Eastern Europe Food $ Hacks by Ruth Paget
Lesley Chamberlain writes about delicious, nutritious, and economical food in her cookbook The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe (468 pages – University of Nebraska Press). The centuries’ old recipes she preserves have lasted longer than the nations she describes such as Yugoslavia.
The following recipes are especially economical and have sustained Eastern Europe through kingdoms, empires, and dictatorships to modern-day democracies:
-Serbian Salad (The modern country of Serbia was part of the former Yugoslavia)
Ingredients:
-green peppers
-green tomatoes
-red tomatoes
-cucumbers
-onions
-white or red cabbage
-sugar
-vinegar
-olive oil
-seasonings
For this recipe, you chop and boil the vegetables with the seasonings and let it cool for 4 or 5 days in a cool place to blend flavors. Bread and fruit make this a nice picnic lunch using this pickled salad.
-Warsaw Salad from Poland
Ingredients:
-haricot beans (white or Navy beans)
-lemon juice
-mustard
-pepper
-boiled eggs
-1 apple
-cucumbers
-onion
-sour cream
To make this dish very economical, you soak beans overnight and boil them the next day. Using canned beans saves lots of time, but shop around for the best prices. Sour cream is a dressing here.
-Autumn Potato Salad from the Czech Republic (a recipe from the former Czechoslovakia)
Ingredients:
-potatoes
-onions
-green pepper
-tomatoes
-sour apples
-cucumber
-mayonnaise
-lemon juice
-2 hard boiled eggs
Apples are highly nutritious and inexpensive. They stretch this recipe to serve more people and provide a nice contrast to the potatoes as well.
The recipes in The Food and Cooking of Eastern Europe by Lesley Chamberlain provide delicious, nutritious, and relatively inexpensive dishes that can be easily recreated in the United States to save money, retrieve one’s heritage, or make best use of ingredients at hand.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
