Did you know that the Havana cake has its traditional roots from Zenica? In 1966, the story of Zenica Havana began, which is still one of the most popular sweets in this city.
Light texture, Linzer dough, whipped cream, hazelnuts or almonds, gelatin – in one word, Havana. The traditional recipe, the research showed, dates precisely from Zenica, this industrial city, from the sixties of the last century. Fifty years later, seven confectioners from Zenica tried to conjure up their own. One of them is Nihad, who inherited the recipe from his father.
“It was in this house, Hotel Metalrug, that I started working with Ćazim Daković. That’s where Havana, our Havana from Zenica, was created. We haven’t changed that recipe. The way it was made then is the same today,” says pastry chef Nihad Mušović from Zenica.
The aim of the presentation and the whole story about this delicacy, initiated by the Zenica Citizens’ Forum, and for which the interest of the citizens was surprisingly high, is to brand Havana as an intangible heritage of Zenica and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“But even if we fail in that goal, this will be an excellent opportunity to describe it very well, to leave to our future generations what Havana really is,” says the president of the Zenica Citizens’ Forum Mirsad Mujkić.
Although this is just one cake, it is certainly part of identity because once upon a time, going to a pastry shop required elegant clothes and manners on which citizenship was built.
“It is not necessary to erase every past by declaring it irrelevant and bad. There is sometimes a better past, not because I am old now, and I was 10 years old then. It is just a cake, but it is not necessarily just a cake. Identity is a psychological category. It is not something that can be firmly grasped,” says sociologist Sead Pašić.
“I truly support traditional food, because it represents the identity of a people. In addition to tourism, the economy and agriculture can branch out and develop precisely thanks to our traditional dishes,” says Prof. Dr. Irzada Taljić from the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science at UNSA.
Whatever the outcome, this delicacy will certainly decorate the tables of Zenica for generations to come, BHRT writes.
