Tavče Gravče

North Macedonia's national dish: white beans baked in an earthenware pan under a red slick of paprika, with a whole dried pepper laid on top

Origin: Skopje, Tetovo & North Macedonia

From the journey of Beans.

Tavče gravče means beans in a pan, and the pan is part of the name for a reason: the dish is finished uncovered in a shallow unglazed earthenware tava, which lets the surface dry and catch whilst the beans underneath stay soupy. What arrives at the table is a wide dish with a crusted red top and a loose, oily, deeply savoury interior, and it is eaten straight from the pan with bread. The bean is specific and Macedonians will tell you so. Tetovski grav, the large flat white bean grown around Tetovo in the north-west, is the one the dish is built for: thin-skinned, floury, and large enough that a spoonful is three or four beans. It is protected as a regional product and it costs more than an ordinary haricot, which is regarded as reasonable. The paprika does two jobs and goes in twice. Once early, stirred into the fried onion off the heat so it colours the whole pot, and again at the end scattered over the surface with the dried peppers that are laid whole across the top to soften in the oven. Those whole peppers are eaten, not removed. It is a poor man's dish that became a national one, and it is genuinely meatless in its standard form, which is unusual for a Balkan national dish; the versions with sausage or ribs exist and are treated as additions rather than as the thing itself. It belongs to the Lenten table and to the everyday one equally, and it is what North Macedonia serves when it wants to serve something Macedonian.

Ingredients

Beans

  • 500 g large dried white beans, ideally Tetovo or a large butter bean, soaked overnight

Aromatics

  • 3 onions, finely chopped
  • 6 garlic cloves, sliced

To cook

  • 120 ml sunflower oil

Seasoning

  • 2 tbsp sweet paprika
  • 1 tsp hot paprika, or to taste
  • 1 tbsp dried mint, crumbled
  • 1 tbsp plain flour
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste

To finish

  • 4 whole dried red peppers
  • 3 long fresh peppers, in rings
  • 1 large bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped

To serve

  • 6 thick slices bread, to serve

Method

  1. Drain the soaked beans, cover them with fresh cold water, and bring to the boil. Boil hard for ten minutes, then drain and discard that water.
  2. Cover with fresh water again and simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, until the beans are tender but still whole. Salt them only once they have softened.
  3. Drain, keeping about 700ml of the cooking liquid, which is the body of the finished dish and should not be thrown away.
  4. Fry the onions in the oil in a wide pan over a medium heat for fifteen minutes until soft and golden.
  5. Add the garlic for a minute, then take the pan off the heat entirely.
  6. Stir in both paprikas and the flour off the heat. Paprika burns at a low temperature and a scorched batch turns the whole pan bitter.
  7. Return to the heat, add a ladle of the reserved bean liquid, and stir into a smooth red sauce.
  8. Tip in the beans with the rest of the reserved liquid and the dried mint, and simmer for ten minutes.
  9. Transfer everything to a wide shallow earthenware or ceramic dish. It should look distinctly soupy at this stage, because the oven will take a good deal of liquid off.
  10. Lay the whole dried peppers and the fresh pepper rings over the surface and scatter half the parsley across.
  11. Bake uncovered at 200°C for thirty to forty minutes, until the top has dried into a red crust and the oil has risen and pooled at the edges.
  12. Rest for ten minutes, scatter the remaining parsley over, and serve straight from the dish with bread. The whole peppers are eaten.

Notes

Go into the oven wetter than seems right; the uncovered bake is what makes the dish and it removes a surprising amount of liquid. Keep the bean cooking water, which carries the starch that gives the finished pan its body. Both additions of paprika go in off the heat. Large flat white beans are what the dish is designed around and a small haricot gives a different and lesser result; butter beans are the easiest substitute. The dried mint is a Macedonian marker and is easy to leave out by accident and hard to do without. Meatless is the standard version rather than a concession.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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