Every year, Pavlina and I take a break the day after Thanksgiving and drive away to a secluded mountain retreat. The first year we did it, I was on chemotherapy. Another year, Pavlina was in such a state, I had to feed her chocolates every time she went through a tunnel or passed a truck. This year it was me again, playing angry music on the car speakers.
Sidle up with a big grin
Caught the scent of my skin
From across the room.
But I can see your bloody teeth
Peering out from underneath
I know it’s coming soon.
Such was my state of mind, but Pavlina couldn’t feed me chocolates. I’m low-carb. Instead, we looped through Tsigov Chark and pulled up at the Shkembedzhiynitsa. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. Shkembe is the Bulgarian (from Turkish) word for tripe. -dzhiya (also from Turkish) is a person who does something, a triper. -nitsa forms nouns of place. The Tripery.
I don’t like tripe. It’s sold in soup (shkembe chorba) in every roadside truck stop, and it’s never any good. Watery, rubbery, and no matter how much pickled garlic and chili flakes you pile onto it, always smelling just a bit like farts.
I ordered the vegetarian chorba, with mushrooms, but Pavlina ordered chorba three-in-one, including not only shredded stomach lining, but tongue and liver as well. this plus another serving of those same organs, chopped, without the broth. She had more faith than me that day, and she was hungrier.
There’s a wrong way to make shkembe chorba, but there’s also a right way. Even though I wasn’t in the mood, even though I’d ordered a pale, wimpish imitation of the real thing, my soup seized me.
Roux, salt, meat, and a deep well of savory warmth. The pickled garlic and chili flakes became, not an escape hatch, but a ritual. Pavlina’s soup was even better. The tripe was satiny, cooked down to almost the same consistency as the broth. Substantial. I forgot why I was angry.
The Shkembedzhiynitsa is a small place, full of stuffed weasels and wooden tchotchkes, surrounded by aimless construction. Its Shkembedzhiya is an old bald man who watches political YouTube videos and won’t talk to diners. A master. The place didn’t have a card reader, but I dug up enough coins to pay for our meal.
“So that’s what the truck stops are imitating,” I said as we got into the car. Across the street was a lot full of abandoned campers and a grossly overbuilt vacation house. We drove toward the severely dry Lake Batak, past poorly-planned developments of bungalows trying to look rustic. I was reminded of Montana.
“What must someone think, staying in one of these?” I asked. “You bought a block of Dragolevtsi suburbia in a sheep field. Your house is two meters from someone else’s, and your windows look out onto a construction site, but deep inside you is your desire for the real thing: a cabin in the woods. It’s like the truckstop shkembe chorba. It’s an insultingly bad imitation, but what it’s imitating is so good, you’re glad to have it.”
Once we were at the hotel, I went on to Google Maps to give the place a review. “Should be the center of a national revival of Bulgarian cuisine,” I wrote, before reading the other reviews. The master shkembedzhiya had responded only to the negative reviews. He told his dissatisfied customers not to be idiots.
See you next month