Sausage stew from Yugoslavia

YES YUGOSLAVIA - A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

It began with capsicums. I had a lot of capsicums in my fridge so my thoughts turned to sausage stew - a dish I make every now and then in memory of our first holiday together back in 1965 in what was then Yugoslavia. Here I am with Mike and Sue - also our first holiday with them - we have just finished our most recent. Alas I have no pictures of us eating sausage stew - I think this is lunch, but sausage stew was what we had most frequently for dinner.

Why was this? Well in those days Yugoslavia was communist under the rule of Tito. However, it was not quite as anti the west as the rest of the communist bloc and welcomed western tourists. It was beautiful and it was very very cheap. We were there for a month and it cost us £22 each for everything including the ferry fare, the petrol and the fairly extensive repairs to Mike's sister's Beetle which we overturned into a ditch. We were camping and so making our own food - with very few utensils. I remember we bought two aluminium pots in England before we left - one of which I still have and use occasionally in which we cooked almost everything. We might have had some sort of frying pan too but I can't remember this. How we got it all into the car I have no idea - well a lot of it was on the roof which is part of the reason the car overturned. (The Union Jack you can see on the car was because we were warned that the Yugoslavians were still hostile to the Germans because of the war. However this meant that they spoke German and because Sue was fluent in this language we were able to communicate with the Yugoslavs - though Mike made valiant efforts with a phrase book and dictionary.)

We bought our food in the market in Split.

As you can see it's pretty third world and there were not a lot of goods on sale. A few things laid out on tables or in baskets on the ground. Basically just capsicum and tomatoes I seem to remember with a few onions maybe. And potatoes. Meat was hard to come by other than sausages - of the kabana type. Occasionally there would be a whole carcass and you bought whatever part the butcher was up to cutting off. So Sue and I devised sausage stew. Capsicum, sausage, tomatoes and potatoes thrown into a pot and cooked in water. Very tasty it was too - but we did have a lot of it. We must have eaten other things, but honestly I don't remember them. Did we have garlic, or herbs? I don't remember. Maybe we ate out very occasionally in the campsite - probably sausages or cevacipi - a kind of sausage - again.

The car was borrowed and so were the tents - well really we had just one tent - a blow-up igloo kind of thing and the other was just a tarpaulin thrown over a rope tied between two trees. We took it in turns! But we were young - and skinny and in love and I remember it very fondly.

But back to sausage stew - the stew I made yesterday had some herbs and some garlic in it, and I had to use tinned tomatoes because it's winter. I used a mix of kabana, rookwurst and ham, but any mix of sausages that you fancy is fine. I guess beans of some kind would be a good addition too. I also had chicken stock and some wine, so it was a rather more sophisticated version of the meals we had in Yugoslavia - but it always brings back those memories. A golden time. Some food does that - it reminds us of the good things in our life.