Tastes of Coastal Croatia
Here's a longer version that fills out the story - your grandparents, the village, learning to cook, why you finally made the book - while keeping the voice direct and unfussy. I've tried to write it the way you actually talk: specific, no corporate filler, no triplets.
Nobody ever leaves hungry.
That was the rule at my grandparents' table in Petrčane, a small fishing village just outside Zadar on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. It wasn't a saying - it was enforced. You ate, and then you ate more, and then somebody put another plate in front of you. Refusing wasn't really an option, and after a while you stopped trying.
I grew up inside that rule. In a Croatian family, food isn't something you make on the side while life happens somewhere else - food is the thing. It's how we show up for each other. Births, deaths, holidays, ordinary Tuesdays, somebody passing through town for an afternoon - all of it routes through the kitchen and ends at the table. Meals stretch on for hours. The wine keeps coming. Somebody starts telling a story they've told a hundred times and everybody listens like it's the first time. That's the part of my childhood I carry with me, and it's the part I wanted to put in this book.
Petrčane itself is a small place - a few hundred people, stone houses, fishing boats, the Adriatic right there at the end of every road. I first went back as an adult in 2010 and I've been returning ever since. Some of the recipes here come straight from that village. Some come from my family's kitchen in the States, where my grandparents brought Dalmatia with them and rebuilt it on Long Island, ingredient by ingredient. And some are American dishes we've quietly Croatianized over the years - more olive oil, more garlic, more time, fewer shortcuts. Once you cook this way for long enough, you can't really cook any other way.
Dalmatian food is shaped by what's there. The sea gives us fish in abundance, so fish shows up constantly - grilled whole over coals, baked under a peka, tossed into a brodet, salted and dried for winter. Meat is different. Meat is for holidays, for honored guests, for the days that matter. Lamb on the spit for Easter. A long-cooked pasticada when somebody important is coming. The rest of the time, it's vegetables from the garden, fruit from the trees, herbs growing wild on the hillside, bread from the bakery down the road, and olive oil - pressed from family trees, poured without measuring, in everything.
That's really the secret, if there is one. We cook simply. A handful of ingredients, treated with respect, given enough time. No tricks. No twenty-step techniques. The flavor comes from the quality of what you start with and from not getting in its way.
This book is my attempt to get all of that down in one place - before it slips, before the people who taught me are gone, before the next generation forgets which dish goes with which holiday. I wrote it. I photographed it. I designed it. Every recipe in here is one I cook, on a stove I cook on, for people I love. Some are my grandmother's. Some are my mother's. Some are mine. A few are dishes I've reverse-engineered from meals in Petrčane that I couldn't stop thinking about after I came home.
It's a piece of my family. I hope some of it makes its way into yours.
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