In Bulgaria, Christmas Eve is called "Бъдни вечер." I would say that this night is even more important to us than Christmas itself. We have a special menu and several other traditions we observe through the night. The menu consists of an odd number of vegan dishes, and there must be at least 7 types of foods present on the table. In the course of the dinner, you're supposed to try at least one bite/sip from everything that is placed on the table. The count this year was 15 food items :) I told you this is "really big eats"...
So let's start with what we had. One of the most important things is the home-made bread with a coin baked inside. At the beginning of dinner, everyone receives a piece of bread. The traditions states that whomever gets the coin will have great luck for the next year. This year the luck went to my father.
Two other traditional dishes are the bean soup and the pickled cabbage leaves stuffed with rice.
On the dessert side, we always make baklava and something called "tikvenik" (тиквеник). It has shredded pumpkin sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, rolled inside leaves of fillo dough and baked.
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| Baklava |
As you might notice, several of the food items might be familiar to you from Greek or Turkish cuisine. Bulgarian cuisine is very tightly intertwined with other cuisines from the Mediterranean, encompassing countries from Morocco to Lebanon. I think what sets us apart is the heavy use of potatoes. Hmm, somehow potatoes are not featured at this traditional dinner.
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| Tikvenik |
Rounding up the food items are little things like fruit (oranges, bananas, apples, mango), nuts (walnuts and almonds), and drinks (wine, whiskey for my father, soda). Believe me, even if you take only a couple of bites of everything, you are so stuffed at the end of the dinner, you go to the couch and fall asleep ;)
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