Wildly good preserves from Serbia
As William Marshall, one the retail managers at the Deli, said with a smile, "Serbia! Who'd a thunk it?" Not me, that's for sure. Thankfully, Vaso Lekic, Milan Petkovic, Aleksandar Lekic had the vision, temerity and tenacity to make these old style jams, and we can get at them without swerving off to a roadside stand in the Balkans.

These jams from the Balkans are sort of spare in a way that reflects the roughness of the pine forests and high altitudes at which the fruit is picked. The sun in Serbia certainly shines as it does elsewhere, but the work of gathering by hand on steep mountain sides is no small thing. What is small, actually, is the fruit itself. These are mostly wild fruits, which means that by commercial standards, the berries are tiny. The strawberries are maybe the size of the nail on your little finger. The plants have to fight far harder to survive than their cultivated cousins meaning that they have less water, are denser and chewier with more intense flavors. The preserves are lean, lovely and so special that we've spent like two years working to bring them here from Belgrade.

The mention of Serbia's capital city might be a bit misleading here I guess. It is, quite accurately, where the folks from whom we buy them are based. The office has a Belgrade address. But Belgrade is a big city, the center of political and economic life in Serbia, not a place where wild strawberries would be generally be growing. The fruit that makes these special is anything but urban. This is not the stuff that shows up in supermarkets. It's way too much work and way too hard to gather in mass market quantities. Tiny little wild strawberries (my personal favorite of all these preserves), baby wild blueberries, really delicious wild raspberries. While the names of all those fruits are, of course, familiar to folks around here, we rarely get to taste truly wild fruit in any form any more. And each jar of these jams packs in a lot of these hard to find little wild berries. There's a great plum butter (that sort of thing being very big in the Balkans) that's made without any added sugar.

I guess for our Michigan context, I'll just say that the folks at Foodland are doing in Serbia what Justin Rashid (and everyone else who works there) has been doing up at American Spoon in Petoskey in northern Michigan for the last 30 years — hand picking the best of our area's very special fruits and then cooking them in small batches in open copper kettles to make some really exceptional jams, preserves and jellies.

Then there's the stuff that doesn't grow here. I love the sensual perfume of the rose petal jam. In this case the roses actually come from Bulgaria. Like the berries above, they're gathered in the wild — tiny small roses that grow out in the fields and are harvested completely by hand for just a few weeks in May. Stick a spoonful in the Creamery's fresh fromage franc and you've got a really great, very easy breakfast.

My favorite of this first shipment though is actually the green walnuts. Sounds strange, I'm sure, but "green" walnuts are quite commonly consumed in the Balkans though we almost never see them here. What we're used to are the fully mature, dry textured nuts that we put on salads or eat out of hand in toasted or roasted form. These, by contrast, are the young fruits, picked before the shell is hard. They have to be rinsed and soaked nine different times, then hand peeled and cooked in sugar syrup. The results are delicious. Honestly they're great just with a spoon, but you could do all the obvious and good things one would do — put 'em on gelato, on pound cake, etc. They're tender but firm, sweet but not excessively so, and lusciously, deliciously good!

I was thinking that I was safe in saying that hardly anyone in Ann Arbor would have been missing access to preserves and special stuff like this. But then I remembered Pedja Sukovic from Xoran. Most folks in Ann Arbor won't have heard of his company. I know them because they're very good customers, both of our eating establishments, and also of ZingTrain, having partaken of our training seminars in service and more recently open book finance (see www.zingtrain.com for more on those). Anyways, Pedja's work has nothing to do with food or hand picking wild berries or cooking preserves in old open kettles over wood fires. He's sort of at the other end of the business spectrum — Xoran innovated the production of portable CAT scan machines which they sell and service to hospitals all over the world from their Ann Arbor HQ. What made me think of Pedja is the fact that he's from Serbia and that he likes food. I brought him a few jars for a gift. It's not every day that a Serbian living in Ann Arbor gets to eat Serbian food, and a big part of what I love about our work is that we get the chance to connect people with positive taste memories from their past. Turns out that the folks who make these preserves have their offices in the neighborhood in which he lived growing up in Belgrade. One taste of the wild strawberry was all it took. "Wow. I remember this! This is great!" Serbia may seem obscure to most of us here in Ann Arbor ("Who'd a thunk it?" to come back to Mr. Marshall's quote up at the top of this piece), but to someone who left there to live here this food we're finally getting in is an important cultural and emotional link to the past.

Get these incredible flavors at Zingerman's Delicatessen:
Raspberry
Blueberry
Green Walnut
Rose Petals
Cranberry
Plum Butter
Strawberry

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