Uskršnji goranski nadjev

The story

Novi list calls nadjev an obligatory food on the Easter table of every house in Croatia's Gorski kotar. Day-old bread is cut into cubes and soaked in beaten eggs, mixed with lightly fried smoked ham and bacon, stuffed into a casing and cooked slowly in a large pot. Families once used a pig's stomach; today most use a cleaned beef intestine, filled only three quarters full because the filling swells. Each place has its own name for it, among them naduàvajna, bȕdle, žeuòce, nadèla, nàdjevi and hrge. The Delnice recipe, from writer and radio journalist Davor Grgurić's cookbook Goranska jela, made with the Prepelin'c ethnographic association, uses 45 eggs to a kilogram of ham and leaves out green onion. The Ravna Gora version recorded by Blažica Sveticki of the Plodova gorja association adds the green tops of spring onions. Sveticki describes a holiday table of nadjev, boiled ham, eggs, horseradish, spring onions and raisin bread, and a basket that the youngest woman of the family carried to early Mass to be blessed. Crumbs of the blessed food were never thrown away; they were burned or scattered in the first furrow of spring plowing. Easter Sunday falls on March 28 in 2027, so make the roll on Holy Saturday and give it a night in the refrigerator before slicing.