Lisnato: Puff Pastry Baked Goods
The label behind the glass said "lisnato so višna i vanila" and I made a mental note of another Macedonian specialty to look up. Back home it turned out that what I'd noted down was an adjective.
Lisnato (Macedonian: лиснато) simply means "leafed", and in Balkan bakeries the word has come to cover a whole family of puff pastry baked goods - with cheese, with ham and kaškaval, or, in my case, with sour cherries. No feast day or town lays claim to it; even so, it deserves more than that one line on the label.
What Lisnato Means and Why Half of Europe Calls It the Same Thing
The name comes from the word list, leaf: in the oven the layers of dough open up like the pages of a book. The French hit on the same principle (pâte feuilletée, and feuille is a leaf too), and so did the Turks, who turned the French mille-feuille, a thousand leaves, into milföy; half of Europe calls the very same dough by the same name, each in its own language. Only the Bulgarians prefer to name it after the butter - buter testo, with a German word in the middle - even though they know the "leafed" version as well. Which settles the question of geography: lisnato isn't Macedonian and it isn't even Balkan, it's a shared bakery category stretching from Croatia to Turkey, only the filling is local. Sour cherry pastries made from the same dough go by another name in Bulgarian cooking, Turkish cooking serves vişneli milföy with tea, and Serbia, one of the world's biggest exporters of sour cherries, bakes pita sa višnjama. Lisnato has less in common with burek or baklava than it looks: those are built on thin sheets of hand-stretched phyllo, lisnato on dough folded with fat and lifted by steam. Different workshop, different family.
Where Puff Pastry Came From
The Spanish and the French are still fighting over who was first. The oldest surviving printed recipe for puff pastry is Spanish, from 1607, and the French one comes half a century later (layered pastry does turn up in documents earlier than that, in Amiens in 1311, for instance). France then added the legend that the dough was invented by an apprentice in a pâtisserie who later grew up to be the painter Claude Lorrain. Nobody knows for certain who really stacked the first leaves, and I'm not going to pick that fight here.
How Lisnato Is Eaten and What Else Bakeries Make from It
In a Macedonian bakery the dough is almost never made from scratch. It arrives in a frozen block, gets rolled out, filled and put in the oven, where the fat between the layers melts, the steam pushes the leaves apart and the flat sheet rises into a crisp pillow with edges cracked wide open. The only thing the baker chooses is the filling and the shape - and that's how a single block turns into a savory cheese pastry for breakfast and a sweet sour cherry one for an afternoon snack. If you've ever rescued a surprise visit at home with apple turnovers made from frozen puff pastry, you've held exactly this kind of pastry in your hand, only here it gets baked every day and by the hundreds. The shapes have names of their own: polžav is a snail coiled into a spiral, rolna a roll and štrudla a long roulade with fruit. There's a small linguistic trap in that last one. In the Balkans a real štrudla is made from leavened dough, not the hand-stretched phyllo of a Viennese strudel, except that in a Macedonian bakery today it almost always comes out of the oven made of lisnato - and nobody minds, because it tastes good.
Lisnato is bakery food, which makes it morning and snack-break food: you buy it at the counter, grab it and eat it on the way. Skopje's bakeries open while it's still dark and a few of them never close at all. That's especially worth knowing on a Sunday. A Macedonian Sunday is the day when plenty of shops stay shut, but the ovens stay on.
A Sunday Bakery in Skopje
I tasted lisnato in Skopje at the La Delicious bakery (see Where to Eat in Skopje), and for a reason that never makes it into the guidebooks: it was Sunday and La Delicious was open. The piece with sour cherry and vanilla was crisp, the pastry broke apart leaf by leaf and there was more filling in it than I expect from a bakery - the cherries weren't a thin smear but a proper layer. It cost 55 MKD (0.90 EUR).
