Soleti

Crisps aren’t such a big part of everyday life in Bulgaria as they are in Britain. You can only get them in ‘grab-bag’ size and there isn’t anywhere near as much shelf space given over to them in newsagents or supermarkets. They’re not called crisps either. Like the Americans, Bulgarians call them chips (which has frequently resulted in somewhat disappointing experiences in restaurants). The go-to unhealthy snack of choice is instead Soleti. These are long, thin sticks of a pretzel-like substance that come in different flavours and are sold in vending-machinable bags about the size of a regular crisp packet.

Bob

Beans. More specifically, white beans which have been slowly cooked in a clay pot with vegetables and herbs. The types and quantities of vegetables and herbs will vary, everyone has their own version, but there will usually be chopped onions, peppers, carrots and tomatoes. Bob is served in the pot with spearmint on top and is eaten as a side dish, often with sausage. ‘Sausage’ in Bulgarian is nadenitsa (наденица) and ‘with’ is c, so when combined the dish is: bob c nadenitsa, pronounced ‘Bob Snadenitsa’ which sounds like a reliable yet slightly bumbling veteran policeman in a crime novel.

Potatoes

I saw somebody - British or Irish, I think - who was complaining online about restaurants in Sofia. He said that whenever he ordered a meal, the server said: ‘You know that this doesn’t come with potatoes, don’t you?’ This probably happened around Vitoshka as the restaurants there are most used to managing the expectations of tourists who might expect the inclusion of potato to be so obvious that it doesn’t warrant mentioning on the menu. The potato is more of a main event here and not eaten very frequently. The staple accompaniment to a meal is generally some kind of salad.

Cigarettes

More people smoke here than in the UK and often, inside some bars and restaurants, the staff will bring around water filled pots to use as ashtrays when it gets suitably late. There used to be a brand called Victory Cigarettes but these were re-packaged as Rothmans a few years ago. Aside from these and a couple of the bigger American names, most of the manufacturers are Greek. The biggest difference is that smoking is gendered in Bulgaria. The female cigarettes are thinner and all white and you would never see a woman smoking one of the thicker, normal brands.

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.

Winter Salad

It might also be called ‘Royal Salad’. This is a mixture of raw vegetables, generally cauliflower, peppers, garlic and carrot (although this will vary) floating in pickling vinegar mixed with a little salt and sugar. Like lutenitsa, this is usually made in the autumn and stored in jars for use in the winter months when fresh produce isn’t so readily available. It’s nice with a little paprika sprinkled on the top and goes very well with rakia. In fact, I suspect that eating winter salad is an excuse to drink rakia the whole year round – it is for me, anyway.

Lutenitsa

A sauce made primarily from roasted peppers. It goes with almost everything, especially red meat, but you can also eat it on its own on toast or as a dip. Every supermarket will have several long shelves devoted to different brands but the best, of course, is homemade and you generally make it at the start of autumn. To do this, you’ll need an afternoon sweating over your chushkopek roasting several kilograms of peppers one by one, as well as a few aubergines, some carrots, garlic, cumin, salt and tomato puree. Then you peel everything and blend it all together.

Chushkopek

With characteristic self-depreciating humour, the chushkopek is touted as being Bulgaria’s proudest invention. It’s a device for roasting peppers. If you cut a howitzer shell in half, the bottom half would look like a chushkopek and it weighs about the same, thick metal with a well in the centre that’s wide enough for a single pepper. You might get a handful of chilis in there or a narrow aubergine, but peppers are its primary concern. When you start using it, you realise why it’s so industrial looking – if was built from anything less than military grade armour, it would melt.

Kozunak

This must have the same kinds of roots as hot cross buns as it’s a form of sweetened bread associated with Easter. It’s a full loaf though – a bit like panettone, but sweeter with sugar sprinkled on top and lumps of chocolate, raisins or candied fruits inside. It’s very difficult to make so you can tell which are the best bakeries as these will be the ones with queues outside in the couple of weeks before Easter. If there’s a better accompaniment to a cup of (British) tea than kozunak anywhere in the world, I’ve yet to hear about it.

Snezhanka

In a restaurant you’ll usually see a section on the menu that comes after the starters and says ‘appetisers’. These are different types of dips that will generally include: katuk (made with sirene and Bulgarian yoghurt), kyopul (made with mashed aubergine and garlic), tarama (taramasalata) and snezhanka. The translation of snezhanka is ‘snow white’ and it has the same ingredients as tarator but without the water - it might also have pickled gherkin instead of cucumber. It’s perfect to eat in the sunshine on a summer picnic and goes very well with rakia.

Gyuveche

The name comes from the small, round ceramic pot it’s cooked in - you can find these pots in any souvenir shop or market stall. The dish is very old and very adaptable as it depends on whatever ingredients you have available. It’s simple to cook and methodical in preparation. You cut up all the bits into small pieces - ours has yellow cheese, sirene, ham, tomato, pepper and leek - then layer them inside the pot and put it in the oven. Just before it’s ready, you crack an egg on top. Everything melts together into a magnificent goo.

Tarator

A beloved summer staple. It’s eaten with a spoon as a kind of thin, cold soup or you can drink it – which seems much more logical to me. It takes a while to get used to this one as it tastes a bit like watered down tzatziki. The first time I ordered it from a takeaway soup shop, I mistakenly ate it with bread and was so disgusted that I poured the whole lot down the toilet. It’s made with half Bulgarian yoghurt, half water, cubes or strips of cucumber, and garlic – you can also add crushed walnuts for texture.

Cuban Coffee Pots

Moka pots or stove-top coffee makers - you can get them for about 10LV from most all-purpose household tat shops. Although they’re quintessentially Italian, Bulgarians call them Cuban because that’s where they imported them from during Communism. There’s a satisfying steampunk element to making Cuban coffee, none of the faff of filters or capsules, and you don’t need an instruction manual, just the pot, the coffee, some water, and a source of heat. The taste is far superior to the scalded tar you get from permanently re-heating filter machines and the pretentiously named foam that dribbles from expensive chrome gadgets.

Ayran

A drink made from Bulgarian yoghurt. Bulgarians are very proud of their yoghurt as it’s the only one in the world that contains a particular type of bacteria (lactobacillus bulgarius). The nearest equivalent would be Greek yoghurt but that’s more liquidy and has a sourer taste. The first time you try ayran, you’ll think it needs some kind of fruit flavour but you lose this perspective quite quickly. It’s sold for about 1LV in any shop that has a fridge but is pretty easy to make at home: two thirds Bulgarian yoghurt, one third water and a dash of salt.

Carp

This is traditionally eaten on St Nikola’s day on 6^th December but it’s also what you’ll most likely get if you ask for a generic ‘fish’. Carp has all the usual difficulties of eating fish - digging around for meat, picking out bones, not looking it in the eye - and none of the rewards. There are bits that look as though they might be tasty but they’re just slimy flaps that slip around in your mouth until you can gag them down. At best, it has no discernible flavour, at worst, it has an earthiness that’s like eating sludge.

Shopska

Named after the Shopi region around Sofia, this is the country’s ubiquitous salad and the perfect accompaniment to rakia. Tomatoes, cucumber and sirene – Bulgarian white cheese which is similar to feta but saltier and less crumbly. Don’t be deceived by the apparently simple ingredients, keep in mind that vegetables actually have proper flavours here. Even the substandard dregs you find in Billa (the equivalent of Tesco) are tastier than the high quality organic produce you can buy in the UK. Before I came to Bulgaria, I didn’t much like tomatoes and I could never really see the point of cucumbers.

Boza

This is a breakfast drink that you have as an accompaniment to banitsa. It’s made from fermented millet with an alcohol content of about 1% and isn’t very appetising to look at – extremely thick and resembling clay dredged up from a riverbed. It doesn’t taste too bad if you have a sweet tooth though, you can probably sip at it. Imagine making a bowl of muesli from the dust left over at the bottom of the packet and then adding half a kilogram of sugar. The sludge of milk left over at the end would taste quite similar to boza.

Shkembe

If rakia is the national drink, then shkembe is probably the national food. They kind of go together anyway as shkembe is popularly regarded as a hangover cure. It’s tripe soup - ‘peasant food’ as all tripe dishes seem to be. I remember my grandpa eating tripe, a flaccid, waffle-like slab slathered in vinegar. The tripe in shkembe is easy enough to deal with – it sinks to the bottom so it’s easily avoided – but the liquid is unbelievably rich and is eaten with so many spoonfuls of crushed garlic that it makes you wonder if anyone really likes the taste.

Rakia

Flavours include apricot, fig and plum, but the best is unflavoured and made from grapes. Unlike most hard liquors, you drink it at the start of a meal when it really enhances the taste of a salad. It doesn’t go with any other food - or when it’s drunk on its own. You get a happy, confident buzz almost immediately but when you attempt to walk, you’ll find that your sense of balance has disappeared. Many Bulgarians make their own, which is stronger than the usual 40% proof, and in villages they have community stills where you can book timeslots.

Banitsa

Almost every metro station has at least one banitsa kiosk – it’s the equivalent of a pasty in Cornwall or a hot dog in New York. It’s more than just street food though, each family has their own particular recipe. It comes in slabs or in coils and is made by layering extremely thin sheets of pastry between different mixtures of fillings and then baking. The most popular and traditional filling is crumbled sirene (Bulgarian white cheese) but there’s also leek and a sweet version that has chopped pumpkin. It works with mince as a kind of bechemel free lasagne too.