Sunday Lunch in Murska Sobota

Out of Ljubljana, there is a road heading east to Budapest. Today this road is a six-lane highway, smooth tarmac with eager white lane-dividers. But once this was an unassuming dirt road, trampled over by the Ostrogoths, the Avars, the Lombards, and other avid tribes from the steppes of Central Asia, intent on settling in Europe. Even the Romans traversed this route, though in the opposite direction from their nomadic precursors, during their conquest of the plains of Pannonia.

The road east cuts through cornfields that stretch out undisturbed towards the horizon. Atop each cornstalk sits a cluster of tassels, which when viewed from a distance, creates a purple haze, like the smoke from a sorcerer’s brew, floating over the field. Poplar trees that dot the road are the only vertical challenge to this otherwise flat and unvaried landscape. As Uros and I head along this ancient route, our thoughts are not filled with the legacy of the Ostrogoths, the Avars, the Lombards, or even the Romans, but with a far more mundane matter: what we are going to have for lunch. We go to Murska Sobota, a quiet city of thirty thousand in the heart of these Pannonian flatlands, to visit his maternal and paternal grandparents, who share their love through three-course meals.

Babi Sida and Dedi Mirko live in a two-story house of a wooden and concrete frame, topped with a sloping roof. Their house sits in the center of the city, along a road that sees few cars and few pedestrians. Behind their house, stretches a large garden that shares a boundary with the grounds of a Renaissance castle that once belonged to a feudal Hungarian lord.

Babi Sida is a passionate gardener and tends to her flowers with great affection. A sprawling rosebush climbs along one side of the house, while on the other side, stand short but productive rhododendron plants. In wide pots on the balcony outside of her bedroom, Sida rears tall stalks of hibiscuses, which bloom into regal yellow, orange, and pink flowers.

Dedi Mirko tends to the fruits in the garden, the pear, plum, apricot, and peach trees that yield enough for jams and compotes to last throughout the winter. On our recent visit, the boughs of the apple and pear trees were laden with fruit, while only a few ripe peaches remained for picking.

The garden is the source of the vegetables that find their way into the kitchen. Luscious, fist-sized tomatoes, belonging to the “cow’s heart” variety, appear at dinnertime, cut in slices set on a ceramic plate. My husband eats them with a sprinkling of salt, but I prefer eating their juicy, fruit-like flesh plain. Sweet, pale-yellow paprika joins the tomato as another raw accompaniment to slices of the region’s Prekmurje ham and braided milk bread that form the crux of the day’s final meal.

Dinners are simple in an effort to counterbalance the extravagance of lunch. The first course is always a soup, followed by a heavy meat dish, and finished off with something sweet: a small square of cake, a helping of baked rice pudding, or maybe a scoop of chestnut puree, served with fresh whipped cream. And to cleanse the palette and aid digestion, or what I perceive as indigestion, a cup of Turkish coffee.

For Sunday lunch, Sida had prepared an elaborate baked roll: under a thin shell of phyllo dough, layers of Swiss chard, gouda cheese, grated carrot, sautéed mushrooms encased a chunk of pork loin. What an unusual but beautiful and tasty combination! When the roll came out of the oven, the vegetables were warm, the cheese had melted, and the pastry was moist yet flaky. Each slice of the baked log is colorful and geometrically balanced. When I asked Sida what it is called, she shrugged her shoulders. “A baked roll with vegetables and meat, I suppose,” she said. Though this may be her invention drawn from over fifty years of cooking experience, its colors and emphasis on patterns strikes me as something from the Middle Ages, a dish that perhaps may have been served to the Hungarian lord of the neighboring castle.

Dessert was yet another phyllo dough ingenuity; the flaky layers sheltered a moist walnut and chocolate cake. We eat the this course on the verandah, in between jokes and sips of sweet, hot Turkish coffee.