Cuisine

Goriška Brda cuisine, is very Mediterranean, incredibly inventive and creative. Full of attractive old traits, it has been rejuvenated with new combinations and has changed into a more cosmopolitan style.

All year round fresh ingredients; tasty and succulent vegetables; national meat products (particularly the salami sausages and smoked ham); savoury white polenta; rich herbs and wild shoots (hop, wild asparagus, orach) and the exceptional Goriška Brda olive oil, which returns to Brda after two heavy frosts in 1929 and 1955 are just some of the highlights of the Goriška Brda cuisine. Once you taste the ‘krodegini’ (sausages), ‘markandele’ (sausages); the almost forgotten chestnut dishes; smell the fennel flowers or taste a good home-produced grape brandy or mixed (medicinal brandy), you will feel the fascination of Brda in a different way. But the most important ingredient, of course, is always added by the people, their experienced hands and good hearts. Everything is prepared with love, which is equally expressed to both family members and guests.

Smoked ham
The fresh smoked ham, just mature enough and succulent, is one of the most popular appetizers in Brda besides the fine home-produced salami, and it is also an ingredient of ‘toč’ (sauce), which has been served for centuries with white polenta. The inhabitants of Brda always serve a glass of good wine with the smoked ham; and the white wine is especially good.

White polenta     
In Brda they mostly prepare white polenta which is evenmore appreciated than the yellow variety. They pour white flour, ground from a white variety of maize (corn), into boiling salted water, and they cook it in a copper pan for at least half an hour. The wealthier people even had a small machine for making polenta.

They usually

put the cooked polenta on a wooden board, then they cut it with a thread and serve it as a main dish, seasoned with various sauces. ‘Frtalja’ (egg omelette with herbs) A typical Brda dish, prepared as a fried egg omelette from beaten eggs, into which the Brda’s inhabitants put a mixture of fresh, finely chopped herbs: heart cabbage (balm-mint), chives, the young green fennel tops, ‘madrjalca’ (feverfew)

Polenta Briška kuhinjaČešnjev štrudelj

pr  ut 2 Kuhanje polente frtalja