2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29
Shopska salad is the undisputed leader of the Bulgarian national cuisine. Its balanced taste of fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, peppers and grated cheese tempts us every day and everywhere. And not just us. The Shopska salad is probably the first thing that foreigners learn in Bulgaria and about Bulgaria, which they spell in restaurants or in TV interviews and which they do not forget long after they leave.
And do you know who invented the Shopska salad?
No, it's not obvious, it's not the shops. The shoppers are, in fact, the Bulgarians who are best known not only for their stubbornness but also for their conservatism. In no case can they be expected to experiment creatively, leading to the creation of such a queen of the kitchen as it is. the Shopska salad. Their worldview will surely always be based on a few truths of their own that nothing will ever change. There is no assumption supported by the famous There is nothing higher than Vitosha, no deeper than Iskra.
The truth is that the Shopska salad is not the work of any of the regions in the country. It is not an old folk recipe, but a product of an unknown experimenter from the former Balkantourist - the tourist organization of communist Bulgaria.
According to some of the stories from that time, Balkantourist was tasked to create a unique culinary product, which would be presented as typically Bulgarian and which would attract and delight foreign tourists in the country. This led to the combination of finely chopped red tomatoes and cucumbers, peppers - roasted or raw, onions, oil, vinegar and for cover - grated cheese. Apart from the indisputable taste qualities, the discovery was entirely in the colors of the national flag - white, green and red. This story most likely happened somewhere in the 60s of the last century, and in the 70s the new Bulgarian salad began to make its way through the resorts and around the country.
And why shopska in a situation where it has nothing to do with the shops?
Photo: Zoritsa
According to one version, the author was probably influenced by the fact that the folk costumes in the Shopska region are white, with white aprons and white caps, reminiscent of grated cheese on a salad. Whether this is the case, however, we cannot know today.
For the short history of the Shopska salad evidence that it is not present in any of the old Bulgarian cookbooks.
According to some of the researchers of Bulgarian cuisine and culinary traditions in our country, the Shopska salad had no chance to appear earlier. The reason is that tomatoes enter Bulgaria as a product much late. There is historical evidence that until the 1930s, Bulgarian peasants viewed vegetables that were popular today with considerable suspicion. They used it mainly green and mostly in pickles, and red was considered rotten and fed to animals.
In fact, the fear of the red tomato also existed in other Western European countries. The probable explanation for this is in the metal containers with high lead content used in the past. In contact with them, the acid in tomatoes probably caused stomach upset, which led to the tasty vegetables to be stigmatized for a long time.
Thank God, that time has passed and today it is part of some of the most delicious foods in the world. Undoubtedly, he is among them the Shopska salad, which has long surpassed even the boldest dreams of communist ideologues. The Shopska salad is well-known not only in Bulgaria but also abroad. Its variants are prepared in Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and even American restaurants.
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