In my mother-in-law's house sarma is not cooked, it is kept quiet about. Šefika Mehmedović of Pehare in Zenica makes it for every Bajram, every funeral, and every wedding in the neighborhood, and nobody has ever seen how. When I married Edis, she gave me the recipe at Bajram, dictating it while I wrote on the back of an electricity bill: cabbage, meat, rice, smoked ribs, black pepper, a little sweet paprika. For twelve years I cooked from that bill. For twelve years Edis told me the same thing, with his mouth full and the best of intentions: "It's good, but it's not Mom's."
I knew something was missing. I tried more ribs, less rice, bay leaves, sour cream, an extra glass of cabbage brine. My mother-in-law would taste it, nod, and say: "It's nice." In her language that meant it was not. So when my sister-in-law Alma showed me an ad on her phone in March for a show called Taste of Heritage, where dishes handed down from generation to generation competed, I knew right away what I would enter. The casting was at the cultural center in Zenica. I said nothing to my mother-in-law.
I got through the casting. The filming was in May, in a studio in Sarajevo, and at six in the morning I got on the bus with a bucket of sauerkraut between my feet and smoked ribs in my shopping bag. In the makeup room, behind a mirror framed in light bulbs, sat my mother-in-law in her blue suit for weddings, her hands on her handbag. The makeup artist had just lifted a brush toward her face and froze, because she saw the way we were looking at each other.
"What are you doing here, Mirela?" asked Šefika. "The same thing you are," I said. It turned out that her neighbor Rabija had signed her up without asking, and she had agreed only when she saw that the prize was a new stove. Her casting had been a week after mine. Nobody told us, because nobody knew we were from the same house: I had signed up under my maiden name. "You came with my sarma," she said. "With mine," I said. "I've been making it for twelve years." The makeup artist put down her brush and went for coffee, though nobody had sent her.
When the director heard what was going on, he changed the schedule. They put us side by side, at two neighboring cooktops, with a camera between us. The host, Eldar, a young man with teeth that were too white, went to her first. "Mrs. Mehmedović, whose recipe is this?" "Mine," my mother-in-law said into the camera. "From my mother-in-law. And now, I see, from my daughter-in-law too, without asking." The studio audience murmured. "You gave it to me," I said. "At Bajram, twelve years ago. You just left something out." "I left nothing out," she said, without looking at me. "You didn't want to learn."
We cooked with our backs to each other. The studio was hot from the lights, the cabbage smelled the way it does in every Bosnian kitchen in January, and the cameraman kept swinging his camera from one of us to the other, as if at a tennis match. All I could see was her elbow and a corner of her handbag, from which a small jar of something dark peeked out, with no label. My sarma rolls were neat, all the same size, wrapped the way she had taught me during our first winter preserving together. Hers were a little bigger and uneven, as if she were not trying. I knew hers would be better. They always had been.
Near the end they turned off the lights over our cooktops, because the host was reshooting his introduction at the other end of the studio. For half a minute nobody was watching us. Then my mother-in-law, without turning around, slid that jar along the counter to my hand. It was plum pekmez, thick and black, the kind her sister makes in Nemila. "Two spoonfuls in the brine," she whispered. "At the end, not at the beginning." Then she put the jar back in her bag, and the lights came on. I added two spoonfuls. My hands were shaking, so the second one was a little bigger.
The jury tasted both kinds of sarma. Chef Zlatan, who usually spoke as if he were pronouncing a verdict, chewed mine for a long time. He said the two were almost the same, but that in the daughter-in-law's you could taste something deep and sweet, at the very end, like when somebody remembers something lovely. I got one point more and went through to the final. My mother-in-law looked into the camera and said: "She has the hand for it." We went home separately, me by bus, she with Rabija's son, and we did not speak for a week.
Three weeks later the station released a trailer for the episode. It lasted forty seconds and held nothing but the quarrel: "without asking," "you left something out," "you didn't want to learn," all of it set to music from mafia movies. Underneath it said: Mother-in-Law Accuses Daughter-in-Law of Stealing Recipe. In two days the clip had four hundred thousand views. The Facebook groups split into two camps. Women at the market in Zenica stopped talking when my mother-in-law came up to a stall. Edis turned off his phone. I wrote a long comment explaining everything, and all it got me was another two thousand insults.
One Saturday I saw her at the market from a distance. She was standing at a stall selling leeks, and the stallholder, a woman she had traded pickle recipes with for thirty years, turned her back on her and started stacking bags. My mother-in-law paid another woman, took her leeks, and walked off toward the bus as straight as if she were carrying water on her head. She did not see me. That night I did not sleep. Edis asked what was wrong, and for the first time I told him about the jar. He was silent for a long time, then said: "She will never admit it." "I know," I said. "That is why I will."
The morning program invited us to make peace live on air. We both agreed, for the same reason: neither wanted the other to face the cameras alone. The host was clearly waiting for a new quarrel and seated us in two armchairs with a small table between them. When she asked me what had really happened, I told her everything: the lights going off, the jar, two spoonfuls, at the end, not at the beginning. I said I had won that point thanks to her. The studio went quiet.
"I didn't slide anything," my mother-in-law said calmly. "She figured it out herself. I was just standing close by." The host did not know what to ask. I was looking at my mother-in-law, and she was looking at the little cup of coffee in front of her as if searching it for something she had lost. That clip went around the country faster than the first. People wrote that she was the most stubborn and the best mother-in-law in Bosnia. Some wrote that I was the one lying. Šefika did not read a single comment, because she does not know where they are read.
I did not go to the final. I said I was sick, which was not far from the truth. That year, for Kurban Bajram, for the first time I rolled sarma in her kitchen in Pehare, at the same stove, with her. When it was time for the brine, my mother-in-law handed me the jar without a word. I added two spoonfuls, at the end. "There is one more thing," she said, turning the rolls with a wooden spoon. "What is it?" "You will get that," she said, "when you are a mother-in-law yourself."