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The Storied Spoon is a warm, inviting hearth full of experience, authenticity, and humor. And some lovely photos to boot. Guides to sweet and savory baking and comfort foods is at your disposal. Learn more by subscribing to our newsletter and connecting with The Storied Spoon for updates!

Bread / Fruit / Cheese

When I was eight years old, living in a house on a hill in upstate New York, a house my Croatian father built, I smelled walnut rolls (Povitica, Povica) when it snowed before Christmas. There were bubbling sauces of all kinds over the stove in the kitchen: Goulash, Tomato Ragu, Pasta Fazal. When fireflies would light the late afternoon sky behind our house, the smoke wafted from meat that grilled on a homemade spit in the ground, the scent not unlike the Bosnian Cevapci smoke that I witnessed rising up from the stones in the city of Sarajevo when I was 21 and living abroad. Croatians felt the need to add the extra “ci” in their typical ode to Italian culture– “cevapcici”.

I have more answers about my own life experience with food than the great unrecorded histories that have passed before us. Still, I wish to know the secret recipes, the traditions, the arguments about how this became that. From the world and its unraveling and re-building to my father taking lunch on his house work sites with bread, fruit, and cheese in hand–All the best elements of food coming together in my world of dough bread, and tart; Croatian plums, fall apples, Dalmatian figs; and Turkish savory fare with goat cheese, feta, and mozzarella all vying for center stage. Feast and food and their creation is a never ending cycle.

Despite my love for a meal which played out slowly with family, and my father’s jug of red wine beneath his feet, it was my Croatian-Ukrainian mother from Queens who passively imparted to me her obsession with baking. Notebooks of recipes and half written papers, which were stuck into old books that needed to be translated into English by my father, littered our kitchens in every house we called home.

I now collect in the way my baking librarian mother did, mostly with screenshots on my phone. I still scribble variations and take photos of each new sweet that I resurrect from my Dalmatian Croatian heritage, along with other recipes of Anglo-British baking descent, many of which borrowed from their more suave French and continental cousins.

I grew up a mostly Croatian, slightly Ukrainian child in Westchester, New York. My father, born into then Yugoslavia, came to New York in the late 1950’s, where he met my Astoria, Queens born mother. We moved around as he built houses in Tierra Verde, Florida and the Hudson Valley/Catskills. He passed away in 2007, and I have been finding my own way to honor his Croatian-American dream ever since. I became a writer, if only in my own time, and never forgot his stories, our memories, the histories I could not shake, along with the meals and bakes that I could recreate and delight in each time I learned something new about them.

The Storied Spoon will delve into these food stories, many mine, and others from history painted into form by my awfully busy mind.

This blog is for anyone who remembers what meal they ate on a particular Sunday in childhood;

For immigrants new and old who enact their culinary cultural traditions day to day;

For bakers who find new textures and flavours in each new creation;

For those who will swear on their life that THEIR version of the feast is the BEST version.

Let’s have at it.