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Henrie's Recipes
An elixir for all manner of ills
by Tanja Subotic
Posted Wed, 03 Dec 2003
A group of Bosnian Serbs gather around a fire in this northern village, waiting for the first drops of precious plum brandy to trickle from the still and, soon after, down their throats.
Highly alcoholic and distilled in backyard drums using home-grown fruit, Bosnian brandy, or sljivovica as it is generally known around here, is much more than a drink to warm the soul on a cold Balkan night.
It's a way of life, a cultural tradition, and, despite what medical science has to say, an elixir for all manner of ills.
"Sljivovica is good for everything. It's great for the heart, blood circulation and for infections," said Ostoja Miletic, a sprightly 70-year-old, as he watched the still with his neighbours, the brothers Boro and Zlatko Miletic.
"Every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is take two shots of sljivovica."
The brothers' still consists of two huge kettle-like copper drums linked by a small pipe. After the plums are heated in the first container the alcohol vapour travels through the pipe into the second where it cools back into a liquid.
The first drops are "not recommended," warned 40-year-old Zlatko, because the first litre is methanol. The ethanol, the actual brandy, only comes later.
"The liquid pours first into a bottle placed in the middle of a huge can and, since methanol is heavier, it remains in the bottle. The rest, the liquid that brims over from bottle into the can, is sljivovica," he explained.
Like vodka for the Russians, Bosnian brandy is not a drink for the light-hearted.
"Sljivovica is considered good when it has around 42 percent alcohol content," said the brothers' neighbour, Slobodan Aleksic, 60.
More potent stuff, known as "rot-gut brandy," had the advantage of doubling as a cleaning agent, he said.
"Rot-gut brandy is very good for cleaning windshields, but it's not so good if the police stop you because they'll immediately ask you to blow into the balloon," he said, referring to a breath test.
Plum brandy ceremonies are held throughout October and November and village men spend much of their time during these two months walking from one still to another. People feel offended if passers-by refuse a shot of home brew.
Producers enjoy a special reputation in villages because the expensive stills are a significant investment. Even so, no one worries about the cost.
Ranko, a still owner, explained that anyone could use his still to make their own brandy as long as they brought enough plums. As for payment — no cash please.
"One fill of brandy still costs one litre of sljivovica. It can be paid in cash but we prefer to be paid in sljivovica," he said.
Boro said that this year he had collected only one tonne of plums, enough for some 130 litres of sljivovica, but in a good year he could expect to produce three times as much.
None of it will be sold, but Boro said he was still a bit concerned that his supplies might run short by the end of summer.
Of all the plums grown in Bosnia, 83 percent are used for making sljivovica and only 17 percent goes into jam. In the Serb part of Bosnia alone, there are some six million plum trees that can produce up to 80 000 tonnes of fruit per year.
However much the Bosnians produce, sljivovica earns little export income for the impoverished country because local people drink it all.
They drink it for good health, for the good of their souls, when they're happy or sad, during childbirth, at funerals, to celebrate success and forget failure, before and after meals, with their first coffees of the morning, to ease stress during work, to relax after work, at night to aid sleep ... the list goes on.
AFP
