“I’m not from Italy or Spain, where you can talk about the food for hours,” Jasmina Bojic said, her cooks darting into the refrigerator beside her. She’s the executive pastry chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, where she makes extravagant cakes fit for oligarchs, but, she said, “my country is small. It’s homey, nothing fancy about it, so I’m nervous to tell you about our food.” She was referring to Montenegro, a rough diamond set on the Adriatic, surrounded by Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania — more borders than I thought a country the size of Connecticut could have.
Jasmina came to New York when she was 17, on vacation, and fell in love with an American boy. Her parents brought her back the following year for the wedding, return tickets to Yugoslavia nestled in their luggage with their finery. But this was the summer of 1991, when civil war erupted. The family decided to wait here, to see what happened. They heard about the violence. They heard about the new borders. They never went home.
Over a lunch of juicy kebablike cevapi in Astoria, where Croatians, Bosnians, Serbians and Montenegrins have settled for generations, Jasmina told me all those new borders have never meant much for her community here. For proof, she asked me to talk to her friend Anita Boneta, who was a resident of Astoria for four decades.
“A lot of people in Belgrade and Dubrov-nik, husband and wife, would break up,” Anita, a Croatian, said. “I thought, This is crazy! Everybody here, they were O.K. with each other. When I was working at a restaurant, there was a captain from the area where Jasmina is from. He said, ‘You know, we shouldn’t even be friends!’ But he was one of my best friends.”
So many immigrant stories are marked by loss, by what people miss. Yet, talking to people from a country that no longer exists, I also realized that sometimes they have a chance to reconnect what’s severed when they get to their new home. Without the baggage of borders, the estranged can become bedfellows — Indians and Pakistanis buying the same spices in Jackson Heights, or Ukrainians and Russians eating the same fish in Brighton Beach.
It’s a lesson Jasmina showed me in the hotel’s kitchen. Sampita, a treat she has been making since she was a girl, is a plank of yolk-rich cake piled with glossy meringue, a kind of open-faced marshmallow sandwich. At first glance, it could be any white-topped European layer cake, until you cut into it and see that it’s mostly a riot of rich sugar. It’s a simple pleasure, sweet and gooey and compelling with strong coffee and rigorous dental hygiene. When I asked why we were making this dessert in particular, Jasmina said: “Well, our country is big on things like baklava, but when I was talking with my mom, she said that’s not really us. But this, I know, is our creation. I haven’t seen it anyplace else.”
Jasmina poured hot syrup into the egg whites, whipping them to a spectacular height. I had noticed that she used much more sugar than called for in a typical meringue. When we ate it, she noted how moist the cake gets after you let it rest; the extra syrup in the meringue slowly seeps into the base. This is crucial, she said.
It’s an unusual technique, and something about it kept nagging at me, until I went back to the map. Yugoslavia — with Montenegro near its center — sat directly between Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Or, in dessert terms, precisely between the lofty cakes of Austria and the syrup-soaked baklavas of Greece and Turkey. Jasmina’s sampita might be “nothing fancy,” as she put it, but it speaks to her people, undivided by borders.
