A Serbian Breakfast

The Balkan Cookbook

A Serbian Breakfast

I discovered my first Serbian Breakfast at the national trumpet festival in Guca.  The trumpet festival happens once a year in the village of Guca where for one weekend a few hundred thousand people descend on Guca and spend five days and nights, without pause, drinking and dancing to trumpet music, occasionally stopping to eat spit roast pork and bread. I guess it was the best place in the world to have my first Serbian breakfast.

Really it’s a pre breakfast. People get up at the crack of dawn to start work in the Balkan countryside—as I’m sure they do on any farm in the world—and kick the day off with this liquid classic. I don’t know about you but any hour before eight a.m and my stomach turns at the prospect of solids so this little number makes a lot of sense.

Srpskog Dorucak — Serp-skog Doh-roo-chuck

Quite simply a Serbian breakfast is a spoonful of honey followed by a shot of rakija and a short, thick, black Turkish coffee.  No solids just sugar, alcohol and caffeine. It’s like a WAKE UP holy trinity.

‘The honey is good for you and gives you energy, the coffee—well you know where the toilet is—and the rakija gives the day a little polish’ said my old landlady as she repetitively straightened the hem of her plastic blue apron.  I could hear distant trumpets dragging me away, or was it the honey, caffeine and alcohol that made me want to move?

Ingredients

One teaspoon of good quality honey*

One shot of slivovitz or lozovaca**

A Turkish coffee***

*Try Balkan Locust honey which comes from South Eastern Serbia and is made from the white flowers of the Locust tree. Available at  https://www.ogilvys.com/Our-Honey/Balkan-Locust.

**OK I could go on and on here, but I won’t. Lozovaca, as far as I am aware, is not available in the UK but a good Italian Grappa is its equivalent. You can get a standard bottle of slivovitz—plum brandy—from Gerry’s Wine and Spirits on Old Compton Street, London.

*** Check out how to make a Turkish coffee in this section of The Flaneur. A good Turkish blend is Gourmet Mulatte available at the Algerian Coffee Shop conveniently a few doors down from Gerry’s.