ABOUT TOM PAYNE
I have lived two lives which converge here in Feastern Europe: Slavic languages and food. For 11 years I studied the languages, history and cultures of Eastern Europe. Most of that time I concentrated on Bulgarian and Russian, which I taught at the college level. But I also dabbled in Czech, Polish and Old Church Slavonic, the medieval Slavic liturgical language. Dissatisfied with life in academia, I began a second career marketing in the food business.
I have always worked in food, from my first ever job at age 15 in a grocery store to cooking professionally in a restaurant earning money for graduate school. My warmest family memories are entwined with food and cooking. I clung to the side of my maternal and paternal grandparents learning important culinary lessons from all of them. I frequently asked my mother if I could help prepare the family dinner and was inquisitive about every ingredient used in the process.
In marketing I have concentrated on the baking business but my passion for cooking and baking in general has remained strong, fueled by curiosity and nostalgia. Some of my go-to dishes are those I remember from my time living abroad in Eastern Europe. It was there that my culinary horizons were truly widened.
My passion for Eastern Europe
Some of my earliest memories are of spending afternoons in the small living room of the tiniest little house that belonged to my great-grandparents, Ivan and Eula Zekoff. The little, square four-room house with grey clapboard siding sat just over the railroad tracks from my other set of great-grandparents in my hometown–who incidentally lived in an even tinier house of only three rooms. Great grandpa Zekoff was somewhat of a mystery to me as a small child. He spoke very little and when he did it was through a dense Bulgarian accent.*
To an 8 year old boy, Grandpa Zekoff was exotic. I remember watching re-runs of the colorful, campy Batman TV show while he ate his favorite Fig Newtons and smoked his pipe. He died before I reached my ninth birthday. My mother would later tell me stories about how he emigrated alone as a very young man, a teenager I think, and ended up in our small northern Illinois town. Like many immigrants to the United States, Ivan Zekoff sought to assimilate. He married my great grandmother Eula, of English descent, had three children and spoke only English to them. I do not recall once hearing him utter a single word of Bulgarian.
I was fascinated that someone in my family had so recently come from a far off, completely unknown place. I would calculate the percentage of Bulgarian heritage in my blood: eight great grandparents meant I was one-eighth or 12.5% Bulgarian! That made me unique. No one I knew had even heard of Bulgaria much less had a direct connection to it. Alas the connection seemed to have died with my great grandfather. No one in the family knew any Bulgarian language nor any Bulgarian relatives or how to contact them. There was no internet then and Bulgaria lay squarely behind an iron curtain.
What I did know of Bulgaria was clouded by misinformation and fear. My mother told me stories about the people in the Eastern Bloc countries and how Ivan bravely escaped the tyranny to find freedom in America. But that timeline was all wrong. See my mother was a child of the 50s and grew up with the Red Scare. Her grandfather left Bulgaria at least forty years before communism. So there was revisionism in Ivan’s story to fit our political bias against countries in Eastern Europe.
When I started studying Russian in college, I was determined that I would use my new language skills to learn some Bulgarian. Perhaps I would be able to communicate some day with people who could help me find relatives. Upon graduation I was able to find a masters program in Slavic linguistics that actually offered Bulgarian language instruction and even had a native speaker on the faculty. Even more amazing, that school was in my home state of Illinois at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Despite considerable effort (you can read about it here), I have still not found any of my relatives. But exploring Bulgaria and the countries of Eastern Europe left me with a passion for learning about other cultures and other cuisines. And I did a fair amount of sharing my own American food culture with my Slavic friends along the way. Those will make for some funny stories as well. I hope you enjoy them as much as I will recalling them!
*No one in the family is completely certain how the name is pronounced but we are quite convinced it was supposed to be Zhekov (Жеков). Grandpa Zekoff likely lost his ability to speak Bulgarian as there was no one at all to converse with and we’re not certain he was literate in Bulgarian either.
My objective
Several years back I was attending the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals in San Francisco. At one of the luncheons I sat with a young woman who had launched a Georgian food blog. Georgia the country, not the state. I’m not sure why I found this particularly intriguing; after all there are blogs on every obscure subject under the sun. Yet I was struck by my own complacency: if this woman could write a blog about Georgian food, why couldn’t I write one about Bulgarian food?
Surely there couldn’t be many Bulgarian food blogs out there. I searched and didn’t find much. Yet this plucky young woman was giving food blogging a go, shamelessly self promoting amongst her peers (that’s what one does at an IACP conference). And then I sat on it. For a couple years.
In 2015, I decided I’d give it a try. I knew nothing about creating a website but I’d worked in food long enough to know how to write a recipe clearly. And I’d produced food used in photoshoots before. How hard could it be? My first attempt at photographing a recipe that I was in the process of preparing was disastrous. Perhaps someday I’ll post those photos as a sort of “blooper reel.” They were awful. The dish was not pretty to look at either. I learned I could either craft food well or photograph well but not simultaneously.
Then in early 2019 the thought kept creeping back in my head. Why not try again? Only this time I decided that Bulgarian cuisine was be too specific, too niche. If I expanded the topic to cover an entire region, the blog would appeal to many more people and would give me years’ worth of material without getting repetitive. It’s been no less difficult to handle the photography–I expect it will improve over time or I’ll get some professional help. But for now this remains a hobby blog albeit one produced by someone with more than a passing interest in food.
My years as a teacher showed me that you learn so much instructing others. I hope to not only share information, cultural and culinary knowledge with you, I expect to grow and learn in the process. I also hope that eventually there will be readers who will teach me. And maybe some guest contributors, too.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t prepare a meal from scratch. Cooking (and baking) never gets old for me. I hope that doesn’t change because of this project! Cooking provides me a perpetual outlet for creativity. And of course fills a daily need for nourishment.
As I write this I have just finished freezing portioned batches of curry base gravy for Indian cooking. My culinary interests aren’t limited to Europe! In fact, I think I’ll stretch the limits a bit and include a Georgian recipe of my own on this blog. When I was living in the Soviet Union, one of my greatest pleasures was grabbing a hot slab of khachapuri at a Georgian restaurant near my dormitory. Thank you Georgian blog lady!