Fërgesë

Name: Fërgesë
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 35 min
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Tirana & Albania
Ingredients: 6 long sweet green peppers, deseeded and cut into strips; 4 ripe tomatoes, chopped, or 400g tinned; 2 onions, finely sliced; 4 garlic cloves, sliced; 90 ml olive oil; 30 g butter; 1 tbsp plain flour; 300 g gjizë, ricotta, or a young curd cheese; 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste; 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper; 1 tsp dried oregano; 1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped; 4 thick slices country bread, to serve

Tirana's pan of peppers and tomato cooked down and stirred through with fresh white cheese until it goes stringy and rich

Origin: Tirana & Albania

From the journey of Bell Pepper.

Fërgesë comes from fërgoj, to fry, and the whole dish is one pan. Sweet green peppers and tomatoes are fried down slowly until they collapse and the oil separates; then gjizë, the fresh unsalted curd cheese of the Albanian mountains, is crumbled in off the heat and stirred through until it softens into the sauce without quite melting. It is served bubbling in a small earthenware dish with bread to scoop it, and it is the standard opening of a Tirana meal. The full name is fërgesë e Tiranës, and the capital claims it firmly, though versions run through central Albania. Two branches exist and Albanians distinguish them: the plain vegetable one given here, and fërgesë me mëlçi, which adds calf's liver fried separately and folded in at the end. The vegetarian version is the older and the more common. The cheese is what a substitution most often gets wrong. Gjizë is fresh, soft, faintly sour, and barely salted, closer to a ricotta than to a feta, and it is meant to go creamy rather than to melt into strings or to stay in stubborn salty lumps. Ricotta is the closest thing on most shelves; a young curd cheese or a well-rinsed feta mashed with a little yoghurt will also serve, but a mature feta will make the dish aggressively salty and will not soften properly. Albania grows a great deal of pepper and eats it in quantity through the late summer, and fërgesë belongs to that season along with the pepper preserves and the roasted-pepper relishes that run the length of the Balkans. What separates the Albanian version from a Serbian ajvar or a Bulgarian lyutenitsa is that the peppers stay in recognisable pieces and the cheese arrives whilst the pan is still hot.

Ingredients

Vegetables

6 long sweet green peppers, deseeded and cut into strips
4 ripe tomatoes, chopped, or 400g tinned
2 onions, finely sliced
4 garlic cloves, sliced

To cook

90 ml olive oil
30 g butter

To thicken

1 tbsp plain flour

Cheese

300 g gjizë, ricotta, or a young curd cheese

Seasoning

1.5 tsp salt, or to taste
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp dried oregano

To finish

1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped

To serve

4 thick slices country bread, to serve

Method

Warm the olive oil and butter in a wide heavy pan and soften the onions over a low heat for ten minutes without letting them brown.
Add the pepper strips and cook for a further twelve to fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally, until they have gone limp and sweet.
Take the peppers well past the bright crisp stage. A fërgesë made with peppers that still have bite tastes raw and thin.
Add the garlic and cook for a minute, then the tomatoes, salt, pepper, and oregano.
Simmer for twelve to fifteen minutes until the tomato has broken down entirely and the oil separates and pools at the edges.
Scatter the flour over and stir it through for two minutes, which thickens the pan and helps the cheese hold together rather than weeping.
Take the pan off the heat and let it stop bubbling.
Crumble the cheese in and fold it through the residual heat with a wooden spoon until it has softened into the sauce in streaks.
Do not return it to a high heat once the cheese is in. Boiled, it tightens into rubbery beads and releases its water.
Taste for salt, remembering that gjizë is barely salted and feta is not.
Divide between small earthenware dishes and, if you like, give them five minutes in a hot oven to blister the top.
Scatter the parsley over and serve very hot with bread to scoop it up.

Notes

The cheese goes in off the heat and stays there; this is the single thing that decides whether the dish is creamy or grainy. Use a fresh, mild, barely salted curd cheese: ricotta is the easiest substitute for gjizë, and if you only have feta, rinse it well and mash it with a spoonful of yoghurt to soften both the salt and the texture. Long sweet peppers are correct rather than bell peppers, which are thicker-walled and wetter, though bell peppers work if you cook them longer. The spoonful of flour is traditional in Tirana and is what keeps the sauce together.

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control