Souvenir hunting #4
At home, we rarely count a trip to the supermarket among the highlights of the day. But abroad, at least one supermarket visit is always planned in the hunt for edible souvenirs to take home. What should you not miss from each country? FavorFlav scours the shelves.
Today we’re returning from Croatia & Istria with:
Arancini
The traditional delicacy of Dalmatia in southern Croatia is arancini. Not the rice balls from Sicily that look like oranges, but candied orange (bitter orange) peel. Forgot to bring them home? Make them yourself, Istrian-style, by soaking orange peels cut into strips in water, boiling them for half an hour with an equal weight of sugar in water, then rolling them in sugar while they are still hot and leaving them to dry on a rack. Homesickness cured.
Fuzi
Bringing home dried pasta is always a good idea. An easy way to recall the flavours of your holiday destination à la minute. And Italy certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on pasta. In Istria, you’ll find fuzi everywhere. Pasta dough, cut into diamonds and then usually rolled around a pencil and dried. Eat them as they do in Istria, with a ragout of mushrooms, truffles, chicken or steak.
Maraschino
In Zadar, in Dalmatia, Marasca cherries grow: a small, bitter, red-black variety of cherry from which a crystal-clear liqueur has been distilled locally since the sixteenth century. Stones and all. The liqueur is sold in bottles with a straw covering.
Text:
Marjan Ippel
Images:
