Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (California Studies in Food and Culture) by Amy B. Trubek

Author:Amy B. Trubek [Trubek, Amy B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780520289222
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Cooking Is a Crafts

Anina emigrated from Bosnia to a small town in rural New England in the early 1990s. She became involved in her town’s community and is also active in the statewide Bosnian community; 1,600 Bosnian migrants settled to this state between 1993 and 2001 (it is estimated that 20,000 Bosnians migrated to the United States between 1992 and 1995). She and her family ended up in a place with a very similar landscape and climate as her natal home, and she feels fortunate for this. Similar foods are foraged and cultivated in both regions: wild mushrooms, prune plums, apples, strawberries. Many traditional dishes, however, are not easily available or simply not available at all, save among other Bosnian refugees who settled in rural New England in the early 1990s, during the height of the civil war in their country. One such dish is burek, which Anina and her mother make often; its taste evokes memories and solidifies identities. To an outsider, making burek looks difficult, almost impossible. A small disk of dough is rolled out on a round, eight-foot table until it is as thin as a sheet of paper and the dough takes up the entire surface. This large, thin pastry is then transformed into smaller round spirals consisting of multiple layers of pastry and meat filling. First, a cooked meat mixture is placed at the outside edge of the pastry sheet, which is then rolled over and around the filling. The resulting long, thin roll is cut away from the large sheet of dough, which now has a new outside edge. The process—the placing of the cooked-meat filling, the rolling of the pastry over the filling—is repeated until all the dough has been used. Each six-foot-long, one- to two-inch-thick tube is then curled around itself until it becomes a twelve-inch round spiral. From the eight-foot pastry sheet, multiple spiral-shaped bureks are created. The finished bureks are placed on baking sheets and put into the oven. Each step looks daunting, but for Anina, making burek is simple, and the evidence is in her hands: her confident manipulation of the dough, her graceful use of the rolling pin.

Burek can be classified as a form of savory pastry or a meat pie. It is considered part of a family of pastries made from phyllo dough and linked to the Ottoman Empire; there are numerous phyllo-based pastries (both savory and sweet) made from Turkey to Albania to the Slavic countries, such as Bosnia. The burek made in Bosnia is distinctive for being rolled into a long tube, spun into spiral shape, and then baked. Other versions of burek are rolled into individual, shorter, cigar-like rolls or are baked in one large dish (most Americans are familiar with spanakopita, a rectangular spinach pie).

Anina makes burek in her home, primarily for special occasions these days. She learned how to make it by watching her mother: “I then tried it many, many times until I learned how to do it.” She first makes the dough by mixing together flour, salt, and water, and she then lets it rest.

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