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.
It’s an unexpectedly emotional experience to leave one farm for another. You say a formal round of good-byes and offer thanks in registers of sincerity that would normally make an American cringe. After all, you’ve shared someone’s home, and the intensity of Slovenian hospitality is such that the memory of it can make you teary-eyed months later. Silva sends us off with pots of fig jam. She’d have made sandwiches for us, too, if we hadn’t been heading just down the road to the restaurant Gostišče Pri Lojzetu.
It’s true that we’re only 45 miles from the Adriatic, but Slovenia’s coast is short and crowded. So after lunch we drive toward Govc, our next farm, along the Karst, that gigantic hump of limestone that hems in the Vipava Valley, and we breathe in the honeyed scent of flowering lime trees. Only in Europe can you travel so far in two hours. After passing through acres of hops, their pale green tendrils coiled around tall wire fences, we’re driving directly toward the Alps. The architecture has changed, too. The rounded terra-cotta roof tiles of the Latin world have given way to shingles, and weathered brown timber replaces masonry. German, not Italian, is the second language here.
Our rooms are simple yet comfortable, and look north toward the mountains, still snowcapped in late May. The cool air outdoors smells of cow pies and clover. Starlings are going mad, and there’s the distant roar of the swollen stream that powers an old sawmill just down the hill.
Marjana Vršnik, our hostess, can’t understand why we don’t eat all the delicious sausage, juniper-berry-cured fatback, and cheese she brings out for us to nibble on before dinner. She raises her eyebrows and scuffs back to the kitchen. Not that she’s been deterred. She returns with beef bouillon with vermicelli; a green salad; veal breast stuffed with hard-boiled eggs; and little mesni žlinkofi (meat-filled ravioli) served with krems. Dessert is štruklji z brusnicami, boiled sautéed curd-cheese dumplings (Marjana makes the curd cheese from the milk of the five cows in the barn next door) sprinkled with toasted bread crumbs and dribbled with melted butter, with a side of tart wild red berries.
In the morning, we drive six miles to Logarska Dolina, one of the Slovenes’ favorite national parks. To the sounds of birdsong and rushing water, we hike to Slap Rinka, a waterfall, where wildflowers brighten the grassy banks. It’s like being in a fairy tale. “Slovenia looks no different today than it did when I was a girl,” Marjana’s mother-in-law tells us later. “When you come back, we’ll make sure it hasn’t changed.”
At Ločnikar, our last farm, perched high on a hill overlooking valleys and pine forests, the garlands of peppers drying in the sun under the eaves of the barn tell us that Hungary isn’t far away. In the cheerful parlor, a curled black-and-white photo of Neil Armstrong in his space suit sits on a shelf next to an old Czech-made Tesla radio. A huge woodburning furnace covered with thick-glazed tiles is the room’s centerpiece. The owner, Marica Ločnikar, dresses the table with doilies and serves us homemade blueberry schnapps. Then she brings in white wine with salami, smoked ham, cheese, pickles, and bread; everything comes from the property, which is an organic farm. “The fields are too steep for machinery,” she explains, “and the ground is so rich we don’t need chemical fertilizers here.”
Behind the house, there’s a pretty chapel with a painting of the Madonna and Child, and lacy stencils brightening the lime-painted walls. Just off the kitchen are a thriving vegetable garden and several of the neighbors’ beehives. Chickens peck at the ground, and in the barn are cows and pigs. Marica’s husband and son are working a log with a two-handled saw.
Wild-mushroom soup starts the meal. “I picked and dried the mushrooms last fall,” Marica says. “If you come back in September, you can help me.” Garnished with feathery sprigs of dill, a platter of Backhendl (Viennese-style fried chicken) follows, with egg noodles, broad beans, and rich onion gravy. It’s farm food for a special occasion—the kind of meal that’s been served here for a hundred, even two hundred years.
In the morning, the scent of yeast and toasted cornmeal rouses us from our beds—Marica is baking bread in the woodburning oven. And breakfast has been laid out—pale farmhouse butter tasting of cream; sour curds of farmer cheese; plum jam; cheese; špek (streaky bacon); soft-boiled eggs; and warm bread. “Grüss Gott,” Marica says (echoing the standard Austrian greeting) before telling us to head to the city of Ptuj “if you want to understand Slovenia.”
Ptuj is pure Offenbach, a place where the scales bounce from tragedy to hilarity and back again in seconds. We head up an ancient zigzagging cobbled lane to the city’s famed castle. The façades below are painted the edible colors of the Hapsburg dominions (ham pink, pistachio, caramel, chocolate), and the wealth, manners, and rituals of a vanished empire inform everything, from the courtliness of its people to the grand houses on the main street, Presernova Ulica, to the way coffee is served (with light cream, heavy cream, or whipped cream). This city on the Drava River has changed allegiances often enough to know such ties are not only worthless but dangerous. So their loyalty goes first to family, then to town and region, then to others who share their language, and finally to country, with the awareness that that entity could shatter on the floor like a dropped dinner plate.
“Ptuj is beautiful, but maybe it also scared you a little,” Marica says when we return, perhaps implying that as the indulged children of the New World, we might be unhinged by the specter of unrest that haunts Mitteleuropa. She’s not only a wonderful cook but a very perceptive woman. She can certainly also perceive that we’d rather be sitting at her table with her than packing our things to go. If it’s sad to leave one farm for another, it’s heartwrenching to leave the country altogether. Marica clasps our hands and tucks bottles of her schnapps into the backseat of our car, “for the road,” and we know that it will be a long time before we’re cared for—mothered, really—in just this way again.