Ajvar: Roasted Red Pepper Spread
The jar the locals kept recommending to me as the best Macedonian ajvar isn't quite what it looks like. The lid is wrapped in a scrap of newspaper tied with a ribbon, the label says "home style" and "Mother Maria's recipe", and only the small print admits that it's filled by a company in the village of Dabilje near Strumica, which ships it halfway around the world. That disguise tells you everything you need to know about ajvar: in a country where nearly every family cooks it in the autumn, even a commercially made jar wants to pass for grandma's.
Ajvar (Macedonian: ајвар) is a thick spread of roasted, peeled and ground red peppers, simmered long and slow in oil, often with roasted eggplant too, and Macedonian cuisine puts it on the table before anything else.
Why Ajvar Is Named After Caviar
The name costs more than the contents. The word ajvar came from the Turkish havyar, meaning caviar, salted fish roe. How the roe turned into peppers is a story the Serbs tell: at the end of the 19th century, Belgrade restaurants supposedly lost their cheap Danube sturgeon caviar and offered their guests "red ajvar" made of peppers instead. Nobody has ever pinned down the year or the name of the restaurant, so take it as an anecdote, not a source. Cheap vegetables under an expensive name clearly work, because the same trick was invented independently in Russia, where a zucchini spread is called ikra to this day.
Whose Ajvar Is It: Macedonian, Serbian, or Balkan?
Let's be honest about it: ajvar belongs to the whole of the former Yugoslavia and its neighbors, not to one country. Under the same name and from the same peppers it gets cooked every autumn in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Kosovo, Albanian cuisine picked it up from across the border, and Bulgarian cooking has its own ljutenica with tomatoes. The family line ends further south: Levantine muhammara, which Turkish cuisine calls acuka, is also made of roasted peppers, but with walnuts and pomegranate molasses, and that's a different family altogether. Back in Macedonia itself, ajvar has two brothers that a visitor easily mixes up: the coarser pindžur with tomatoes and the green malidžano, where eggplant plays the lead. Two countries claim it more loudly than the rest: Macedonian Wikipedia says it comes from Macedonia, the Serbian one cites the Belgrade caviar, and the Serbian daily Politika headlined its article about it "a treasure with no owner". I doubt anyone will come up with a more accurate title.
The paperwork speaks for Serbia, everyday life for Macedonia. One of the oldest recorded recipes sits in a Serbian cookbook from the turn of the 20th century, while in Macedonia, according to local sources, people only started making ajvar at home in any numbers after the Second World War. But spread it did, so thoroughly that Strumica has been cooking its "caviar" nonstop since the 1960s and Macedonian ajvar has carried an internationally protected designation of origin under the Lisbon Agreement since 2010; Serbia answered two years later by certifying the ajvar from Leskovac.
Peppers, Smoke, and Hours of Stirring
The lead character of the whole recipe is called kurtovska kapija, a deep red pepper with firm flesh that people simply call ajvarka; most of it grows around Strumica. The peppers are roasted on a stove out in the yard, then go into a sack while still hot to steam until the skins slip off; once peeled, they drain overnight and get ground. Then come the hours of stirring in oil, until it thickens. From mid-September to the first frosts, yards all over the country fill with smoke and a local forum runs a thread called "Close the window, there's smoke!". Anyone who has ever spent a whole afternoon over a pot of plum butter knows that stirring, and knows what you smell like by the end of it. Eggplant goes in or stays out depending on the household, the hot version lut gets chili peppers and the mild blag doesn't, and the argument over whether real ajvar is peppers only gets rehashed over every other garden fence.
It's eaten cold, as the first thing on the table. In a restaurant it belongs to the meze before the main course, on bread with the white cheese sirenje, next to a glass of rakija and most of all with grilled meat, with kebapi or with veal liver. You take it home in a jar; at the market, go for the homemade kind, because every jar is different - each family stirs it for a different length of time and takes it to a different heat. The Mama's brand, the one with the newspaper lid, meanwhile ships more than half its output abroad and has had a billboard in Times Square in New York. The village of Dabilje is probably still talking about it.
A Bowl Beside the Meat in Skopje
In Skopje I ordered ajvar in restaurants with every piece of meat, a bowl of its own to go with whatever came off the grill, and I loved it: sweet from the roasted peppers, a little smoky and thick enough to stay put on a fork or on a slice of bread. A bowl cost around 120 MKD (2 EUR).
When I asked which of the store-bought ones is the best, the locals agreed: Mama's. I don't know what a jar costs, because I didn't buy one; my carry-on was already stuffed to bursting with Macedonian cheeses, and I wouldn't have got it past security anyway. I'll just have to come back for it next time.
