Prženi Tikvički: Balkan Fried Zucchini
If Macedonia handed out a prize for the youngest vegetable on the plate, the zucchini would win and nobody would believe it. It came over from America, just like peppers and tomatoes, but the variety that ends up in the pan today was bred by growers in northern Italy only in the second half of the 19th century, and it did not travel the world as zucchini until around 1900. Macedonian Wikipedia knows all this. And a paragraph later it still credits the vegetable to the Egyptians and the Romans, who had no idea it existed.
Prženi tikvički (Macedonian: пржени тиквички) are thin slices of zucchini coated in flour and fried in oil - a summer side dish or starter of Macedonian cuisine that calls for something cold and garlicky alongside.
A Little Gourd and Its Relatives From Sofia to Tirana
The name is a diminutive, and for once a literally accurate one: tikva means gourd, tikvička a little gourd, and the zucchini really is, botanically, nothing more than a cultivar of the same species that gives us the pumpkins for autumn soup. The Greeks see it the same way - their kolokithaki is a diminutive of pumpkin - and a Serb says tikvica, which in Macedonia is a one-letter mistake, but a mistake all the same. Prženi tikvički are nothing specifically Macedonian; the dish is shared across the whole southern Balkans: Bulgarian cuisine knows them as tikvički s mlečen sos and pours garlicky soured milk over them, Greek cuisine fries kolokithakia tiganita and serves tzatziki or skordalia on the side, a garlic paste made with bread or potato, and in Turkish cuisine the slices are fried as kabak kızartması, while grated and bound with egg they turn into mücver fritters - a different dish, as everyone there will be quick to point out. In Albania the same thing is called kungull i skuqur and comes with yogurt. The principle is the same everywhere; only the name of the sauce changes.
A Vegetable That Walked Into a Kitchen Already Running
The history of this dish is written by a botanist. The Ottomans were cooking and stewing kabak all over the Balkans long before Italian growers came up with the slim green zucchini, except back then the word covered older gourds, the African bottle gourd among them. The gourd was at home here centuries before the zucchini; the new vegetable simply slipped into a kitchen that already knew what to do with it, rather like a rental company swapping its cars while your license stays valid. No Macedonian source bothers to say exactly when the modern zucchini reached Macedonian kitchens, and the dish has no legend about an inventor - it's a summer recipe you make when the garden gives you more than you can eat raw.
Flour, Hot Oil, and a Bowl of Garlic
There are two characters here, flour and oil, and one trap. The zucchini is cut into sticks or into rounds as thin as a coin, dredged in flour - wheat or corn, which gives a more golden coat - and sometimes in egg as well; most recipes skip the breadcrumbs. The trap is the oil: if it isn't hot enough or the pan is crowded, the slices soak it up and a crisp side dish turns into a greasy one, which Macedonian recipes guard against with a single phrase - "crisp, doesn't soak up the oil". A home trick: the coated slices get a quick dip in cold water before they hit the pan.
They come to the table hot, straight from the pan, usually as a starter or a side to grilled meat, with the cold, garlicky part alongside: in Macedonia that's garlic stirred into soured milk, or just thinned with vinegar, and down south around Ohrid the white makalo, a garlic emulsion otherwise served with fish. Look for them on the menu among the sides or the starters, and don't mix them up with polneti tikvički, zucchini hollowed out, stuffed with meat and baked in the oven - a completely different dish that shares nothing with them but the vegetable in the name. It's a summer dish.
I had prženi tikvički in Skopje at Gostilnica Dukat (see Where to Eat in Skopje), a traditional restaurant just outside the center and one of the pricier ones. They came cut into sticks rather than rounds, in a golden coating, with a bowl of white garlic makalo alongside - the Ohrid version, then. The portion cost 260 MKD (4.40 EUR) and it was a terrific little bite, one I liked far more than the fries it resembled in shape. The fries it competes with on every menu apparently have no idea they've lost that match.
