By Joel Denker
A cornucopia of peppers awaits you at Cafe Sofia, the recently opened Bulgarian eatery in Adams-Morgan. Its cooks have exploited the New World vegetable, preparing it in a myriad of ways. I enjoyed it stuffed, roasted, baked in a casserole, in salads, in spreads. The cafe’s pepper possibilities are endless—I have yet to explore the kitchen’s tortellini with chopped red peppers. The Bulgarians, the “Gardeners of Europe,” have taken this gift from the Americas and fashioned inventive dishes from it.
One evening I dug into the cafe’s stuffed peppers. The red pepper, the piperka, was bursting with a seductive mix of rice and ground pork. Its charred flesh was sweet and tender. I was learning to relish a vegetable that I had never really been passionate about. “It’s probably the tastiest vegetable,” proprietor Stoyan (Stan) Tsenkov remarked.
My wife, Peggy, tried a casserole studded with squares of red peppers, chock full of tomatoes, green beans, potatoes, peas, and pieces of pork. The stew was bright red from an infusion of sweet paprika, a flavoring beloved by the Bulgarians.
The giuvech, as it was called, takes its name from the Turkish word for the earthenware casserole in which it was baked. The Bulgarians had borrowed both food words and habits from the Ottomans, who had ruled their country for 400 years. The salty yogurt beverage I drank with my stuffed peppers had a Turkish name, ayran. The Bulgarian grape leaves and cabbage rolls were known as sarma, a word with Turkish roots. So interwoven were Turkish and Bulgarian cooking that the Bulgarians refer to their coffee as “Turkish coffee.”
The Turks were also masters of the decoratively prepared stuffed vegetable, or dolma. This cooking style was a Middle Eastern tradition. In Spain, the birthplace of the stuffed pepper, Moorish and Jewish outsiders had a penchant for filling eggplants and artichokes with minced meat, observes anthropologist Susan Tax Freeman. Spanish cooks adapted this technique to peppers from the New World, which arrived in Spain in the late fifteenth century.
The Spaniards, who pioneered the roasting of the sweet pepper, made the stuffed red pepper their national dish. Usually topped with tomato sauce, it was fortified with a filling of chopped pork. It was as if they were taunting Jews and Muslims—whom they had expelled from their land—with forbidden fruit.
The Turks were heirs of the Arabs, who shaped stuffed vegetables into artistic creations fit for a “shaykh.” The chefs of the Tokapi palace in Constantinople prepared lavish plates of venerable vegetables like eggplant and grape leaves along with a repertoire of more recently acquired produce like zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes. The dolmas and sarmas variously filled with rice, bulgur, pine nuts, walnuts, currants, ground lamb, and other tasty ingredients were staples of the Turkish court cuisine.
It’s very likely that stuffed vegetables were part of the culinary baggage the Turks hauled into the Balkans. Other pepper treats were also bequeathed to their subjects. I found a pepper relish of Turkish lineage at the Washington Cafe, a Bosnian restaurant. The condiment arrived with a plate of cevapcici (from the Turkish kebap), sausage- shaped rolls of minced beef, veal, and lamb served on top of pita bread. Muslim grill men who made this barbecue in open air restaurants and in sidewalk stands in the former Yugoslavia were renowned for their prowess.
I nibbled on the kebabs, which I sprinkled with chopped onions. I savored the sweet red pepper relish, which had a sharp aftertaste. It reminded me, except for the absence of eggplant, of ajver, the bottled Macedonian relish my Bosnian student had given me.
I was excited to discover that the Cafe Sofia offered a dish that was kin to ajver. The puree of smoky eggplant and roasted red pepper had a haunting name, kiopoulo. The chunky eggplant, the tangy pepper, the acid of vinegar, and the the bite of garlic intermingled.
I asked the waitress about the dish. She thought its name was probably Turkish. I consulted The Melting Pot, an invaluable book on Balkan cookery by Maria Kaneva-Johnson, which traced kiopoulo to the Turkish kopoglu or “scoundrel.” (My Bulgarian friend, Dimitre Natchev, did some checking and also confirmed that the Bulgarian name was of Turkish origin but was not so certain about Ms. Johnson’s conclusion.) If true, the connection between this bold relish and “scoundrel” was tantalizing. The dish indeed had a certain cunning and outlaw spirit.
Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
