Makedonska Salata: A Cold Salad of Roasted Peppers and Tomatoes
I'll admit to one weakness: I'd eat roasted peppers in any form at all. Which is why Skopje surprised me with where I found them - not in ajvar, not in a bowl of pindžur, but in a salad. Cold, cut into pieces, with tomato and onion, served as a side with meat.
Makedonska salata (Macedonian: Македонска салата) is a cold salad of roasted and peeled peppers, raw tomato, onion, and parsley, dressed with oil - no cheese and nothing out of a jar; Macedonian cuisine puts it on the table as meze with rakija and as a side for the grill.
A Name Only Macedonia Has
Roasted peppers are made all over the Balkans, but only one country came up with a name for them. In Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia you order this salad descriptively as salata od pečenih paprika, Turkish cuisine calls it közlenmiş biber salatası, which is simply "roasted pepper salad", and in Albania a spoonful of yogurt turns up alongside. The Macedonians gave it a name of its own. So the technique is shared with the whole of the former Ottoman Balkans; the name and the exact line-up (tomato, onion, parsley, no cheese) are Macedonian.
A Legend That Belongs to a Different Salad
Nobody puts a date on the first plate of this salad - no cookbook, no newspaper. All anyone knows is when it shows up: when the markets fill with peppers for roasting. Anyone who insists on a date lands on 1919 and the peace conference at Versailles, where a Macedonian cook supposedly put together a salad to stand for his partitioned homeland. That story has two flaws: it is about the French macédoine, meaning fruit or vegetables diced small, and it is made up - Macedonian Wikipedia dismisses it in a single sentence: there is not a shred of evidence for it. French cooks were already calling colorful mixtures macédoine at the end of the 18th century, long before any conference. So if you want a true story to tell over a Macedonian salad, it comes down to peppers and fire.
Why the Peppers Get Peeled and What Never Goes In
It all comes down to the pepper and its skin. It roasts whole, on the stovetop or in the oven, for about half an hour, until the skin blisters and blackens; then, while it is still hot, it goes into a bag tied shut and steams there for another half hour so the skin will come away in one piece. Peeling roasted peppers is a job familiar to anyone who has ever peeled hard-boiled eggs for potato salad: either the skin comes off in one pull, or in shreds and with a lot of swearing, and the Macedonian bag is the trick that decides which. Only once the peppers have cooled and been peeled do the raw tomato, onion, and a handful of chopped parsley go in - on the menu of a Macedonian restaurant those four ingredients are written out as the entire recipe: domat, kromid, pečeni piperki, magdonos. Vinegar goes in only in some households, and cheese has no business in the bowl at all; a piece of sheep's sirenje may sit next to it on its own little plate, never piled on top. That is the obvious difference between this salad and shopska, which sits one line higher on every Macedonian menu and always has cheese in it.
A Plate of Salad Next to the Grilled Meat
In Skopje I ordered Macedonian salad as a side in plenty of places - at the inn Gostilnica Nadžak and at the restaurant Dukat (see Where to Eat in Skopje). Pieces of soft, peeled pepper still sweet from the roasting, refreshing straight from the fridge, then tomato and onion for juice and crunch, oil at the bottom of the plate and parsley over the top. It was the kind of surprise I like best: a dish I know from my own kitchen, just served the way it would never occur to me to serve it at home. At Nadžak a portion cost 200 MKD (3.30 EUR), at Dukat 260 MKD (4.40 EUR).
