Banica: A Balkan Filled Pastry from Hand-Stretched Phyllo
In a Skopje bakery, in the display case next to the burek, lies a golden roll as long as your forearm, white cheese peeking out of a split down its side and a little label reading banička, price per piece. Macedonian Wikipedia, meanwhile, doesn't know banica as a food at all; the only entry under that name is a village that no longer exists. The bakeries aren't bothered: a pastry with more names than recipes across the Balkans sells perfectly well without a Wikipedia entry.
Banica (Macedonian: баница) is a savory pastry of paper-thin sheets of dough with crumbled white cheese and egg between them, and leek or spinach depending on the season; it bakes to a deep gold, crisp on top and soft inside. At home the sheets are layered in a tray like a savory pie that gets cut into squares; bakeries wrap the filling in a single sheet and coil it into a roll for one. It's eaten warm, for breakfast, with a glass of sour milk.
Banica, Banička and Zelnik: Three Names, One Dough
In Macedonia three words jump out at you, and they mean almost the same thing, each from a different angle. Zelnik is the homegrown Macedonian name for the whole tray-baked pie, from the word zelje, vegetables - which is why that's the one with an entry in the Macedonian encyclopedia. Banica is what the neighbors in Bulgaria call the same pastry, and Skopje's bakeries with them; Bulgarian linguists trace it back to the Proto-Slavic gъbanica, from the verb meaning "to bend", because the dough gets folded and coiled. And banička is the diminutive: a piece of banica rolled up for one, roughly what a bread roll is to a loaf back home - same dough, a portion you eat out of hand. Nobody at the bakery is going to explain the difference to you; the name on the price tag follows the shape, not the etymology.
The family reaches across the whole of the Balkans and everywhere it comes down to the same craft, thin sheets and cheese in the oven. Bulgarian cooking counts banica among its signature dishes and bakes it either layered in sheets or coiled into a spiral; Serbian cooking knows it as gibanica, where sheets soaked in egg and milk are crumpled into the tin rather than laid flat; Greek and Turkish cooking bake the same thing and call it börek or pita. Albanian byrek comes from the same family, only folded into a triangle for the hand, and in the bakery Macedonian burek gives itself away next to banica mostly by its shape: a round tray, a wedge on a plate. So banica is Macedonian just as much as it is Bulgarian and Serbian; what's Macedonian about it is mainly the name zelnik and what you eat it with.
The Saturday before Prochka and the Coin at Vasilica
When the first banica was baked in Macedonia nobody knows, and I'm not going to claim otherwise. What is known is when it gets baked today. The Saturday before Prochka, Cheesefare Sunday, after which the seven-week Easter fast begins, is the traditional day for banica: cheese, eggs and milk are off the table for the next seven weeks, so the last weekend fits all of it in at once. The other occasion comes in winter. At Vasilica, New Year on the old calendar - January 14 - a festive loaf with a coin baked inside is broken, and in some places banica stands in for the bread; whoever finds the coin is in for a lucky year.
Kori, Cheese and Leek: What Banica Is Made of and How It's Eaten
The main ingredient is kori, sheets of phyllo made from flour, water, oil and salt. At home the dough is kneaded and then slapped against the counter eighty to a hundred times so it turns elastic and can be stretched thin; bakeries buy the sheets ready-made. Between them goes crumbled white sirenje mixed with eggs, and with it, depending on the season, leek, spinach, nettles with sorrel in spring, sauerkraut in winter. Then it's either sheet on sheet in the tray, or filling on a sheet and the sheet into a roll. Without the thin sheets it would be nothing but baked cheese; what makes it banica is the dough, several layers of it in every bite and weighing almost nothing. Hence the hundred slaps.
It's morning food. Zelnik or banička with ajran or sour milk - that's the classic Macedonian breakfast from a bakery or a hole-in-the-wall window. It's sold by the piece with the weight written on the label. If you'd rather eat it there than out of the paper on the way, ask for a plate: cut into pieces, it eats better.
Two Mornings at the Same Bakery
I ate banica in Skopje two mornings in a row, at the La Delicious bakery (see Where to Eat in Skopje). We bought the cheese version first, then the one with cheese and leek. The top leaves crackled and flaked off in scales, the ones underneath were soft and salty from the cheese; in the leek one the filling was greener and a touch sweeter, with the cheese taking a back seat. Both cost 90 MKD (1.50 EUR) a piece and both were excellent. The first morning they handed them to us whole, each in its paper, and we ate them like tourists, out of hand. The second morning, same bakery and same counter, the banička arrived cut into pieces on a plate without our asking for anything. I don't know whether that promoted us to locals or just to regulars. Either way, it made my day.
