Potica Is Not Pizza: A Papal Joke and a Culinary Lesson, thanks to President Trump

Pizza, from Wikipedia

I try to steer clear of politics in this blog, but it is impossible to resist this breaking news story. 

During his historic visit to the Vatican, the stocky President Trump was subject to a little gentle teasing by Pope Francis and the First Lady. 

During a cordial exchange, the Pope asked the Slovenian-born Melania:  "What are you feeding him? Potica?"  

Melania replied with a smile: "Yes, potica." 

Apparently, some of the news sources misunderstood this as a reference to pizza, which might be Italy's most famous culinary export.  

The New York Daily News has a full and accurate report of this gaffe, which was not (for once) the fault of President Trump. 

So, just for the record: Pizza has no connection to potica, beyond the obvious: Both are treasured national dishes that use yeast dough as a base. But otherwise, the differences are pronounced.

Potica is rolled and filled. The dough is rich and the filling is usually (but not always) sweet. It is an elaborate creation that is normally reserved for holidays and other celebrations. Pizza is flat, just a simple yeast dough covered with a savory topping. It is an everyday dish that probably began as a quick way to use leftover bread dough. 

Pizza looks like that tasty photo at the top of the page. Potica looks like this: 

Homemade Walnut-Honey Potica, from Blair K's kitchen

Pretty hard to confuse the two dishes, no?

But here is the likely source of the confusion: Italy and Slovenia share a border. In the border regions, there is a blending of both food and language. The rich, rolled yeast pastry/bread that is called potica in Slovenia (where it originated) is called "putizza" in Italian. So the meaning probably just got lost--or tangled--in translation. Potica/putizza morphed into pizza. But it's not.

The most famous Italian version of this shared dish is called putizza di noci. It is a specialty of Trieste, a cosmopolitan port city that is now part of Italy but was previously within the borders of the former Yugoslavia. There is a particularly delicious version of putizza filled with chocolate and nuts that is also a holiday dish in the Jewish community of Trieste. That is how I discovered this fascinating culinary overlap across three cultures.

If you would like to try your hand at the chocolate-filled Trieste version of putizza (or just want to learn more) see my previous post:

Putizza di Noci: Slovenian-Italian-Jewish Fusion = Chocolate Potica! 

In the photo below, the putizza di noci slices are on the left and the potica slices are on the right. They look very much the same. But you would never confuse either one with pizza!

Left: Putizza di Noci with chocolate-walnut filling.
Right: Potica with almond-honey (top) and poppyseed filling (bottom)
From Blair K's kitchen 

Christmas Day Dinner: A Preview

Christmas Poticas: Chocolate, Honey Nut, and Poppy Seed

Menu
Klobase with Red Pepper and Onion
Pecan-Crusted Salmon
Zeljanica (Spinach Cheese Pie)
Green Salad
Potica Three Ways
Shortbread Three Ways
. . . And Many Other Goodies!


It was a festive Christmas dinner, with family and a few friends gathered around the table.

My family's mixed heritage was well-represented. This year I think the Slovenian side may have won out!

I will be posting recipes early in the coming year.  Meanwhile, here is a photo preview:

Klobase with Red Pepper and Onion

Pecan-Crusted Salmon

Zeljanica (Spinach Cheese Pie)

Shortbread Three Ways: Plain, Ginger, & Caraway-Buckwheat

Potica Three Ways: Honey Nut, Chocolate, and Poppy Seed

Cranberry Walnut Potica

Cranberry Walnut Potica, with Scottish Shortbread
(photo by Blair Kilpatrick)

Potica (puh-teet’-za) is Slovenia’s most famous dish. For American families with roots in that small, beautiful Alpine country, the rich yeast pastry is a beloved Christmas tradition. It is also a traditional Easter dish.

In my family, potica served as the bread of memory, because it was the only Slovenian tradition my mother maintained.  So we took it very seriously and didn't allow for much experimentation.  At most, we might substitute pecans for walnuts.  In recent years, we began to grind the nuts in a food processor and melt the butter in the microwave.  But that was the extent of our innovations.  We wanted our potica to taste just like my grandmother's.

Last year, I took a bold step. I added a sprinkle of dried cranberries to the family recipe. It seemed to fit with the Christmas spirit.  Besides, many traditional recipes call for adding raisins.

My family actually liked the cranberry version.  If I try it again this way, I'll use a lighter hand with the honey.

A word about this treasured family recipe:  It came from my mother, who learned to make potica from her mother.  But my grandmother wasn't the source of the written instructions.

My grandmother, like so many traditional ethnic cooks, didn't use recipes herself, and she never offered written directions.  So my mother turned to an old high school friend, who got a recipe from her mother.  Here's an odd twist: her friend's family came from Serbia, another country in the former Yugoslavia.  But my mother insists that this was the method her Slovenian American mother followed.

And we all agree:  It tastes just like our memory of Grandma's potica.

The recipe that follows is copied from the battered notecard my mother wrote out for me, with a few added comments of my own.  Clearly, it is one of those minimalist recipes that is intended for someone who is already familiar with a dish, knows how to prepare it, and just needs guidelines about quantities.

In a future post, I will offer step-by-step instructions, along with photos.  But for now, here is my family's traditional recipe for potica.  Good luck!

About the photo: Are you wondering why that Slovenian potica is sharing space with Scottish shortbread? Take a look at one of my early blog posts, Holiday Baking: A Bittersweet Taste of My Ethnic Roots.


Potica (Slovenian Nut Roll)

Dough

2 ¾ sticks butter, melted and cooled
1 c. sugar
6 egg yolks
1 ½ c. sour cream
2 packages yeast
¾ c. warm milk
1 t. sugar
6 c. flour
1 t. salt

Mix first four ingredients together in a large bowl. In a small bowl, proof yeast in warm milk and sugar. Add yeast to the first mixture and mix well.

Mix flour and salt. Add to the above and mix to make a soft, sticky dough.

Knead dough. Divide in 4 parts. Wrap in waxed paper. Refrigerate overnight.


Filling

Combine:

2 lb. ground walnuts or pecans (6 1/2 c.)
1 c. sugar
2 t. cinnamon
dash of salt

Melted butter, about ½ c
Honey to taste
(Optional: dried cranberries)


Roll and stretch each portion of dough into a rectangle, a little thicker than pie crust. (Important note:  This should be: "a little thinner than pie crust," at least in my family.  The dough should be thinner than pie crust, but thicker than strudel or phyllo.)

Spread each portion with about 2 T. melted butter and ¼ of the nut/sugar mixture. Drizzle with honey. Sprinkle with dried cranberries, if desired. Roll up (from the long end) pinch seam and ends closed. Place seam side down on baking sheet, greased or lined with parchment paper. Let rise 1 ¼ hours.  (Note: Loaves don't rise much.) Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, if necessary for 10 minutes more at 325 degrees.  Let cool before slicing.  Makes 4 loaves.

Slovenian Dinner Week 1

Menu

*Stuffed Cabbage (Sarma)

*Cucumber Salad

 Serbian Corn Bread

 Coleslaw

 Christmas Potica (aka Slovenian Nut Roll)

Here it is!  This was my inaugural menu for the Josephine and Jožefa project.  The first week of January, I set out to begin my year of cooking ethnically.  Or, to be more exact, Slovenian-ly.

What to say about this first menu?  I decided to make a main dish and a side dish from Woman's Glory. Those are the starred dishes.  For the stuffed cabbage, an old favorite, I tried to combine the best of the three or four versions offered.  Naturally, I made a few changes.  I couldn't bring myself to use 2/3 cup of fat to saute the onion!  As for the filling . . . well, we are not big meat eaters, but I  figured I could go along with the pork and beef. But we draw the line at veal in our house, so I substituted ground turkey for that part of the mix.

I figured I would "cheat" with dessert, since I still had leftover Christmas potica. The Serbian cornbread and coleslaw, also leftover, were extra.  I figured they fit pretty well, ethnically speaking.  Besides, the spirit of these vintage American ethnic cookbooks was practical and eclectic. You used what was at hand.

I will be posting the recipes soon.  My Slovenian-style stuffed cabbage is still a work in progress. (This version came out tasty but under spiced.) The cucumber salad was quick and easy: sliced cucumbers, sour cream mixed with yogurt and garlic, along with a little paprika, probably the one Slovenian touch.

As for the potica?  That's the one and only Slovenian food I grew up eating and preparing. You can find my potica recipe included in a long essay I wrote over on my  more "literary" blog.  It's called Potica, Bread of Memory.

This year's Christmas potica included one new touch: I added dried cranberries.  This might not seem like much of a stretch, since many versions do include raisins.  But my family doesn't do that.   So it was a bold move on my part.  Pretty well received, too.  

Potica, Bread of Memory | Blair Kilpatrick | Blog Post | Red Room

Potica, Bread of Memory | Blair Kilpatrick | Blog Post | Red Room

I wrote this essay to answer a question posed on a writing community called Red Room:  What is the secret ingredient in your holiday traditions?

Naturally, I wrote about potica, the rich yeast bread that is probably Slovenia's most well known dish.  My family's version is more pastry than bread.  It's like the love child of brioche and baklava.

The secret ingredients are:

love, memory, and family
ambivalence
a refrigerated yeast dough made with sour cream
a simple, uncooked nut filling
a heavy hand with the honey

To see the recipe, follow the link above.

Holiday Baking: A Bittersweet Taste of My Ethnic Roots

My parents, children of immigrants, grew up during the Depression. They followed a typical path to success: education and assimilation. But their ambivalence about their ethnic roots weakened when the winter holidays approached.

I’ve always associated the winter holidays with two special holiday sweets: Scottish shortbread, a unique version passed down by my late father; and potica, a rich Slovenian yeast bread my mother learned to make from her mother. Their preparation took on the character of ritual during my childhood. I’ve kept up the tradition.

My father supervised the shortbread making. We started early, just after Thanksgiving, so the shortbread would be properly aged by Christmas. The ingredients were simple: butter, flour, sugar, and a touch of salt.

We would gather around the kitchen table, with a massive pile of butter and sugar in the center, salt-laced flour off to the side. Then five pairs of hands started kneading. My father was very particular about the method: long kneading with warm hands, to allow as much flour as possible to be incorporated into the butter-sugar mix.

Once the shortbread had been worked to the point of being dense, smooth and warm to the touch (a process that could take as much as an hour), my father pressed it thickly into rectangular pans and scored it with a fork. The dough was allowed to rest and then baked to a pale golden brown. Finally, the shortbread was cut into squares and stored in tins between layers of paper towels, to draw off excess moisture.

My father was very clear about the desired outcome: a hard, dry, buttery cube that offered significant resistance to the tooth. Anything less than that, anything thin and crisp and tender, he dismissed as “Lorna Doons.” In other words, commercial shortbread for Americans, about as authentic as chop suey.

My father had learned to make shortbread from his Scottish mother, an angry woman who was often ill. She died before I turned three. Grandma Kilpatrick despised Catholics and had little use for anyone who wasn’t British, according to my mother. Any good baker will tell you that her approach to making shortbread was completely wrong. But in my family, it became the gold standard.

My Slovenian American grandma, who lived into my adolescence, was a sweet, loving woman. She worked magic in the kitchen of that little bungalow on Cleveland’s East Side she shared—unhappily—with my immigrant grandfather. I didn’t learn they were both alcoholics until years after their deaths.

My grandmother’s crowning achievement was potica, a rich pastry masquerading as bread. Potica (pronounced “puh-teetza”) is a national dish in Slovenia—a very small country in Central Europe, about the size of Massachusetts, with a population of around two million. Until the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, it was probably unknown to most Americans. It has a long history of falling under the control of one or the other of its powerful neighbors.

Potica occupies the border region between bread and strudel—just like the Balkans, at the crossroads of east and west. It begins with a rich sour cream yeast dough, rolled out thinly, then spread with a filling of butter, sugar, cinnamon, and walnuts, drizzled with honey. My own mother has always always managed to find one extreme or the other, with the honey: drenching the dough in sweetness, or forgetting it entirely. Next, the potica is rolled up, formed into a loaf or coil, and baked. Potica is usually reserved for special occasions. In my family, it is rationed out like gold—or caviar.


My family’s version of potica has always tasted like baklava. Other fillings do exist: raisins, curd cheese, chocolate, poppy seeds. But I’m partial to the potica I have eaten every Christmas of my life. I now make it myself, but my attempts don’t measure up to my grandmother, my mother—or even my younger son, who first made potica as a project for his ninth grade ethnic studies class.

So this month, just like every December I can recall, I’ll make shortbread and potica. I’ll knead the dough and remember. I’ll taste the sweetness and the sadness. I'll remember the lives of my ancestors. Hard and sweet.

Reading Louis Adamic (An Introduction)

I've just started reading Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle, published in 1932. It's subtitled The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America.


It was Adamic's second book. His first, Dynamite: A History of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 came out the previous year. Both books were well-received. But it was Adamic's next book, The Native's Return(1934) that established his reputation as a social critic and chronicler of the immigrant experience. It became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It sold 70,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication! I read The Native's Return three years ago. Until recently, that was the extent of my exposure to Adamic's writing.

Louis Adamic was prolific: A dozen books, plus a large number of articles and essays in his twenty year writing career. It ended too soon, with his mysterious death in 1951. A suicide or a political murder, depending on who you believe. But more on that later.

Except for Dynamite, which has just been re-issued, Adamic's books are out of print. There are lots of vintage copies floating around on the Internet, usually at modest cost. Except for Laughing in the Jungle, which seems to be pretty scarce. I paid about $45 for my copy.

I've just been reading about Adamic's school days at a gymnasium in Ljubljana, now the capitol of Slovenia. He writes that his mother used to visit him at his student boarding house every couple of months. It wasn't such an easy trek from their peasant village of Blato ("mud.") She would bring him fruit and potica. "Carniolan cake," Adamic called it, using one of the old names for Slovenia.

Potica. That makes me smile. It's the one bit of our Slovenian heritage my family never lost. We make potica every Christmas and ration it out like gold. But I found a little bit in the freezer, left over from last year. So I've been defrosting a slice now and then.

I thought potica out of season might function like Proust's madeleine. At the very least, I figured it might help put me in the mood for my new writing project. Potica is very rich, with all that butter and honey, so it does keep well. But this particular batch was definitely the worse for wear after a year in the freezer.

Time for a new batch. Here's a nice potica link.