Tetovski Grav: Large White Beans from Polog
A hundred and twenty, said the cardboard sign propped over a heap of white beans at a Skopje market. A hundred and twenty denars a kilo, 2 EUR. I took the photo for a bit of market color and only later worked out that the sign was more interesting than it looked: that year the real Tetovo bean was going for four or five times as much in Tetovo, and a hundred and twenty is the usual price for the imported kind, the kind sellers usually just slap the Tetovo name on.
Tetovski grav (Macedonian: тетовски грав) are large white beans from the Polog region below the Šar Mountains, the variety that Macedonian cuisine builds its national dish tavče gravče on - and one of the few Macedonian food souvenirs where it pays to ask exactly where they come from.
What Makes the Tetovo Bean Tetovo
The name translates easily enough: beans from Tetovo, the town in the west of the country that sits at the heart of the fertile Polog valley. Locals never call them anything but tetovec. That word has traveled further than the bean itself - in Serbia you can still buy seed of the tetovac variety, because under Yugoslavia the Tetovo name came to stand for any large-grained white bean, wherever it grew. Back home in Polog, though, it's a strictly regional crop: it's grown in the mountain villages above Tetovo and Gostivar, Macedonian and Albanian ones alike, and the rest of the country only buys it. More than one Balkan mountain range claims big white beans as its own: Greek cuisine has its gigantes from Prespa, protected by a European designation since the nineties, Bulgarian cuisine the Smilyan beans from the Rhodopes. The Greek beans belong to a different species, though, the runner bean, and the Greeks named theirs for size - giants and elephants.
Why the Tetovo Bean Is Vanishing and Why It Gets Faked
Older people around Tetovo will tell you that in Yugoslav times the beans left here by the truckload for the whole federation and fed an entire army; nobody has any proof of it, so treat it as local lore. The statistics are sadder. According to the Macedonian papers, production has fallen by more than eighty percent over the past ten years - where a decare once yielded over a hundred kilos, it now yields twenty. The villages below the Šar Mountains have emptied out, the summers are drier, and the growers point to one more culprit: the small hydropower plants on the mountain streams, which they say took away the water they irrigated with. A bean that survived the breakup of a country is being finished off by drought and green energy.
Scarcity has made the bean expensive: at the markets in Tetovo and Gostivar the real tetovec sells for 500 to 600 MKD (8.30 to 10 EUR) a kilo, while beans imported from Egypt, Kyrgyzstan or Madagascar go for 110 to 180 MKD (1.80 to 3 EUR). And since "tetovski" on a sign sells better than "Egyptian," the Macedonian papers write about relabeled imports on a regular basis. The difference shows up in the pot as well. Tetovec holds its shape once cooked and the skins stay on; an ordinary bean, the kind you know from school-canteen soup, often cooks down to mush with the skins floating on top. Tavče gravče spends a long time in the oven, and a bean that sheds its skin will never end up gleaming in the clay dish as whole grains. That's why a country with beans to spare makes such a fuss about a single variety: it's the one the national dish needs.
Beans for the Suitcase
A food souvenir usually comes with a catch: a jar of ajvar is heavy, cheese tends to smell, and a bottle of rakija can't go in your carry-on. Dried beans keep, and back home you can cook the national dish of the country you've just come back from. They're sold by weight, best in the fall after the harvest, when the markets fill up with the new crop - the label taze, meaning fresh, is a Turkish word that marks this year's crop. But precisely because tetovec is a brand, buying it takes a bit of detective work. Buy in Tetovo or Gostivar, where the growers sell their own, and ask which village it comes from; if someone in Skopje offers you a kilo for under two hundred denars, what you're getting is probably just beans, not Tetovo beans.
The Sign at Zelen Pazar
I saw the Tetovo bean in Skopje at Zelen pazar, the market in the center on Boulevard Kočo Racin, where the stalls had it heaped up loose next to peppers and tomatoes. I didn't buy any, I only took photos, so the one place I tasted the beans themselves was where they belong - in tavče gravče, where the grains held their shape. Whether they were Tetovo ones I can't vouch for; according to the Macedonian papers, neither can plenty of the cooks who make it. So my tavče gravče may well have been ordinary beans with an extraordinary name.
