Archives for August 18th, 2006

The first ingredients: blueberries and sugar.

Since coming to Slovenia, I’ve gone from “Never drinking fruity apéritifs” to “Drinking twice my body weight in fruity apéritifs every weekend.”

Sipping a borovnica (blueberry schnapps) is de reigueur at traditional Slovenian meals. It’s something of a ritual. By accepting one from your host, you enter into a sacred covenant: You signal your willingness to eat and drink to maximum capacity, and your host accepts the responsibility to do everything he can to completely and utterly wreck your digestive system.

In the summer, which is a season that sometimes happens in Slovenia but sometimes not, you’ll often see bottles of dark liquid suntanning on people’s balconies. This is usually homemade borovnica, or some variant thereof: višnja (sour cherry schnapps), or a liquor made with some other fruit: blackberries, wild strawberries, etc… It’s very easy to do. Here’s one way.

First, you’ll need the ingredients: white sugar, fresh blueberries, and alcohol. Then you’ll need to clean the blueberries. This can be a bit of a pain.

Washing away their sins.

If you want your schnapps to contain a lot of berries, you’ll need to be careful to pick out all the leaves and stems. Be aware that this is a time-consuming process. If you want it “clear” or “fruitless,” or if you have, say, two young children at home, and one of them has bronchitis again so he’s constantly waking up and coughing and you don’t have the time and energy to clean the stupid berries, and the boy keeps interrupting things anyway so you just want to finish things up and get some sleep, then just rinse the blueberries and move on to the next step. Which is:

Building a tower of power.

Layer the blueberries and sugar in a bottle. The amount of sugar determines the sweetness, obviously, but don’t be too shy with the white stuff. We generally use a ratio of 1:1, and (contrary to expectations) the final product doesn’t taste sickeningly sweet. Fill up the bottle about 3/4 of the way up and get ready for the next and easiest step.

Here comes the sun, doo doo doo doo.

Leave the bottle out in the sun and just let the sugar melt. If you live in Slovenia you might need to travel abroad for this step. Just ask your local travel agent if he can recommend a place that has an orb-like thing called a sonce (sun). When the sugar melts, you’ll eventually have a half-full bottle of sludge. Now comes the essential part.

Gallons of alcohol flow into the bottle.

Fill up the remainder of the bottle with alcohol. Of course, a true professional would also make their own alcohol, but that’s out of my league. We use good ol’ Serbian-made slivovitz. Now that all the ingredients are together the way God intended them to be, you’re pretty much finished.

Stir it, don’t shake it.

Stir things up, close the bottle and put it in a dark place. (Basements are perfect — just be careful it doesn’t come into contact with the dead bodies you have down there.) When it’s ready, you’ll have your very own bottle of borovnica!

Needless to say, this is just one way of preparing the stuff. And I can’t be held liable if you decapitate yourself or otherwise hurt yourself making this. If anyone wants to share some of their tips, or secret production method, please do so in the comments!