Sarmi

These are little packages containing rice, various spices and minced meat (unless they’re the ones eaten for the Christmas meal when the meat is left out) and wrapped in vine leaves, skins of red peppers or, more usually, pickled cabbage leaves. In the winter, most families will have a huge jar of pickling cabbages on their balcony which will be used for making sarmi. The pickling liquid is an unnaturally bright pink with a distinctive pungent smell and the cabbages are carefully selected – the ones with five or more veins on the leaves are said to give the best flavour.

Road Rage

There was a recent item on the news about the residents of a tower block who woke up one day to find that all the tyres of their cars had been punctured with a screwdriver. The culprit was said to be an Englishman who had been in Sofia visiting his wife’s family and had left that morning. I don’t know if he was a convenient scapegoat to enable the police to avoid doing any actual policing, but if it was the Englishman, I can understand it. The Bulgarian standards of driving and parking don’t mix well with repressed English rage.

Christmas Meal

This happens on Christmas Eve evening – there’s no particular food-related tradition for Christmas Day, other than to eat lots of it. The Christmas meal is vegan (as is the whole of Christmas Eve) and will include dishes like roasted peppers, a big pot of beans, winter salad, different kinds of dips, sarmi, a bread made without milk or yeast and a special compot made from figs and other dried fruit. It’s very important that there’s an odd number of these dishes and, after the meal, they should be left on the table overnight so that departed relatives can eat too.