Selsko Meso: Macedonian Meat with Mushrooms from a Clay Dish
I didn't pick my last big meal before the flight out of Skopje by what I was craving, but off a list. Two items baked in clay were still on it: selsko meso and turli tava. Gostilnica Dukat had both on the menu, so the choice made itself.
Selsko meso (Macedonian: селско месо) is a dish of Macedonian cuisine: cubes of meat, most often pork, browned with onion and mushrooms and then stewed for a long time in a clay dish in the oven, until the meat and its juices turn into a thick sauce; it comes to the table in the very dish it was baked in.
Village Meat with Turkish Neighbors
Macedonian dishes baked in clay usually carry a Turkish name. Ǵuveč comes from the Turkish güveç, which originally means the oval clay dish itself and only after that whatever gets baked in it; turli tava is the Turkish türlü, meaning "mixed", plus tava, a pan. And then there's selsko meso, which is simply called "village meat" - Slavic, without a single Turkish syllable. The most Macedonian-sounding dish from the clay tava is at the same time the one that gives away the least about its roots: it shares the technique with neighbors who own up to it in the name, while it keeps nothing but an address. Village, meat.
The clay tava isn't one particular dish, though - it's a piece of cookware. The same dish brings tavče gravče to the table, which is made of beans and where you won't find any meat at all, and turli tava as well, where meat merely keeps a pile of vegetables company; selsko meso is the meatiest branch of that family - the vegetables in it come down to onion and mushrooms. Geographically it's a Macedonian dish and a Balkan one at once, as the Macedonian encyclopedia puts it: in Serbia and Bosnia they cook it under the same name, but cookbooks there list it as a Macedonian recipe. Bulgarian cuisine knows nothing by that name, and the Greek giouvetsi is a relative in word only - inside it there's pasta, not mushrooms. The root of the whole clay family stands in Turkey; selsko meso is its Macedonian branch.
As Many Recipes as There Are Originals
Nobody has written the history of selsko meso. It has no date and no inn where it was supposedly born, and nobody has invented a shepherd-and-a-forgotten-pot legend for it either - Macedonian sources describe it as traditional, and that's as far as they go. Recipes, on the other hand, are countless, and every other one claims to be the authentic one. One Macedonian site headlined its method "selsko meso by the original recipe" and put meatballs, carrot and mustard into it, three things the encyclopedia entry knows nothing about. With a dish that has no birth certificate, anyone can claim to have the original, and everyone a little differently - that's what a cuisine that lives in pots rather than in books looks like. If you want to know what "the real thing" is, stick to what all the versions have in common: meat, onion, mushrooms, clay and time.
Meat, Mushrooms and Clay That Takes Its Time
The meat is cut into cubes and goes into a pan first to take on some color; the encyclopedia talks about pork, while everyday recipes are happy with a mix of pork, beef and chicken, sometimes with meatballs in the same dish as well. Onions are a must, mushrooms too - fresh button mushrooms and marinated ones from a jar show up in recipes about equally often, and nobody turns up their nose at the jar. Then it all goes into the clay tava, gets covered with water or wine and goes into the oven for anywhere between one and three hours, depending on the recipe. What you want from the clay isn't flavor but steady heat: the meat falls apart more easily in it. An ordinary roasting pan will do the job too, but the clay dish goes from the oven straight to the table and stays hot long after the food has been dished out.
You eat selsko meso sitting down, with a knife and fork: you get it in a kafana, the local tavern, or in a restaurant, and at home it's made for several people at once.
I ate selsko meso in Skopje at the Gostilnica Dukat restaurant (see Where to Eat in Skopje) during that last big meal before the flight, when we wanted to fit in as much as we could and Dukat had both dishes at once. It arrived in a black oval dish on a wooden board, cubes of pork swimming in a thick sauce. Of all Macedonian dishes, this one comes closest in flavor to what I know from home as braised meat in a cream sauce - there's probably no cream in it at all, but meat that falls apart and juices thickened to velvet do almost the same job. The portion cost 500 MKD (8.30 EUR). So I ate village meat in the capital, a few hours before takeoff.
