Switzerland, I used to think, was the inspiration for all the perfect miniature scenery made to garnish the routes of model trains—those idylls of snowcapped mountains with little cottages clinging to impossibly green slopes. Now, though, I’m certain that the toymakers come from Slovenia.
It’s hard to imagine a place so pastoral that it seems an entire century has gone missing. But that’s how the Slovenian countryside was described to me by a couple who’d just returned from a farm-stay there. You go not to sightsee, they said, but to take in the natural beauty and to enjoy some of the best and least-known cuisine and wines in Europe.
Wedged amid large neighbors—like Italy, Austria, Croatia, and Hungary—this tiny Alpine country has a reputation as the quiet sister, whose farms also welcome guests. So with the help of a company specializing in Slovenian agritourism, I book stays at three farms in different parts of the country, all reputed for their food.
Leaving Ljubljana’s matchbox-size airport, a friend from New York City and I plunge into the prewar European countryside. Vineyards surround villages and bare-chested farmers rake the freshly mown hay into old-fashioned ricks, great pillows of grass, as the air fills with its sweet perfume.
In the tiny village of Črniče, in the province of Primorska, the bells in the gabled Venetian-style tower of the church are ringing fiercely when we reach the Arkade farm, which features a handsome L-shaped building neatly whitewashed around beautiful old gray stone arches that support a covered gallery. In the sunny courtyard, under a trellis of grapevines, a group of Italian businessmen are finishing off a large wooden platter of the farm’s award-winning pršut (prosciutto) with a pitcher of slightly fizzy white wine. Owner Silva Cigoj greets us warmly in wobbly English, her voice as husky as Lauren Bacall’s, and shows us to our rooms (the family lives on the floor below), which are immaculate, tile-floored, and decorated with simple pine furniture. We throw open the shuttered windows to a view of hills wrapped in purple afternoon shadows, and the soft sounds of cooking and conversation.
Sitting in the courtyard minutes later, Silva gladly swaps her English for flawless Italian. (Primorska snuggles up to Italy, and many of the locals also speak Italian.) She serves us krems (creamed horseradish), with huge croutons for dipping; warm bread flecked with smoky cracklings; a salad of shaved white cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce, and fat red borlotti beans; and gnocchi poached in a ham-bone stock and sauced with braised green asparagus and sharp sheep’s-milk cheese. We drink the appealingly dry yet perfumed white wine the Cigoj family makes from their Chardonnay and Malvasia grapes. Everything we eat, except for the olive oil on the salad, is produced on the farm.
Since Arkade is located in a village, though, I ask Silva where, exactly, their farm is. She looks puzzled. “Why, the farm is everywhere,” she says. The Cigojs’ vineyards, orchards, and rows of crops surround the village. Just across the way, wine ages in large wooden kegs, and in the depths of the house, legs of pršut and garlands of sausage hang from the ceilings of cool, dry cellars dug into the rock.
Arkade, which is graded three out of a possible four apples by Slovenia’s national tourist board, exemplifies local self-sufficiency and the spirit of Slow Food. Silva, however, has never heard that term, and she’s not impressed when I bring it up. “But who would cook any other way?” she asks.
The rolling fields around Črniče, Palladian in their symmetry, are eternal European landscapes, so as we take a long walk after lunch, it’s disconcerting to see on a distant hillside the name “TITO” (the late strongman of Yugoslavia), spelled out in white stones. In Slovenia, you encounter many such relics of the past—signs, monuments, and buildings that have lost their original, often bombastic, purpose. Given this country’s centuries-long role as a reluctant hinge between disparate parts of Europe—Slavic to Latin at the time of the Venetian Republic, Germanic to Slavic as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Western Europe to the Eastern Bloc during the cold war—its history is as messy as an overturned board game. Today, the country is still light-headed from its 15-year-young sovereignty, an independent identity that may be as puzzling to locals as it is to foreigners trying to figure out what it means to be a Slovene.
By the time we return to Arkade, the Titianesque light on the dense stands of pines is muddling a warm Mediterranean day into a cool Alpine night. Silva greets us, then turns to her mother-in-law, a handsome woman in a calico housedress. She looks up from the peas she’s shelling and speaks. Silva laughs. “She says, ‘You’re very welcome here, since all Slovenes have relatives in America, but please, when you get home, explain to your president that Slovenia is not Slovakia.’” We assure them that we’ll try to set Mr. Bush straight.
Dinner begins with salume, krems, and tiny radishes and scallions from Silva’s garden, served with a basket of warm corn-flour bread. Next comes fresh wild-mushroom soup made with toasted buckwheat flour and a deliciously fatty chicken stock. The main course is a “Slavic grill”—a spread of thin slices of lemon-and-paprika-marinated beef, pork, and chicken grilled over grapevine trimmings and accompanied by charred vegetables and a roasted red-pepper paste.
We tell Silva we can’t eat another bite, but she waves away our protests and returns with sugar-dusted mace cookies and first-of-the-season cherries that squirt juice when we bite into them. Soon after, we’re climbing the stairs to our rooms. A sliver of a moon shines overhead, an owl hoots in the night, and under duvets as weighty as a flock of geese, we sleep.
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