The Egg and Ankica

SEATTLE — Vlatko Petrovic brought the eggs, beautiful orbs the color of fine, aged leather. He had simmered them for 36 hours, a bit shy of the seven days they are normally cooked by the Sephardim of Sarajevo.

A group of us have gathered one Sunday for a meal of traditional foods fromwhat had once been Yugoslavia and what today is a dangerous mess. Vlatko directs the cooking. His wife Ankica ( An-kit-sa ) guides a guest through their recent past.

When she fled Sarajevo with the help of members of the Sephardic community in 1992, Ankica Petrovic packed all she could of her life into a single suitcase. The rest she carried in her heart and in her memories. These eggs on the table are just such memories, the spirit of a Sarajevo that has suffered inexorable change, the spirit of Passover that lives on.

I can’t help but wonder how ancient this Sephardic recipe must be, and how oddly fitting in this current context. The egg as a symbol fits so well with Passover--the image of rebirth, of springtime, of fertility. And yet these are hard-boiled eggs, suggesting the hardness of life lived as a slave. Or as a refugee struggling to find a new home.

When I ask Ankica for the recipe, suggesting quantities for a dozen eggs, she replies, “No, you need more eggs than that. This isn’t about quantities. This is about sharing. You must make enough to give away.”

Later, when I finally get Ankica to sit down with me to discuss specifics of the recipes, she lets her eyes settle on me and finally says, “I have to tell you this one thing first. It makes me feel unpleasant to sit here and speak this way about this food because so many thousands of Bosnians are hungry. When I recall the particular gatherings we hosted, and the friends who shared those pleasant moments at the same table. And today they are besieged in Sarajevo. Today they are hungry.”

In her homeland, Ankica Petrovic was a professor of ethnomusicology at the Music Academy of the University of Sarajevo. She received her Ph.D. in 1977 from Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland--the first Yugoslav woman to hold a Ph.D. in that field--and she brought back to her home a much broader context for studying folklore and music. “I learned,” she says, “to study music in its full cultural and social context.” Today she is recognized in Israel as the foremost expert on the musical traditions of Bosnia’s Sephardic community.

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Sarajevo’s Sephardic community dates back to the 16th Century. It was never a ghetto community. Under Turkish rule, Jews could live anywhere they chose. In pre-World War II Sarajevo, of the 80,000 inhabitants of the city, 10,000 were Jews, mostly Sephardim. In the 1980s, when Ankica began her research, the population of Sarajevo had climbed to 500,000, but only 2,000 Sephardim remained and their music, both secular and liturgical, was dying out with the oldest generation.

The religious music, she discovered, was particularly endangered because services weren’t regularly held in the city’s temples. And it is not notated music but music passed on within the families of the rabbis and hazans (cantors) as an oral tradition. “It was the last possible moment for picking up this tradition,” Ankica explains.

Today there are only 200 Sephardim left, mostly men who have sent their families away in the hopes that when peace returns to Sarajevo they can bring their families back where they belong. Because of the work of Ankica Petrovic, much of their musical heritage will remain intact. In fact, one of her students acts as hazan for the Sephardic community, singing the ancient liturgical chants during the holidays. Ironically, he’s a Muslim dedicated to saving the music.

Sarajevo’s Jews were among the first to recognize the oncoming disaster that became the war in Bosnia. The Jewish community organized convoys to evacuate its population, and having done that, continued its efforts to help Serbs, Croats and Muslims escape the killing. It also organized the only effective pharmacy in a city without medicine at the height of the siege. Not only was the Sephardic community able to bring medicine into Sarajevo through the humanitarian channels it had helped establish, the medicine was offered to everyone, regardless of ethnic background and at no charge.

Ankica Petrovic was on the last convoy out, after seven months of siege. Vlatko, who was a music director of Sarajevo TV and an organizer of classical music festivals, stayed in Sarajevo for 21 months.

When she left Sarajevo, Ankica left behind the vast majority of her research, the years of methodical taping of liturgical chants of the Sephardim as well as the music of the Muslim community. She tried to move her collection out of her apartment before evacuating, to little avail. It was too hard, she says, to run through the streets with bags of books and tapes. And there really wasn’t anyplace safe to store the collection. There wasn’t even wood available in Sarajevo to build shelving. A large portion of the collection was lost when the Petrovic apartment was shelled. The rest is now in a friend’s basement.

“In 1980,” Ankica explains, “when I started working with the Sephardim, it was a community that could not express its identity. The Communists favored assimilation. For Jews to express their identity was to express support of Israel, which was an official enemy. I discovered that the Jews had also neglected their own culture, particularly the religious rituals. It was simply too dangerous for them. They couldn’t openly work on the remnants of their own culture. It was less dangerous for me, as an outsider, to do this work, though it took about two years to convince the community that I was a scientist and not a spy. I felt it important to collect and preserve the remaining fragments. I started with the chants particular to religious holidays.”

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It took six grueling months to gather the material she needed for her first article in an international academic journal, and in that time members of the Sephardic community moved in and out of her home. So too did their food. The long-cooked eggs, a dish prepared for Passover, were typical. “I first made them in the spring of 1981 for my own family for Easter,” Ankica says. “I have made them ever since.

“We worked very hard to create multicultural bonds within our group of people,” Ankica says of her life in Sarajevo. “It was the essence of our social and cultural life, and we enjoyed it. We sang the songs typical of any occasion and we prepared the foods. And I have to say that that spirit remains. But so many people became so cruel and for this I feel shame.”

Though Ankica and Vlatko are both Croatian and Roman Catholic, Ankica’s roots are generations deep in Sarajevo. Her mother had lived in Sarajevo through the Balkan War, through World War I and World War II, through the years of Communist rule, and finally through the ongoing siege. “This is the worst,” she told her daughter. “This is the worst. Nothing makes sense.”

The life Ankica and Vlatko lived in Sarajevo was urbane, sophisticated and multicultural. They counted among their friends Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Sephardic Jews, and any occasion was an excuse for all to gather and share their foods. But those days are gone.

Ankica is now something of an itinerant professor. She’s in Seattle to teach for a quarter at the University of Washington; then she moves on to the University of California at Santa Cruz to teach through the summer. The Petrovics are trying to remake their lives in this country, starting over in their 50s.

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We sit around the table, each of us with an egg in our hand, and then we crack the eggs against our neighbor’s. Only Ankica’s egg remains uncracked, perhaps a good sign. Inside the shell, the whites of the egg have turned the color of cafe au lait. I had expected the worst in over-cooked hard-boiled eggs, but something must happen in all those hours for the eggs are tender and moist and taste of onion and herbs and salt. Vlatko says that when they are cooked for seven days they can be left on the table for three months. Eggs cooked that long have the consistency of soft cheese, the better for spreading on hearty bread.

Vlatko’s English is thin. His look is weary, and for good reason. His smile, however, lights up the room and brings warmth to the common table, a warmth flavored by foods from far away.

SEVEN-DAY PASSOVER EGGS

1/4 pound red onion skins

24 eggs

1 tablespoon whole black pepper

7 to 8 medium bay leaves

1 tablespoon dried basil

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons salt

Ankica Petrovic insists that a dozen eggs is too few to use for this recipe, but it takes a massive amount of onions to yield 1/4 pound of onion skins for 24 eggs. We did just half the recipe when we tested it in The Times Test Kitchen and it worked fine. And we discovered that a good source of onion skins is the bottom of a supermarket onion bin. Check with the produce manager at your local grocery store; he might have some that he’s ready to throw away.

Place half of red onion skins in bottom of pot large enough to comfortably hold eggs. Add eggs, black pepper, bay leaves, dried basil and olive oil. Place remaining onion skins on top of eggs. Cover generously with cold water. Let stand 1 hour.

Slowly bring to boil over low heat. Reduce to lowest possible simmer, cover and cook. Add warm water to top off pot as needed. Cook minimum of 36 hours, up to 7 days.

Makes 2 dozen eggs.

Each egg contains about: 92 calories; 653 mg sodium; 212 mg cholesterol; 7 grams fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; 0.05 gram fiber.

BUMBARI

1 (6-pound) bone-in lamb shoulder

6 cloves garlic, crushed

Coarse salt

Freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons chopped fresh sage

2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

2 tablespoons olive oil, optional

3 to 4 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup minced parsley

1/2 pound prosciutto, optional

1/2 pound ham, optional Water

4 pounds cabbage, cored and thinly sliced

4 boiling potatoes, peeled and quartered Lamb stock, optional

2 cups instant polenta

Vlatko Petrovic directs the cooking in his house when the main dish is bumbari, a Croatian stew that comes from his village, Kotor, in the mountains south of Dubrovnik, an area called Boka Kotorska Bay. It is typical of the foods he had brought to his marriage, and bumbari is one of Ankica Petrovic’s favorite foods. If you’d like to serve bumbari for Passover, prepare it without the prosciutto and ham. With the pork, it makes a fine Easter entree.

Traditionally, bumbari is made with polenta-stuffed sausages. In our tests, however, we couldn’t find a sausage casing as resilient as the Yugoslavian sheep’s intestine, and most of the meticulously made sausages burst. We came up with this alternative presentation with the polenta served in slices. It’s much easier without sacrificing the interesting flavor combinations.

In addition, Croatian cooks typically rub the lamb with salt and cold smoke it with sage for ten days, a process that give the lamb a prosciutto-like quality. I’ve come up with a shorter barbecue version of the process (you can also roast the meat). Think of it as California bumbari.

Rub lamb thoroughly with crushed garlic, then sprinkle with pepper and salt to taste. Place lamb on rack in water-pan smoker or in barbecue pit and smoke lamb over low heat 6 hours, adding sage and rosemary to coals or smoker. Or, rub lamb with crushed garlic, pepper and salt to taste, sage, rosemary and olive oil, then roast at 350 degrees about 20 minutes per pound to interior temperature of 140 degrees. Let cool.

When cool enough to handle, cut meat in chunks from bones. Place meat and bones into large stewpot, with minced garlic, parsley, 1 tablespoon pepper, prosciutto and ham, if desired. Add water to cover and cook 30 minutes. Add cabbage and potatoes and cook another 30 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, after stew has begun cooking, bring 6 cups water or lamb stock to vigorous boil and add 2 tablespoons coarse salt. Pour polenta into pot in steady stream, stirring with long-handled wooden spoon. Cook, stirring continuously 5 minutes or until mixture is solid but still soft. Pour into large well-oiled loaf pan. Let cool.

When ready to serve, unmold polenta and cut into 1-inch slices. Place slice of polenta in bottom of soup plate and spoon over stew.

Makes 8 servings.

Each serving, with ham, contains about: 868 calories; 1,524 mg sodium; 179 mg cholesterol; 50 grams fat; 52 grams carbohydrates; 52 grams protein; 2.34 grams fiber.

Each serving, without ham, contains about: 776 calories; 800 mg sodium; 149 mg cholesterol; 45 grams fat; 50 grams carbohydrates; 41 grams protein; 2.34 grams fiber.

* Food styling by Donna Deane and Mayi Brady.