the summer house tradition by. Like they're often not winterized, you only use them for a few months a year, is that right?
Speaker 2:You only use them for the summer normally, or maybe you could go out from April to October and then you need to close them down and normally, like at the r my grandfather built that place in 1940s and we don't have water closet, we have outdoor toilet and and I think we have some weird feeling that it's it's great in the summer if it's nature, if it's simple and yeah yeah, yeah, and it's often near a lake, so that's why you would do the crayfish at the lake, and often in midsummer don't you go jump in a lake, either skinny dipping or yeah, yeah, of course, depending on the family of course you.
Speaker 2:You, if you're close to the lake, you bathe. Uh yeah, at that time still, the lakes could be quite cold. So in the summer it's up to 20, 22 degrees Celsius, what you give 60, 70 Fahrenheit something. In the beginning of summer it could be 14, 14 degrees, but people go in anyway.
Speaker 1:Do you have a tradition of going in in winter?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an ice-baving tradition coming from Finnish and northern part of Sweden. But we have it. But what we do have done in the summer is that a Swedish kid bathes every day in the summer my now 89-year-old mother. She starts every morning, going down to the lake, Even if it's raining, even if it's 14 degrees. That's part of a tradition.
Speaker 1:From April to October.
Speaker 2:June to August, I would say.
Speaker 1:June.
Speaker 2:August, september maybe.
Speaker 1:But by August, september the water is getting a bit warmer right.
Speaker 2:But the lakes are normally quite small. So as soon as the weather is changing it's dropping quite rapidly and if you have four or five days of good sun you could go up quite rapidly. But if you take the traditional lakes already in september it's a little bit too cold and then we are going into an atmosphere of going back to work. Schools are starting. Summer is over, which is a sad time for many swedes. You know they happen as we feel in April and May, pay for it. In the fall. Swedish people already the day after midsummer say oh, it's going to get darker now, so you have melancholy around it as well.
Speaker 1:The only film I could think of was the horror film Midsummer, which you've probably seen it, and that's a bit regrettable because that's probably not how Swedes want their holidays remembered. But it is interesting because it it starts out very happy and light, but then you see that you know, like often in horror films, you see the madness below the surface. But are there any other, maybe better, depictions of Midsommar in the culture?
Speaker 2:Quite often in both TV series and movies you might have a scene from Midsommar, especially in family dramas, where all the expectations is built up around Midsommar, and so you have a little bit sad to say, but a little bit of the dark tradition of the Nordic or Swedish filmmaking. You also have this as a failed. Midsummer is a good way of telling a story about a family that's not really functioning.
Speaker 1:It goes back perhaps to the Ingmar Bergman tradition the very dark.
Speaker 2:Swedish film. That's the Ingmar Bergman tradition, I would say. But we had a Norwegian-Swedish TV series. That's quite big now. It also started on Midsommar and all the problems in the family. It was happy, but under the layer you could see, okay, they are getting a divorce.
Speaker 1:We have some of those films not only in the United States, I'm thinking in Europe too around Christmas, where the whole family comes together at Christmas. But then you have the typical family drama takeover. But in Midsommar it'll be even more dramatic because of course it's light out. You expect everything to be lighthearted. How food is used in diplomacy is quite fascinating. For example, you were recently the ambassador in Jordan, israel. Did you have dinners where you served Swedish dishes and did you have to make adaptations to the cuisine, given that you would have different products? It's a much hotter climate, to say the least. Or did you try and lay on a typical Swedish smorgasbord?
Speaker 2:It happened, but the big thing was that we had the modern Swedish cuisine that we're also trying to promote is quite climate-friendly. We have meat but more of fish, more vegetables. If you take Israel, for example, of course you had a kosher tradition for some of the guests. You needed to adjust to the kosher In Jordan, if you came to my residence there, I had a Jordanian chef, but he had been to Sweden and learned the tradition of Swedish cooking.
Speaker 2:Here in New York we have actually a chef from Finland, gitanian chef, but he had been to sweden and learned traditional swedish cooking. Here in new york we have a actually a chef from finland that was chef of the year in finland, heiki and he he is a good example of the modern swedish, finnish cuisine that is a combination of traditional nordic but with influences from from what he does then is that also here he's following the seasons quite a lot Rhubarb we had a lot for dessert for a while here because we find fresh. So that's also a way of being climate friendly in how we cook and also, yeah, it's a tool for us also in presenting more modern Sweden and Nordic.
Speaker 1:Rhubarb pie was very popular in my family and I think it is also English.
Speaker 2:It is a Swedish-Finnish tradition. We have the rhubarb, but he did it also in the fusion way and having five different rhubarb for dessert. It wasn't the rhubarb pie.
Speaker 1:In Jordan, for example, you had a diplomatic meal. Would you try and do a fusion, for example, of Swedish and Jordanian foods, or would the dishes be very traditionally Swedish?
Speaker 2:Traditionally Swedish, but also fusion sometimes and, of course, respecting traditions, quite often hosted iftars as well and, of course, if you have the iftar tradition, you should start with the dates.
Speaker 2:Then you invite people that are actually fasting, so you need to respect their traditions. Today you have people, quite a lot of people, fasting in sweden, where it is an interesting debate among imams if they should follow the swedish. Coming back to the light, the swedish daylight or the the, the alternatives is Riyadh daylight, because if you are in Stockholm in June with 22 hours of sun, the fasting is a little bit more challenging than in December. Most of them say that the best thing is to follow Saudi time because it's not doable. So now it's closer because it's in the spring, but give it a couple of years, it's going to be in December. Then if you're going to follow the Swedish tradition, then you're fasting for two hours.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing with the Swedish kitchen today is the mix, so the fact that Sweden today has actually 20% of the population foreign-born, which is higher than the United States 180 different nationalities by birth. It started with the Italian kitchen coming in, some of the Turkish kitchen, because we have a lot of Turkish immigrants, a little South American kitchen and the combination of the more Nordic, simple, plain, climate-friendly kitchen with Asian kitchen, japanese or be it it Italian one, is quite amazing actually.
Speaker 1:Now, the North is very interesting. Obviously, most of the population is in the South, understandably, but in the North it is a very different tradition, right? I mean, they are Arctic traditions, and are they connected perhaps with other Arctic cultures, or is it particularly to Sweden?
Speaker 2:You see the same traditions in Finland and Sweden. You have a quite big Swedish speaking minority in Finland. You have the Finnish minority in the Swedish side, in the north, also a little bit over to Norway. They are very close. Then of course you have the indigenous people, the Sami people. That goes over the borders. So that's in the north of Sweden, finland, norway and then also traditional Russia.
Speaker 1:Is there any blending of the culinary traditions in the north between the Sami people, swedish, finnish and maybe even some Russian tradition, but I'm thinking particularly the Sami? Do they eat more wild game, for example?
Speaker 2:One of the biggest part of the traditional Sámi culture and also Sámi economy is actually reindeer. So the reindeer is big up in the north, which also from time to time have created conflicts because these are animals that need really big spaces and big land areas. You could have the conflicts as we had in Sweden in the last decades with the wolf coming back to Sweden because they attacked the reindeer or the mining. You could also see the Sami influences in the Swedes living up north as well and culture and tradition of a lot of hunting and fishing, which of course makes a slightly difference.
Speaker 1:and then stockholm or malmo or gottenberg now my understanding is that so many people they're free to go back and forth across the borders of their hunting reindeer. Is that right?
Speaker 2:yes, and you have norway. Finland and sweden don't really have a border between us in that way. Long before we we joined the European Union, we had a passport union so you could travel without passport. The Nordic countries are in that way. We're close together. And you should also remember that Finland used to be a part of Sweden, norway used to be a part of Sweden, norway also used to be a part of Denmark and we fought all these wars. Today we could say we have the world's best neighbors. So you know, and in that way I think the Nordic model could also be a little bit the role model for the rest of the world, where we're not going back 300 years in history and look at this battle and find the differences between us. It's more that we have similarities between us.
Speaker 1:Today, I would say the Swedish kingdom was the far north for a long time, but they found ways to live with their neighbors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a summer house close to the Norwegian border, you don't need a passport to travel between the northern countries. Then we have had exceptions, when we had the refugee crisis and so on, when we needed to have some kind of border control, which was highly controversial in the Nordic countries because it made it more difficult to live in Malmö, work in Copenhagen.
Speaker 1:It'll be about food and culture. But because Sweden, norway and Finland all have those long spans north-south and the northern part is Arctic, it sounds almost like there's more difference between the south, where most of the people live, for example, in Stockholm, and the north than there is between, say, Stockholm and Oslo.
Speaker 2:It could be Culturally, culturally. It could be Culturally, culturally it could be. And my family one part of my family is close to the Norwegian border in a small town called Arvika in Värmland, a county next to Norway, and my father always described Oslo as his capital because it was just 170 kilometers. It was to Oslo he went to watch sports. If you are used to Danish and live close to the Danish border, you probably also watch Danish television. If you're close to the Swedish border, you watched Swedish television when you were a kid, which means that you understand each other. If you live close to the Norwegian border, you understand each other well. If you live in the north, uh, with different dialect, you will have a challenge understanding the danes, the finn.
Speaker 1:The finnish is a finnish, hungarian language, which is totally different right and finnish, and uh and hungarian are understood to be two of the most difficult languages in the world to learn as second languages so what then?
Speaker 2:I said so you have this history and you, after the second world war, finland was very poor. Sweden wasn't part of the war, so many finnish people came over to sweden also as kids. Uh, during the war, you sent your 12, 13 year old to sweden. Of course, for most of these people this was great, because they came to a peaceful place. And then they it was so poor so they actually could get food. Uh, but being separated from your family when you are early teenagers, these kinds of stories are also there.
Speaker 2:What happened last decade, I would say, or last decades, is that we are much more equal between each other in a way. Norway found oil, so they are super rich. So then young Swedes needed to go over to Oslo, which was a cool city, to work, so that that also is equalizing the relation. Finland last 10 years has been tremendously popular in sweden, and finland has also in certain ways taken the lead in in the nordic countries when it comes to joining the nato together with sweden. We were very impressed on how they handled the pandemic. Traditionally it used to be that Danes, finns and Norwegians followed Swedish news and Swedish politics. Now it's more. If you look at Swedish newspapers, it's more equal.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us in the Delegates Lounge. Thank you From Scandinavia, we make our way across Europe to the Mediterranean. The Spanish consulate in New York shared a favorite summer recipe with us. In Spain, where summer temperatures often soar above 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and occasionally much higher in recent years, the cuisine needs to be refreshing as well as tasty and nutritious. On searing summer days, the Spanish consular staff recommends samorejo, a cold, creamy tomato soup from Cordoba. This is not to be confused with gazpacho, another cold soup originating from the Andalusia region of Spain, that was famously served up in the classic Pedro Almodovar film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But gazpacho is a thinner blend of tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers that could be consumed either as a soup or as a refreshing summer drink, Whereas salmorejo is a thick, creamy, cold tomato soup typically served as a starter course for a Spanish dinner. I don't remember the first time I tasted salmonejo Eva, a member of the Spanish cultural staff, shares with us but I remember how it felt Cold, creamy and like pure sunshine in a bowl. Every summer in Andalusia, my grandmother would make it in her tiny kitchen, always with the same ritual Peeling the tomatoes with care, soaking the bread just right and finishing it with a swirl of olive oil that looked like gold. Salmorejo is really quite simple to make. Chop ripe tomatoes and blend until smooth, Strain and puree to remove the skin and seeds, or you could use a food bill if you have one. Add day-old white bread, preferably without a thick crust, and let it soak for a few minutes. Add a clove of garlic, extra virgin olive oil and salt to taste, Then chill for at least an hour before serving.
Speaker 1:We journey now to the Black Sea, a unique body of water where Europe and Asia meet. We're joined by diplomats from Romania and later Bulgaria, two neighboring Balkan countries bordering the Black Sea and traversed by the powerful Danube River. Andrea Mocanu, the deputy permanent representative of Romania to the United Nations in New York, has been a diplomat for 16 years. Among other things, she's focused on minorities and election observation. She shares her personal favorite recipes, and especially those only in season during the summer holidays in the rural village where she grew up. Andrea Mocanu, thanks so much for joining us in the Delegates Lounge and for hosting us today in your lovely mission to the United Nations.
Speaker 4:Hi, Alex, and thank you very much for inviting me. And yeah, welcome to our mission, the permanent mission of Romania. We're very happy to be part of this show.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. Well, we're very happy to have you. Let's start by talking about a personal favorite of yours. Is there a Romanian dish that's a personal favorite, and maybe tell us a little bit about, for example, how you learned to make it?
Speaker 4:Right, good question, and I think I'll jump with something which is not boring and I'll go for a dessert. In Romanian we call them cornulețe. Maybe a New Yorkish translation would be Romanian rugelach. And this is a dessert which reminds me of my family, of my grandmother, because this was the first dessert that I made with her. My brother was my assistant, so you know women empowerment. Yeah, this is a nice dish. You can serve it in any holidays.
Speaker 1:It's easy to make, and with tea, and with matcha tea Is it a dish that crosses borders Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and are there differences in the ways that each culture prepares it, or is it more of a regional dish?
Speaker 4:I think there are some nuances Like, for instance, I like it with a special Romanian plum jam from Topolov, which is well known in Europe, especially in the EU, but in Istanbul, for instance, I found it also with a Turkish delight. So you can do that, I mean, I can go through the ingredients, but the thing is that you have to use your hands to do it so you can have the flour, you can have the butter.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that your brother would be your assistant. You learned from your grandmother. Is it often done in family?
Speaker 4:Yes, yes, it is. I mean you need somebody to pour your ingredients into a bowl so you can mix them, and then you know. When you're a kid it's always fun to have your hands dirty. The idea is to make it fluffy from the beginning. So the more you have, like you know, pieces of butter and how you can mix them with, you know, with a flour, with a salt, with a bacon, so that with a lemon juice and so on and so forth, so it's so nice. And then my grandmother used to use something in in the recipe. You can use sour cream, but my mother used to put borscht. So this is an ingredient.
Speaker 4:Anyone from eastern europe knows what it is. It's normally a dish, but this is like a very sour thing made of yeast, and you can create it and you this is how you make a soup sour. So you have, this is one of the ingredients. So it gives them the kick for the dough to be fluffy and fresh. And then, once you mix them, you roll it, then you cut it with a pizza knife and you have a triangle.
Speaker 4:You put your jam or your Turkish delight or wherever you want, like on a pizza, you know, at the larger triangle part, put your jam or your Turkish delight or wherever you want at the like on a pizza, you know, at a larger triangle, part of the triangle, and then you start to roll and this is the product. You just put it in the oven, preheat it at. Let me see, because I don't know it by heart. You always oh, by the way, you always look at the recipe when you do it. I know the trick, but you always have to do the regular so you can preheat it in the oven at 175 Celsius, which is here it's 350 Fahrenheit.
Speaker 1:You have very distinct regions. Obviously you have the Black Sea region, the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania, each little village, or is there sort of a national cuisine?
Speaker 4:or is there sort of a national cuisine? Any Romanian cookbook would feature recipes from all the three regions. So if you look at the map, if you're on SpaceX, let's say, and you look on planet Earth and you will see Romania, you will see that there are three parts. So there is the Transylvania, which is the most famous, and Transylvania is influenced by Austria and Hungary. And you have, in the south you have Wallachia, which is more influenced by the Balkans and the Turks, and then in the east side, which is closer to Republic of Moldova, that's the influence from Russia. So this is something which goes together food and language, and culture and church.
Speaker 1:Well, of course Transylvania is famous, and perhaps a bit unfairly so, for the novel, the Dracula novel, and film. But are there particular dishes that are famous to Transylvania?
Speaker 4:Well, you're in luck because I studied in Transylvania. I studied in Cluj, cluj-napoca, which is a city in the middle of Transylvania. So there is a dish, a specific one, which is called cabbage à la Cluj, so it's very Romanian-French, it's heavy with some fat, but it's good.
Speaker 1:Is it rolled? My mother had a dish. She used to make cabbage rolls, so it's not cabbage rolls.
Speaker 4:It's not cabbage rolls, but it's so. It's not cabbage, it's not the cabbage. The cabbage rolls are the sarmale. You can find them in all the three regions, but this is varza a la cluj, this is how we call it in Romanian. It's cabbage a la cluj, and it's it's an interesting one.
Speaker 1:And then around the Black Sea. I imagine there's some fishing. Are there fish dishes and are they more popular as you get closer to the sea? Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4:So the part of Romania close to the Black Sea it's called Dobroge. We have there the Romanian influence, but also the Bulgarian, a bit of Turkish and a bit of Tatar influence and of course from Ukraine. I know they have like this, dolmas, that you're talking about the cabbage leaf, but not with the meat but with fish, so they can have it with that. I never tried them. I know they exist but I haven't tried it. I only tried like regular fish, because from the Danube and also from the sea, because you have the Danube Delta, everybody goes and fishes.
Speaker 1:So is the Danube Delta more popular for fishing. I mean, it's a very vast, it's very vast, exactly, and I think it's more popular.
Speaker 4:And the fish dishes are there. We call them saramura, basically it's um, you take the fish as a whole. You don't do it like uh pieces. So you take a fish as a whole, you put it on the grill and then you soak it in a bowl full of water and salt and a lot of spices, and this is how you try to do it. And the soup this one, the borscht made of fish, is also amazing.
Speaker 1:A lot of soups.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you flavor them with to make them a little more sour?
Speaker 4:So this one that my grandmother used to use for cornolets as well, the borscht. So this is made from yeast and from wheat. You can use it, it ferments and then it develops. This borscht, I think I like the sour thing. It's most common for the east part. So this is the influence from the Slavs, from the Russian, russian, ukrainian.
Speaker 1:And that I think of is more of a cold weather. Yeah exactly, but very hearty. You were surrounded by Slavic cultures. Romanian is obviously a romance language. The clue is in the name. So do you also have influences from the more Western Mediterranean Italian or Greek food? I mean, obviously you were a part of the Roman Empire, exactly?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we had the Dacians, which is a branch of the Tracians, so we were conquered then by the Romans and they brought the language, the culture. We are a Latin language, but when Romans were there they used the language of the soldiers, the language of the street. So that's why there is a bit of difference between the Romanian and Spanish, or Romanian and Italian. It's easier for me to understand Italian and Spanish rather than them to understand me. If they see it written, yes, they understand it. So this is a bit of difference. And, of course, so we have the substrate, which is the Dacian language. Then we have the main part of the language, which is Latin, and then we have additions from the Russian, which we find it in the religion, in orthodoxy. We also have from Ottomans, from Turks. There are a couple of words.
Speaker 1:Well, in fact, you do have an Ottoman period as well. You mentioned the Turkish delight. Do you have other Turkish influences on the cuisine? I think the coffee.
Speaker 4:This is what they brought to us the coffee and the sweets. If there is something that I cherish, this is what they brought to us.
Speaker 1:And what about the mountain regions too, the Carpathian?
Speaker 4:Mountains. Did they have anything typical that they added to the cuisine? Well, there is something which we also do during Christmas. It's called pomana porculi, which means it's like pork stew.
Speaker 5:We use it for pork stew.
Speaker 4:But basically you take bites of meat with some liver, with some like small things from the pork, and you try not boil them but you keep them on the fire, but very slow fire. Imagine that these used to be done in the woods by the shepherds and you put it outside in a big cauldron, Exactly like in a cauldron, and you leave there and they simmer in a very low, very slow fire and that's what they do in in the mountains mostly in fact, pork is the traditional meat, uh, that you eat at christmas time.
Speaker 1:Yes, and is that because it's after the harvest? Perhaps I mean on the farms, that would be the hog killing time around the harvest festival, so you would have, yeah, that at christmas.
Speaker 4:It's after the harvest and it's after the how do you call it? After the fasting? So we have some fasting, so it's the Christmas fasting, which is five weeks before Christmas. We have the Easter fasting seven weeks before Easter, so it's like Lent only at Christmas time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're Lent, and is that typical of the Eastern Orthodox religion or is it particular to Romania?
Speaker 4:I think it's typical to the Orthodox, yeah, yeah, but the main ingredient for Christmas is pork. For the Easter it's not a rabbit, you know it's not a Easter rabbit, but it's the lamb, I think it's. So we cannot eat during the fasting or the land. We cannot eat anything from animals. So no milk, no eggs, no meat. We can only eat vegetables. Um, and there are for uh, for christmas, because it's the fasting finishes with a celebration, because you know Christ was born. We have each Sunday. You can eat fish. You prepare for a nice celebration for the Easter, because it's the death of Jesus Christ. In those seven weeks I think we have only three times we are allowed to eat the fish.
Speaker 1:And is there any particular way that the fish would be prepared, or is that up to the family how they prefer to prepare?
Speaker 4:It's up to the family how they prefer to prepare. It's up to the family, but I remember during old times you preferred, if you didn't have like during communism, if you didn't have enough oil, then you would use the the grill. That was easier.
Speaker 1:So it depends on on the scarcity of the resources I know at one point in your career you did uh study minority groups.
Speaker 4:I handled the human human rights in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, yeah, one of my portfolios was the rights of the person belonging to national minorities in Romania.
Speaker 1:We have 19 of them, you have 19 ethnic groups, and I know, of course, the Roma, obviously, and presumably some of the surrounding countries. Yes, so Hungarians.
Speaker 4:Turks, Turks, Bulgarians, Tatars, Serbs, Ukrainians, Russians especially closer to the Danube Delta, but also Italians, because they used to be there doing business Greeks, Czechs, Slovaks. Yeah, have they each brought their influence to the cuisine. I think I can see the influence of the cuisine, especially during the holidays.
Speaker 1:Now, of course, today, if you live in an urban area, you can buy anything you want at the shop year round, even when it's out of season. But you know, growing up in the villages did you have certain ways that you would cure or preserve foods for winter, for example. I mean, did you learn any of that from your grandmother? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 4:I mean, she wouldn't have done her job if she wouldn't have taught me. So I grew up in the countryside and I had everything there on our plot. I cried the first time I went to the city to buy a bunch of dill, because normally I would take it from my garden. So for winter. It's interesting that during autumn we always try to organize ourselves for the winter, so you know at least to have something to eat as natural as possible until January, february, because then in February you already started to find something for the spring. So I remember my mother putting the carrots and the potatoes in the basement in a tray with sand so they can be preserved. You can also put like if you take peppers and you use a needle and a thread on their little green stuff and then you make like a pearl string, but it's made of peppers.
Speaker 1:So you have a pepper string. You would hang that in the basement In the basement.
Speaker 5:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4:So then it can. I mean you could see that is like with a lot of they were not fresh, but they were. You can still have like the good nutrients from there.
Speaker 1:Are the peppers very spicy?
Speaker 4:No, not the spicy. I don't like spicy, and I think those are from our neighboring country, bulgaria. We have those as well, so we used to have that, but I don't eat spice. My grandfather used to have that.
Speaker 1:And those are obviously warm weather vegetables, so you'd have to grow them and preserve them. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or onions. You could always put them in the attic. It was a nice thing. It was smelling of nice ingredients all over the place.
Speaker 1:Mmm nice. Now, which of those three regions was your village?
Speaker 4:in. It was born in Galac, which is close to Moldova, which is also close to the Danube. It's like 50 kilometers from the border with Moldova.
Speaker 1:But you thought your family or your family might be more from the east.
Speaker 4:Yes, my grandfather used to tell me that we I mean he knew also from his grandfather that apparently we were, our family, was coming from the Bujak, which is closer to Crimea. So I have some influence in my family from the Mongols, from the Tatars, and my family name is actually something which reminds me of that. Mokhanu in Romanian means one, it's one of the synonyms to the word shepherd, and in Mongolia when I visited, I asked about this and some old guy told me that, yes, you can pronounce it Machchan, which apparently means also a shepherd or somebody that takes care of the of the sheep.
Speaker 1:So yeah, well, shepherding would be very, very important everywhere, but particularly in Mongolia. Yeah, yeah, they know a lot about herding. Now, were you in Mongolia as part of a diplomatic mission?
Speaker 4:I was in Mongolia, involved as an election observer after Mongolia joined the OECD. Oecd they were having elections and then we this is the working methods of the OECD to have election observation missions. So in Mongolia they used to do that, like the small bits of cheese, but they would put it on top of the yurta to, you know, to evaporate all the water and they would eat that whenever they were traveling on the horses and so on. I tried one. It's a bit too sour for my taste, but yeah it was an interesting one.
Speaker 1:Well, that's interesting because actually you do have the sour soups, but in Kazakhstan.
Speaker 4:I had the horse steak. How did it?
Speaker 1:taste. Did it taste different from other meats? No, I didn the horse steak. How did it taste? Did it taste different from other meats?
Speaker 4:No, I didn't know at the time.
Speaker 5:They told me afterward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:But you were okay with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As a diplomat, you have to adapt.
Speaker 4:You have to yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, the oldest, I guess, culinary item that Romania is known for is the wine, because your wine industry goes back, I guess I was going to say to the Roman Empire, but maybe even before that was Thracia known for its winemaking.
Speaker 4:Yes, it was In history. We know that they had wines. Then a king came and because he wanted to have his soldiers sober, he forbid. So he cut all the wine, all the wine plants. When?
Speaker 1:was this, was this in the Roman times Before? Oh, okay, so this is pre-Roman, pre-roman, yeah, oh, okay, we're talking about 3,000 years.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it was before the Romans and then with the Romans. Of course, the wine came back before the Romans and then with the Romans. Of course, the wine came back when, for instance, when we had our skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire, wine was one of the gifts that we were compelled to give to, you know, to the Ottomans, as a tribute, exactly along other stuff, but wine was part of that and I'm very proud to say that now we also have a lot of wine cultures and wine houses and, yeah, I mean it's a business which I wouldn't say it pays off, but it's nice to have a good wine and to have an alternative to the most famous one, like the French or the Spanish or the Italian.
Speaker 1:Are there particular varieties that it's famous for? So?
Speaker 4:in Transylvania not that much because obviously it's a bit higher and it's closer to the mountains. I'm guessing it's more of a beer culture in Transylvania. Yeah, beer and brandy, because Palinka brandy and the plum brandy the Palinka is from that part, brandy and the plum brandy the palinka is from that part in moldova, like the east part is, it's more um red wine and sweet, sweet white wine. In the south, because of the sun, you have more dry wine and dobroja, for instance.
Speaker 1:Closer to the black sea the wine is a bit dry what's a traditional dish you might serve in the heat of summer.
Speaker 4:My favorite one are pancakes with a special jam, which it's really some. Until now I only found it in Romania, so it's a black cherries jam. They're very hard to find. It's a bit.
Speaker 1:it's a bit sour, but sweet at the same time, because if it's a jam, Sour cherries, and are they hand picked picked, I mean, from your village or do you buy them in the store or the shop, or both?
Speaker 4:uh, well, I think now you can find it in the market, but not that much. I remember that when I grew up in my village we had only two trees, uh, one of them was in my, in the garden of my godfather. So, hey, I had um, it was easy for me to to find it um, so pancakes done by my grandmother with this kind of jam. Yes, okay. And then our role as kids was to take, because the the black cherries are even smaller than the regular cherries, so our role was to, you know, to take the stem out. So the pit, when you take it out, because they're black cherries, your hands are black.
Speaker 1:So, kids, we would do that. Anything where you could get messy in the kitchen, of course you can get messy in the kitchen. But yeah, did you help her in the jam making process? No, do you know about how long it took?
Speaker 4:her to make the jam. Oh, that's over three or four hours. It is a long process and she always said don't come next to the cauldron because there is a superstition in the in. You know in the field, when you do a jam, not to touch it. You know, because otherwise you might. It might, I don't know spoil or something like that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, so, and this was over a sort of cauldron in the kitchen. Yeah, of course, in the kitchen or outside, over a fire.
Speaker 4:It's better because the taste from a cauldron, the food tastes better in the cauldron, like a big bronze cauldron that you'd have over a fire outdoors and it would bubble away for maybe three hours.
Speaker 1:Three, four hours, three, four hours.
Speaker 4:So you have jams, sour cherries, sugar, anything else, I guess pectin, or is there something that goes in it? Maybe some of the lemons, just to keep it, you know, not to be spoiled.
Speaker 1:Nice. So then she would make that, and then, while it's fresh, you'd spread it on the pancakes.
Speaker 4:And anyway my grandma would start. You know to stay for five hours during summertime with a fire. You start at 5 am.
Speaker 1:You'd want to do this early in the morning. Early in the morning, the midday heat.
Speaker 4:So that's why I wouldn't be there, because at 5 am I'm not waking up.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, this was really lovely.
Speaker 4:Thank you again for including Romania on this journey, which is so important in our lives, not only the diplomatic, but all the lives.
Speaker 1:It is very important Cultural diplomacy, but also just to be able to share your culture with others. So, yeah, well, thank you for joining us at the Delegates Lounge.
Speaker 4:Thank, you for having me.
Speaker 1:From Romania we slip through the narrow Bosphorus Strait to Greece, where the cuisine comes with a dash of ancient philosophy. Mary Vax of Vanadu, the public diplomacy chief at the Greek consulate in New York, emphasizes that their cuisine is not only regarded as one of the tastiest, but also as one of the healthiest in the world because of its emphasis on fresh ingredients like olive oil, fruits and vegetables, lean proteins and aromatic herbs. She wrote the following about a typical Greek savory dish olive pie called spanakopita. The name derives from the Greek words spanaki, spinach and pita pie. It combines a flaky phyllo dough, creamy filling and aromatic herbs and can be served as either an appetizer or as a main course.
Speaker 1:Spanakopita can be traced back to the gastronomic practices of ancient Greece, and one of the first references to it comes from the 5th century BC, poet Philoxenus, who wrote of a similar dish being served at the end of a banquet. Athenos, a Greek gastronomist and orator of the 2nd century AD, wrote that the ancient Greeks made bread in various shapes to be offered as sacrifices to the gods. Spinach originated in the Middle East and arrived in Europe by way of the Byzantine Empire. To make the perfect Spanakopita, you'll need phyllo dough, a thin, flaky pastry dough that you can find in the frozen section of most grocery stores fresh spinach, feta cheese, onions, herbs such as dill, spearmint and parsley, and olive oil. Herbs such as dill, spearmint and parsley, and olive oil. After cooking the spinach and sautéing the onions in olive oil, you'll combine the mixture and spread it between layers of the phyllo dough brushed with yet more olive oil, and then bake it in a preheated oven until golden brown.
Speaker 1:Bulgaria, which lies between Greece and Romania, shares a similar history and culinary tradition with its Balkan neighbors. However, as Andrea noted, bulgarian dishes tend to be spicier. Bulgarian cuisine puts more emphasis on paprika, vinegar, garlic and hot peppers. Bulgarian holidays, celebrating the emergence from winter into summer, begin in March and last throughout the warm season. As Bulgarian diplomat Svetozar Dimitrov explains, he is a first secretary at Bulgaria's permanent mission to the United Nations in New York, focused on social, humanitarian and cultural issues. Svetozar Dimitrov, thank you for joining us in the Delegates' Lounge.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Alex. It's a pleasure to meet you as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you, alex. It's a pleasure to meet you as well. I do want to thank you for greeting us and your particularly lovely mission to the United Nations. Unlike many of the missions, it's not right next to the United Nations. We're way up here, next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Speaker 3:It is a bit further away from the UN than a lot of other missions, but I think what it lacks in convenience, it compensates for with its historic qualities and its beauty. It's an early 20th century Gilded Age mansion. It's known as the Benjamin Sands Mansion and the mansion was designed featuring some very elegant limestone detailing.
Speaker 1:I assume your government bought it sometime after your government joined the United Nations.
Speaker 3:Indeed, bulgaria joined the United Nations in 1955. So we're actually celebrating our 70th anniversary, and the building was purchased in the late 1960s.
Speaker 1:It really is lovely, because this is the special Midsummer edition for Bulgaria, because you have a longer warm season. You have not one, but a whole string of summer holidays from March to July. Isn't that right? And does each one have its own characteristics? Each holiday?
Speaker 3:So I would say that we start our string of holidays in March before we get to the summer holidays. The first big spring holiday is Baba Marta Day. It literally translates Baba means grandmother, so it's grandmother March Day or granny March Day, and it's quite a popular old pagan holiday that's celebrated mostly in Bulgaria and it symbolizes the arrival of spring. So on March 1st Bulgarians exchange martinitsi, which are these little red and white bracelets or tassels. It doesn't matter how they're shaped. Sometimes they're also shaped like little people and you can put them on with a synonym.
Speaker 1:Perhaps granny represents the winter. I mean, that's really when you go from winter to spring in March. It's more of a metaphor. Yes, it's more of a metaphor. Yes, More of a metaphor, okay.
Speaker 3:What comes next is Sirni Zagovizni. This is another festival that marks the beginning of Lent and it's celebrated, I think, about seven weeks before Easter. It's a very beautiful holiday, which in some ways could be connected or compared to Thanksgiving in the US. But instead of saying thanks, you ask for forgiveness. You say sorry, forgive me if I have done anything wrong to you, and then and then people will normally say of course you're forgiven, even though there is nothing to forgive. Um, it's also a time when uh, especially in villages, people will light up big fires and we'll have folk dances around them.
Speaker 1:Bonfires you mean like a big bonfire in the center of the village?
Speaker 3:Yes, big bonfires exactly so when you're driving through the countryside at night on that night, you can often see big bonfires everywhere. One of the traditions that's associated with that holiday is that people dress up in animal furs and they wear big bells to ward off the evil spirits. So they parade around the villages and towns like this, warding off the evil spirits and um do they? Wear masks. They do wear masks and they're supposed to be quite scary, usually like halloween.
Speaker 1:Yes and um I've heard that you have a tradition of fire walking, and at midsummer. Is that still true, or is that more of an old folk tradition?
Speaker 3:We do have a tradition of fire walking. It's practiced nowadays. It's been preserved mostly in the Stranja mountain. The Stranja mountain is a very beautiful, relatively small mountain with a lot of oak trees that borders the southernmost section of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. On its eastern side it's quite sparsely populated. One of the villages where it's most preserved and they have a festival every year is called Bulgari, which, as you can guess, also means Bulgarians, so it's the village of Bulgari, and have a fire walking festival there. It's walking on coals actually, not fire.
Speaker 1:But they're hot coals. They are hot coals and they have nothing on their feet to protect their feet. They're walking barefoot over hot coals.
Speaker 3:They are walking barefoot, normally carrying an icon.
Speaker 1:Oh, so there is a religious aspect to it.
Speaker 3:Well, this is probably a contentious issue for some, because I believe the church is not a very big fan of these firewalking traditions.
Speaker 1:Because it sounds like there's a little bit of a pagan element, like it may have predated the Christianization. Is that right?
Speaker 3:It's most certainly a pagan. It's most certainly a pagan tradition. Easter and St George's Day, which tend to be pretty close on the calendar, is a time when Bulgarians will often prepare roast lamb at home, so this is a time when you're eating a lot of roast lamb. There's also a traditional pastry for Easter called kuzunak, a sweet pastry. It's a. It's a braided sweet bread, basically, um. It's sometimes infused with lemon zest or raisins, and it's often sprinkled with sugar on top. Um, I I don't know if it symbolizes anything per se, but it is something that's uh, that's usually um, consumed for easter and and during, throughout and during that whole period.
Speaker 1:Do you know um what the preparation is like? Like? Is this something that takes several hours to prepare and the family would be there, the or is it relatively easy? Do you know?
Speaker 3:I wouldn't say it's easy, it's um, it's, it's one of those, uh, it's one of those breads that require very fine flour, so I think it takes a bit of sifting. There's also a more modern summer midsummer tradition, if you will, which is also worth noting it's called July morning.
Speaker 1:Morning, as in grieving or as in waking up.
Speaker 3:Morning, as in waking up early in the morning. You could call it a counterculture tradition. I think it started in the 70s, perhaps so definitely a bit of a hippie association, and it takes place on the last night of June, so June 30th, and into the morning of July 1st. It's generally seen as something that was inspired by Uriah Heep's rock song July Morning, and people will gather on the Black Sea coast that evening on June 30th to welcome the sunrise, celebrate freedom, hope and new beginnings. To welcome the sunrise, celebrate freedom, hope and new beginnings. It's a nice, slightly rebellious and optimistic.
Speaker 1:Kind of a modern, hippie version of the traditional. It sounds a lot like the Midsummer celebration, but with a modern twist. Of course the Midsummer celebration predated Christianization. It was in a way a bit hippie in that it was a folk, druid, pagan tradition. So you know, maybe whatever is old is new again.
Speaker 3:That's very true.
Speaker 1:Now, I did want to talk about the cuisine, and we can start with summer cuisine. You don't have to limit yourself to it. And I'm wondering how regional it is as well, because you have the Black Sea coast, you have the Danube, which traverses your country. It goes all the way from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, and then you have mountain regions. So is there a great difference in what you might eat this time of year whether you're near the Black Sea or whether you're in the mountains?
Speaker 3:Well, there are some regional differences, but you know some regional specialties, but I would say some of the foods that are most popular throughout the country are generally to be found everywhere. One such summer there's a summer cold soup which is called tarator.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's lovely. Tell me how you'd prepare it. A cold soup sounds delicious right now.
Speaker 3:It's really great when it's warm, and Bulgaria does get pretty hot in July and August. It has pretty simple ingredients. You need some Bulgarian yogurt, and I'm highlighting Bulgarian before yogurt, because other types of yogurt that are often sold in the US, for example, or abroad, don't taste quite the same.
Speaker 1:I know comparisons are difficult between countries, but is Bulgarian yogurt similar to Greek yogurt which we could find in the US?
Speaker 3:It's somewhat similar to Greek style or Greek yogurt, but it's a bit less thick and it's a bit more zesty. It has a slightly more lemony taste, in a good way, so it's not unpleasantly sour, but it's fresher so it's not unpleasantly sour, but it's, it's fresher.
Speaker 3:So how do you prepare that summer soup? Um, so, for the summer soup, you need some bulgarian yogurt. You need, you need a cucumber typically typically one of those longer, thinner english cucumbers is what I, what they call them in the us, I think, uh, you don't, you don't want the small ones with the big seeds and then you need a bit of garlic, a bit of salt, and what you do is you dice the cucumber, you put the little bits of cucumber in a bowl, then, separately, you mix in some Bulgarian yogurt with water so that you dilute it to a consistency that's probably a bit thinner than a thick soup, but thicker than bouillon, and you put that on top of the cucumber, you mix them in and you add a bit of garlic paste, a bit of salt, a bit of dill and then some olive oil. So it's really simple, and when you consume it in summer, what people will often do is they'll put a few ice cubes in it just to make it.
Speaker 1:So at no point is it heated and you'll chill it maybe right before serving with the ice cubes.
Speaker 3:It's probably a good idea to chill it and keep it in the fridge for a bit before serving, but you don't have to. You could also just add ice cubes, or you could do both.
Speaker 1:It sounds very refreshing for the hot weather months. You do export wine to the US, correct?
Speaker 3:Well, yes, there are individual wineries that export wine to the US and worldwide. Some of the most traditional grape varieties in Bulgaria, such as Mavrud Melnik and Dimiatar, are red.
Speaker 1:Do you have other traditions as well? Beer making spirits?
Speaker 3:sometimes countries have a particular liqueur that they're associated with so the most traditional um liquor, I would say, is rakia, which a lot of I I've noticed that when I mention rakia to a lot of people, the response that I frequently get is oh you know, I've tried or have heard of, heard of Turkish rakhi, but even though there's a similarity in the names, those are completely different drinks Completely different.
Speaker 1:Are they made from different fruits or what is it derived from?
Speaker 3:So Turkish rakhi is a bit like Greek ouzo, so it's more of an aniseed-flavored drink, whereas Bulgarian we also have that we call that mastika. And actually bulgarian mastika is um has this very typical trait, which is that, unlike uzo, which when you dilute when you dilute uzo with water it turns white, uh. But when you dilute bulgarian mastika with water, um, as you're supposed to do to drink it it turns into a, it looks crystalline, it looks like there's little crystals in the glass. So that's quite unique about it.
Speaker 1:So is that sort of a national drink, would you say, in Bulgaria?
Speaker 3:I wouldn't say that's the national drink, but it is a drink that's quite popular, especially during the summer. But the more national drink is rakia and that's brandy. That's often popular, especially during the summer. But the more national drink is rakia and that's brandy. That's often made from grapes, but it can also be made from plums or pears or apples even and I've heard that back in the day plum rakia used to be more popular. But in the last, let's say, 40 or 50 years, grape rakia has really come to dominate the market and people's tastes and a lot of people in villages and small towns will produce their own grapes.
Speaker 3:And then one interesting aspect is that Bulgarian villages often have a communal rakia-making facility oh really which they share, and for a very small fee you can bring your own grapes there and brew your own rakia. And it's hard liquor. It's the same strength, more or less as whiskey and it's not a sweet liquor. It's sort of similar like whiskey but it has more of a grape taste. As far as I just wanted to add about the beer, that beer making in Bulgaria started after liberation from the Ottoman Empire, which was in the late 19th century, 1878. And I believe it was brought by Czech businessmen in Bulgaria. There were a lot of Czechs who moved to Bulgaria after it was newly liberated, and they were, they played an important role in many fields of cultural and business life in this newly re-established country. And it's important to point out that it was newly re-established and not established, because otherwise Bulgaria is a very old country. It was officially recognized in its current location in the Balkans since 681 AD, so in the 1980s we celebrated 13 centuries of existing.
Speaker 1:So you have some traditions that you got, you would say, from the Ottoman in terms of cuisine, but some of them obviously predate the arrival of the Ottomans to the region?
Speaker 3:Probably, and I don't think there's enough enough records and it's very difficult to prove. I think in Southeastern Europe and in the Balkans there are always these little arguments between neighbors about who what comes from whom and who is the rightful owner or founder to you know different foods. Actually, one interesting story in that context is that there's a very popular Bulgarian salad called Shopska Salata, and this is named after the people, shopi, who live mostly in the area around Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. It's known as the Shopluk, or the region where the Shops, the Shopi, live, a salad which, of course, many Bulgarians who are not aware of its history also think that it's a traditional salad. But it's even funnier that people in other countries often claim that it is traditional to their countries, whereas in fact this is a 20th century recipe that was invented by the state-owned tourist board in Bulgaria called Balkan Tourists in the 1950s.
Speaker 1:It was the state-run tourism board and what are the ingredients and why do people think it's so old?
Speaker 3:The ingredients are very simple and very typical. It's diced cucumber tomato, a bit of onion, a bit of pepper, and the most popular peppers that we use for this in Bulgaria are these light, pale green peppers that are a bit like banana peppers, but they're sweet, they're not like jalapenos. This is topped with finely grated Bulgarian white cheese or feta cheese on top, and there's of course, a bit of olive oil and salt and red vinegar.
Speaker 3:That's very Mediterranean, very regional, so of course the ingredients are very typical for the whole region, but this particular salad with the grated cheese is and particularly some of your favorites.
Speaker 1:If there are some that you remember growing up your mother or grandmother making, or have you ever helped them bake them in the kitchen? I don't know if little boys are into that, but maybe there are some memories you have around, particular cultural favorites.
Speaker 3:Well, I certainly did help out in the kitchen when I was a kid and I've I've um, you know, I I do cook. Nowadays. There's a very nice spread called Keopulu. The main ingredients that go into Keopulu are eggplant, and you certainly need the most of that. In addition to that, you need bell peppers, tomatoes. So, for example, you might take 1.5 pounds of eggplant, two bell peppers and then two tomatoes, and the best tomatoes you could use are the so-called Roma tomatoes, the ones that are often used for canning as well, because they're not excessively juicy. But if you don't have those, you could use any tomatoes really. And then you'd need a couple of garlic cloves that you mince, some fresh parsley that you chop, olive oil, red wine, vinegar, salt and maybe a bit of black pepper, and that's it. It's a very easy recipe. You're supposed to grill or broil the peppers and the eggplant until their skins are charred peppers in the eggplant until their skins are charred.
Speaker 3:And then an interesting side story about that is that Bulgarians living in villages will often char these on top of a sheet of metal that they just place over an open fire, and it's a beautiful smell. It just smells like roast peppers. It's very, very rich and very pleasant. It's quite a summer smell as well. It's one of the most representative cultural and this is something that's eaten throughout the whole country. It's not just the Black Sea coast, you know. You have the same thing in Sofia and Plovdiv, in the south of the country or anywhere, but contemporary city people who don't have the opportunity to start an open fire and cook things on top of a sheet of metal. So there's a contraption called Cusco Peck, which literally translates as pepper roaster, pepper baker, and you plug it in and it contains a ceramic cylinder and usually it has space for one, two or three peppers or for one eggplant does achieve that same charred effect that you would otherwise need an open fire for.
Speaker 1:What are the different varieties of fish that you take from the Black?
Speaker 3:Sea, black Sea is, and I'm going to veer away from food for just a second here, because, the Black Sea has a very interesting. It's a very fascinating setup. It's not quite like the Dead Sea, which is all salt, but it has layers and the bottom layer consists of denser, saltier water that comes in from the Aegean and the Mediterranean and it somehow flows under the lighter, fresher water that comes from big rivers like the Danube.
Speaker 3:So it's an undercurrent of salt water, of real sea salt water it's something like an undercurrent, but what that does is that it prevents these layers from mixing, and so the deep layers of the Black Sea actually don't have any oxygen, which is great if you're a diver looking for ancient shipwrecks, because they are very well preserved even wooden ships from thousands of years ago are perfectly well preserved but it's less great if you're a fish, because of course, you need oxygen to to live if you're a fish. So so most of the fish in the black sea live in the upper layers of the sea, which is why it's a bit there's a bit less variety as far as as far as fish, compared to other big oceans Compared to, say, the Mediterranean.
Speaker 3:Compared to the Mediterranean, for example, but still the fish that you do find is really great. So some of the varieties that are fished are Sprat Horse, macarelle, bonito. I suppose the kind of the king or queen of the Black Sea fish is a black sea turbot, which is a flat fish living on the bottom. Then there's bluefish, which is quite popular, and even things like garfish, which I think in Garfish, garfish is a very interesting elongated, very nice. I've heard that in some parts of the world they avoid it because, uh, because its bones are actually have this greenish, bluish hue, oh, um, and I've, uh, I've read that you know, in some parts of the world they didn't think that was appetizing, um, but it is actually a very, very tasty fish when it's barbecued, for example now you eat all of those varieties we've all those varieties.
Speaker 3:Um, there's even uh, the black sea even has these little sharks which are edible. Oh yeah, they're very small sharks, they don't attack humans.
Speaker 1:They live in the Black Sea or Dranean.
Speaker 3:I wanted to add about the music. I wanted to add that Bulgaria is a very rich folk music tradition. Our folk music is still. You know, it's not a museum exhibit, it's something that's still part of life. One of the most iconic Bulgarian folk songs is a song from the Rodopi Mountains in the south of the country. It's called Izlel et Deliu Haidutin, which literally translates as Deliu the revolutionary has gone out. The reason why it's so well known is because when the Voyager capsule was sent into space I think in the 7th, potentially by NASA they included a golden record like a vinyl record but made out of metal, and this particular folk song from Bulgaria was included as one of what NASA thought was one of the most representative cultural sounds of Earth. Wow, so it is somewhere in space. You can check where the Voyager is right now.
Speaker 1:So if aliens from outer space ever discover the Voyager, they will hear that.
Speaker 3:So potentially there's some aliens enjoying Bulgarian folk music. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Svetozar, thank you for joining us in the Delegates Lounge.
Speaker 3:Thank you, alex, it's been my pleasure Satsang with Mooji.
Speaker 5:I do need, I do need, and that's it from the Delegates Lounge. We'd like to thank our esteemed guests, who have graciously allowed us to share their hard-earned insights into what really matters. And then there's you, our listeners, who we hope are sufficiently edified to clamour for more of the same. Do drop in for a weekly episode on Thursday, or from time to time if we're on the road, for special events, in which case there'll be a bonus episode. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you've heard, please take a moment to rate or review the show, as it helps others who share your abiding interest in world affairs to find their way to the Delegates Lounge. You can connect with us on many popular social media platforms or reach out to us directly at infothedelicatesloungecom. We're a small team so we can't respond to every message, but we will read them. Our show this week was written and produced by the host and by yours truly executive producer Frank Radford. No-transcript. ¶¶. ¶¶. © transcript Emily Beynon.