19 December 2009 – Magda's Zimnica

With Copenhagen leaving most of us feeling frustrated and disappointed, I am back to the less spectacular micro economy of village life. I have to admit that there is a slightly selfish, perhaps even ridiculous, “Noah's ark” motive at play. I think I can see where we are going. A terrifying prospect of the future through which those with hope see a path powering down to a safer lower energy economy. I've just been observing it amongst our immediate neighbours on both sides of us in Stara Moravica. Magda and Ferenz work all the hours they have to till their strip of land and ours producing vegetables and fruit and winter preserves called zimnica.

I went round to see what they were up to. Magda had a couple of large vats in which her cabbages were fermenting with salt. Kisili kupus, as it is called in Serbian, is the secret ingredient waiting to be discovered by a celebrity chef. The large firm cabbages are lifted in December just before hard weather comes. (A week later a friend tells me that it is -10 with 40cms of snow!). But Magda's cabbages are safely lifted, salted, placed in a vat and pressed to expel the liquid as a natural fermentation sets in. In this state they can be preserved for the whole winter. You won't be convinced by this, but kisili kupus is actually delicious, nothing like vinegary sour kraut, and an exquisite addition to meat dishes, especially the Serbian feast day speciality of sarma which is spicy mince wrapped in cabbage leaves. The village market is now full of all sorts of zimnica including Magda's ajvar, which is a preserve of red peppers roasted, skinned and mashed up with garlic, tomato and hot paprika. And I shouldn't forget to mention the hundred litres or so of Šljivavica (othewise called palinka in Hungarian or plum brandy) all distilled from our orchard crop of plums.

My other neighbour, Irena, bakes the most delicious bread, kneading it all by hand. The brick oven is fired by maize stalks from their strip of land, and the flour comes from the village mill. Nothing could be more local; and certainly no bread is more delicious than her traditional sipo loaf, which is the one folded over. Why it is made that way I haven't discovered, nor why it is called sipo. But the smoke goes up from the oven at 12.00 and three hours later the gate to their yard opens and you can buy hot sweet-smelling bread for lunch which starts any time from 15.00 when people come in from their work.

Owls must wait until last light for their lunch. In a couple of sheltered spruce trees the winter roost of Long-eared owls sleeps out the day, peering back slightly irritably if you go trying to count them. At dusk they fly off in streams on silent wings to their village duties hunting the rodent cohorts scampering through our yards and orchards. We could learn something from the owls; work locally, live as community.