Snezhanka: Bulgarian Yogurt Salad with Cucumber and Walnuts
In Bulgaria you can order Snow White. She sits on the menu in the salad section, right under the shopska and the ovcharska, and all she shares with the fairy tale is the color: Snow White in Bulgarian is Snezhanka.
Snezhanka (Bulgarian: Снежанка) is a thick cold salad of strained sour milk, cucumber, garlic and dill that Bulgarian cuisine serves chilled as a starter or as a side with grilled meat. No apple, no dwarfs - but there are walnuts.
Why the Salad Is Named After Snow White, and Who Its Relatives Are
Snezhanka is a common woman's name in Bulgaria as well as the name of Snow White in the fairy tale, and the salad got it simply for its color: the root of the word is snyag, snow. The name and the exact recipe are Bulgarian, but the yogurt-cucumber-garlic principle is shared across the whole of southeastern Europe. Greek cooking has tzatziki, which leaves out the walnuts and sometimes uses mint instead of dill; Turkish cooking has cacık; Serbian and Macedonian cooking have their own versions too. You can recognize the Bulgarian version by two things: plenty of dill, and a handful of crushed walnuts on top.
Dry Tarator, Straight from Balkantourist
Bulgarians themselves simply call it such tarator, dry tarator. Tarator is a cold soup of sour milk, cucumber and garlic, and Snezhanka is the same thing without the water: what you eat with a spoon out of a bowl in one place, you eat with a fork off a plate a few tables away. Snezhanka got its present form and its name in the late 1970s at the state enterprise Balkantourist - the same company that gave us Shopska salad.
What Makes Snezhanka a Salad and Not a Soup
The strainer does most of the work here. The sour milk has to drain until it holds its shape, because otherwise the whey turns it, within minutes, into exactly the tarator you were trying to avoid. The cucumber is fresh in summer and pickled in winter, the garlic goes in sparingly and the dill by the fistful, the oil is olive or sunflower depending on the recipe and nobody argues about it. Recipes list walnuts as an optional garnish, but restaurants add them almost every time, because without them the plate would look like a bowl of yogurt.
Snezhanka is food for a hot afternoon: a cold starter to go with rakija, a side with grilled meat instead of fries, or something to dip your bread into while you wait for the main course. If you want the version made with fresh cucumber, order it in season; in winter it comes with pickled cucumber, even in a good restaurant. And if you order tarator at the same table, you're really getting the same thing twice, once with a spoon and once with a fork.
A Scoop with an Olive in Varna
I ate Snezhanka in Varna at Staria Chinar Restaurant (see Where to Eat in Varna), where it arrives as a firm scoop buried in chopped walnuts, with a single olive on top and a toasted slice of baguette propped against the side. The yogurt held its shape like quark, cold and sour; the cucumber crunched inside it and the walnuts added what yogurt lacks: fat and a faint bitterness. The portion with the baguette cost 7.90 BGN (3.60 EUR). There wasn't a drop of water in it. And I didn't miss it.
