The grannies who saved Albanian cuisine

After being sealed off from the outside world for decades and experiencing a mass exodus, Albania is leaning into its culinary roots with the help of grandma chefs.

Tefta Pajenga, aged 76, is one of many pension-age TV chefs in Albania. In her nationally televised cooking show, the retired teacher instructs a younger housewife how to cook japrakë, a traditional platter of vine leaves stuffed with rice and herbs.

Japrakë holds a special place in Albanian hearts. It's typically prepared by families together and then shared on Christian and Muslim feast days in this religiously diverse nation. Like so many dishes in this culinary crossroads, the recipe comes from elsewhere (the name derives from the Turkish word for "leaf", courtesy of Albania's more-than 500 years under Ottoman rule). Yet, the ingredients are all local: dill, peppers and mint from northern Albania.

Today, Albanian grannies like Pajenga are teaching multiple generations in one of Europe's youngest-aged countries how to cook age-old dishes. That's because the Balkan nation has suffered not one, but two bouts of culinary amnesia over the past 80 years.

First, from 1946 to 1991, Albania was ruled by hardline communists who effectively sealed the small, mountainous nation off from the outside world, leading Edi Rama, the nation's current prime minister, to say it was once "the North Korea of Europe". During this period, cookbooks were burnt, imports were prohibited, foreign travel was banned, food was collectivised and shortages were widespread. It was a recipe for disaster.

Second, in the violent build-up and aftermath of communism's collapse in the 1990s, 710,000 citizens – 20% of the population – fled Albania from 1989 to 2001 in search of work in other countries. Over time, Pajenga said that many of these emigrants forgot their grandmothers' recipes as they adapted to new countries and cultures. Between the widespread food shortages during communism and the subsequent emigration after it, by the early 21st Century, many Albanians at home and abroad had forgotten how to prepare traditional Albanian cuisine – except for women of a certain age.

Ironically, Pajenga says that the Albania's transition to democracy compounded the problem. "During communism, people had one fixed job from 07:00 until 15:00," she recalls. "When democracy came, you needed more than one job to feed the family." Therefore, many of those who did recall how to prepare traditional Albanian dishes now no longer had the time to make them.

So, when Pajenga started her TV show in 2004, "my audience was not for chefs but for housewives" and also young people, "who were lacking the knowledge or had forgotten how to make traditional cuisine".

Albania's culinary culture has long reflected its status as a stepping stone between East and West. The Romans introduced grapes, olives and other modern Albanian staples when they took hold of the area in the 2nd Century BCE. Starting in the 16th Century, dishes like Arnavut ciğeri (Albanian liver) spread east from Albania across the Ottoman Empire, while sutlijaš (rice pudding) likely arrived in Albania courtesy of the Ottomans. And after World War Two, imported dishes like ajvar (a relish made from roasted red peppers, aubergine and spices) migrated south from the northern Balkans.

Some indigenous foods, like mishavinë (a type of white, grainy cheese), cannot be found anywhere else. Its preparation method, in which curd is packed tightly for three months inside animal fat until it ferments into a piquant cheese, has been passed down by generations of transhumant herders in the Albanian Alps. Other age-old Albanian dishes include flia, a pancake with crepe-like layers brushed with cream, and byrek me mish, a Turkish-style borek laced with paprika.

Gjyste Bici, 67, learned centuries-old recipes at her grandmother's knee in Albania's northern Alps, where snowy winters can still cut off residents for months at a time. "Even before communism there was little material published, so recipes were always passed from grandmothers to younger generations," she says.

Many Albanian recipes have a religious root. This was frowned upon under communism, especially after 1967, when authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha banned all religious practices.

"The dictatorship tried to destroy all religions," recalls Dallendyshe Xhahysa, a 91-year-old amateur chef who memorised Albanian recipes from her ancestors and made them through the country's near-half century of communist rule. According to Xhahysa, "recipes used in Muslim and Christian celebrations never would have survived if it wasn't for the efforts of grandmothers like me".

"We had to cook special dishes secretly during Easter or Ramadan," continues Xhahysa. One such dish was halva, a dense, fudge-like dessert traditionally shared on the holiest day of Ramadan, Lailat al Qadr.

"If you cooked halva over Ramadan, neighbours would spy on you in order to get a bonus from the state," Xhahysa remembers. So as not to attract attention, the ingredients were purchased weeks in advance. "We would cook halva with the windows closed or curtains drawn" to curtail the fragrant waft of sugar, nuts and rosewater.

The punishment if caught preparing a religious feast was harsh. "We could be taken to a re-education camp for many months to be given a bad job, like cleaning a jail in a remote area," recalls Xhahysa, shuddering.

Extreme food shortages led to the loss of other recipes. "Very few people were allowed to keep animals or farm land," explains Bici. Only those in rural areas were allowed to work a 50-sq-m plot and keep a few chickens. "It was forbidden to own a pig or sheep."

Everything was rationed, continues Bici. "Each month you were allowed 10kg of potatoes and 2kg of cheese per family."

Without easy access to ingredients or cookbooks, centuries-old recipes like tavë krapi (a baked carp casserole) were largely forgotten due to the prohibition of private fishing.

When Albania's borders finally opened up in the 1990s and its national television networks were no longer controlled by the state, many grannies started using TV to revive the nation's long-lost culinary heritage.

Bici began cooking on the show The Albanian Sunday in 2007, showcasing recipes she says were cooked "for thousands of years", like lakror me arra (an Albanian pie often made with layered ricotta, nettles, leeks, lamb and nuts).

But while Bici and Pajenga's cooking shows were helping to revive traditional recipes, they were fighting against another tide: farmers in rural Albania were migrating to Tirana in search of work and many rural villages became ghost towns. "Farming has still not fully recovered from what happened [in the decades after communism]," says Pajenga.

Bici has made it her mission to ensure Albania's traditional recipes aren't forgotten a third time. The grandmother has collated age-old cooking methods in a book, Unique Cuisine of the Albanian Highlands. She also cooks mountain recipes on the TV show Histori Shqiptare (Albanian History).

"I have many requests from Instagram for old recipes," Bici says. "If youngsters follow my recipe for lakror on TikTok, that's fine too."

 Xhahysa, now a great-grandmother, is also still sharing her knowledge. She started cooking with her grandmother in the 1930s and contributed recipes to Albania's first farm-to-fork restaurant, Uka Farm, a Tirana-based wine bar and agrotourism that has inspired 100 rural farm stays across Albania.

Xhahysa's recipe of fërgesë (a baked vegetable dish with cheese) is a popular appetiser at Uka Farm. The farm's butter-fried peppers served with a big dollop of gjizë (a ricotta-style cheese) is a taste of Albania’s forgotten past.

Inspired by Pajenga, Bici and other TV-cooking grannies, a 2018 event in Tirana pairing 12 grandmothers with 12 top chefs became an instant Albanian sensation, spawning several granny-meets-millennial TV shows like Gjyshet Milionere ("Millionaire Grandmothers").

The event was hosted by one of Albania's most famous chefs, Bledar Kola, who has dedicated much of his career to championing traditional Albanian cuisine. "Not being too cocky," says Kola, "but this show started a small spark on a big fire."

After a career working in Europe's top restaurants, including stages at Le Gavroche in London and noma in Copenhagen, Kola returned to Tirana a decade ago to present ancient Albanian recipes in a more modern way at the capital's top restaurant Mullixhiu. In the absence of cookbooks, he also picked up skills from an Albanian granny.

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Now Kola is going one step further by opening a traditional restaurant in Gjirokaster, a Unesco-inscribed city in southern Albania. At the forthcoming rural restaurant Mullixhino (which is expected to open in late 2025), the focus is squarely on Albania's age-old dishes. "The cuisine will be garden-inspired, everything cooked on an open fire, in an open kitchen," says Kola.

The restaurant's recipes are an homage to Albanian grandmothers. "We've been meeting grandmothers for coffee to come up with a great concept," says Kola. "We will serve traditional food from Albania's south, influenced by grandmothers in the region."

A new foodie almanac containing 7,000 Albanian ingredients, dishes and cooking methods – many sourced from grandmothers – is also in progress and is being co-written by Kola's brother Nikolin, alongside nine academics.

Nikolin believes the book "will raise awareness of Albanian food, like what René [Redzepi] did for Danish cooking".

Thanks to grannies, Albanian cuisine is finally being reborn.

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