What in the World are You Eating?

Finding slivovka in someone else’s food history

By Phil Lees

I moved house last week and I’m beginning to reconstruct the food history of its owner through the fragments that he left behind. It's my own pathology rather than him abandoning anything edible.

The previous owner built the house when he was young in the early 1940s and lived in it until his death. From the name on the title, he was from the Balkans which is about as much as I want to establish about him concretely without crossing the line into stalking and a relative taking out a restraining order. But for some reason, I can't stay away from establishing how he ate. Maybe it has something to do with the French gastronome Brillat-Savarin's aphorism about being what you eat.

Maybe it is a remnant of my obsessive childhood interest in unearthing dinosaurs.

The kitchen had barely been used; I doubt that the oven had even been opened in years. It is the first time that I have ever seen a build up of dust on the inside of an installed oven. It was bought in the late 1960s but there is no patina of black filth; the rotisserie attachment within has never pierced flesh and looks as it did the day that it came home from the showroom. Parts of the previous oven from the early 1940s, a megalith in enamel-coated cast iron, were dismantled and buried in the back yard. There are parts missing. I tried to rebuild it as an archeological exhibit and failed.

Along with the iron oven, in the backyard he left behind a whole orchard: two healthy apricots, a struggling disfigured lemon, a fig, tamarillo, nectarine and 12 plum trees. What does somebody do with a vast quantity of plums, all coming into season in a single hit?

A single bottle of homemade plum brandy was secreted under the bench in the mouldering garage and tucked away in the corner of the only internal cupboard inside the house were two mini bar-sized bottles of the Slovenian plum brandy, slivovka. One has a crane in flight on the bottle and no other hints to its origin; the other emblazoned with the logo of Turististično Društvo Dimnice Slivje.  From what I can gather from Google Translate, the label on the second refers to the tourist society for the smoking cave in the village of Slivje, Slovenia. I can only surmise that the plums on the bottle refer to plum brandy and the town's logo.

Slivovka is made by crushing and fermenting plums and some of their kernels in a vessel for a few months. Some recipes specify the use of whole plums, others recommend pitting and crushing the fruit to a pulp. The resulting purple alcoholic mash is then distilled and clarified, the eventual liquor coming out at a hefty 50% alcohol. An identical plum brandy is made across Central and Eastern Europe. It does not taste much like plums but does give the sensation of being set alight from the inside.

Home distillation of alcohol in Australia is illegal without an excise license. You can own a still with a capacity of up to five litres, use it to purify water or make essential oils and do anything but make tasty slivovka with it. As soon as you make booze, you must procure a license and owe the Australian Government 65 dollars per litre of pure alcohol. I'd love to know how this is policed by the Tax Office.

So I've moved into the house of an expatriate Slovenian bootlegger. He didn't eat much but drank well.

Source: http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/109169/Finding-slivovka-in-someone-else-s-food-history/blog/Mouthful