Torshi are the pickled vegetables of many Middle Eastern and Balkan cuisines. It’s a food that must Bulgarian families prepare before winter and eat when they gather together.
When I was little, whenever I’d go to someone’s house, they’d show me their basement full of jars and let me pick whichever I wanted - I gravitated to the jars of Tort because of their colours. It’s one of the foods that to me taste of home.
Now that I live in England, it became harder to learn the recipes and traditions that are passed down through the generations and I have growing appreciation of the preciousness of being able to learn something from my grandmother.
Recently, I have been asking my grandma to teach ,me as much as she can, making Torshi was one of the recipes she told me I had to know. I wanted to explore sharing this recipe and method of learning from my grandmother to people outside of my family and culture.
My grandmother isn’t fluent or comfortable speaking English. When I asked her to do a Torch making workshop we decided to make the language barrier a part of the process of learning.
She taught people her recipe by talking them through the steps, even though her verbal instructions were not understood by the people she was talking to, they learnt by watching her actions.
