Kurabiiki: Bulgarian Butter Cookies
Bulgaria had kurabiiki before it had a state of its own. Petko Slavejkov's cookbook came out in 1870, still under Ottoman rule; it described mostly what was being cooked in Constantinople, and alongside baklava, kadaif and halva, these cookies are in there too. The country hasn't given them up since.
Kurabiiki (Bulgarian: курабийки) are small butter cookies of Bulgarian cuisine: a little mound or a crescent of butter, flour, sugar and eggs, baked golden, often brushed with egg yolk and sprinkled with coarse sugar that cracks in the oven. They're sold by the piece in every bakery and eaten out of hand, ideally with coffee.
The Cookie That Might Be Called Stranger
The same name rides on cookies from Morocco to Baku, and hardly any two of them look alike. Kurabiiki are the Bulgarian branch of the qurabiya family, spread across the former Ottoman world by the region's shared baking history. Turkish cuisine calls any small butter cookie a kurabiye and has dozens of kinds; in Greece, kourabiedes are made with almonds, white with powdered sugar and strictly a Christmas affair; in the Levant, ghraybeh is baked from clarified butter without eggs and falls apart at a touch; in Baku they put jam in the middle. The Bulgarian version is the yellowest and the most everyday of the lot: yolk on top, coarse sugar and year-round duty at the bakery. Linguists still can't agree on where the word came from. The Turkish etymologist Nişanyan traces it to the Persian gulābiya, a rosewater cookie; others to the Arabic ġarīb, meaning foreign or strange. A cookie that's at home everywhere and from nowhere might as well be called Stranger. There probably isn't a more fitting name for it.
Butter, Yolk and Sugar That Cracks
Bulgarian recipes agree on very little, and that little is enough. The base is butter, lard in the older recipes, and a lot of flour; eggs and sugar hold the dough together, the yolk brushed on top adds shine and color, the coarse sugar adds crunch. Honey medeni kurabijki have honey right in the dough, the plain butter masleni manage without it, and that determines both the color and how fast the cookie hardens. Kurabiiki are a category rather than a recipe: every family and every bakery has its own. And when koledni and velikdenski kurabijki are baked for Christmas or Easter, what sets them apart from the everyday ones is mostly who baked them.
People eat them with coffee, with tea, on the way back from the market, and at the bakery you buy them by the piece, not by weight. They don't keep as long as you'd expect from a cookie this hard: in a sealed tin kurabiiki last about a week and soften in damp air; only their tougher cousins, soldiers' cookies, keep for months, and those were baked dry precisely so they'd survive the journey. If you want the honey ones, look for the word медени on the label; if you'd rather not be surprised, go for the plain butter ones.
One from a Bakery by the Varna Markets
I bought my kurabiiki in Varna, at one of the bakeries around the central farmers' market, where soldiers' cookies were lying right next to them. Deep yellow on the outside, a cracked crust studded with sugar crystals; it snaps, and even fresh it's harder than it looks. It tastes mainly of butter, and the only sweetness comes from the sugar on top. One cookie cost about 0.75 BGN (0.40 EUR). I ate it standing right outside the bakery. Soldiers' cookies keep for months. Mine didn't make it across the street.
