WE KEPT BAKING.

Who we were. Who we still are. What we can still become.

There are places you can go back to. And then there are places that survive mostly in memory.

Yugoslavia is one of those places for me.

I was born in Sarajevo, in a country that no longer exists the way I remember it. Like a lot of people from that part of the world, I learned early that borders can move faster than people do. Names change. Flags change. Streets get renamed. People scatter. You build another life because sometimes that is what life demands.

But food is stubborn.

A walnut is still a walnut. Butter still smells like butter when it hits a hot oven. Powdered sugar still gets everywhere. A šapa still breaks with that little crunch before turning soft, nutty, and familiar in your mouth.

Some things refuse to disappear just because a map changed.

That is where Last of the Yugos begins.

Not because I want to rebuild a country out of flour and sugar. Not because I think the past was perfect. It wasn’t.

Memory lies. Nostalgia edits.

But taste can bring back something remarkably specific: a kitchen, a table, somebody’s hands, adults talking in the background, a plate of cookies you ate without ever asking where they came from or who invented them.

You just ate them.

They were ours.

That matters to me now in a way it didn’t when I was young.

I have spent years in professional pastry kitchens. French technique. Lamination. Production. Michelin kitchens. Private clubs. Precision, systems, consistency.

I learned how to make pastry professionally.

And eventually I found myself asking a different question:

What am I actually trying to make?

Not what can I make.

What belongs to me?

That question sent me backwards — back to šape, back to walnuts, back to crumbly shortbreads and small sweets that sat on family tables long before anybody called them artisanal.

And somehow, going backwards started showing me a way forward.

Last of the Yugos is starting with cookies and shortbreads because I like what they represent. They’re humble. They travel well. They sit on tables. They get passed around. They don’t need a speech.

They’re the kind of food somebody puts in front of you with coffee and says, uzmi.

Take one.

Then you take three.

Šape are a perfect example. Walnut, butter, flour, sugar. Nothing revolutionary on paper.

But when the texture is right, they become something else. Crisp enough to break cleanly, tender enough to disappear almost immediately afterward. Walnut first. Butter underneath. Powdered sugar everywhere.

There is memory in that texture.

My job is not to improve it until nobody recognizes it. My job is to understand why it survived in the first place.

Then I can ask what happens next.

Maybe a traditional flavor finds its way into a new shortbread. Maybe something familiar meets an ingredient I discovered years later in New York. Maybe the shape changes. Maybe the technique gets sharper.

Maybe Sarajevo meets Queens.

That is not betrayal.

That is how food has always worked.

People move. Food moves with them. Then food meets another place and becomes something new without completely forgetting what it was.

I do not want Last of the Yugos to become a museum. I want it alive.

That means respecting tradition enough to learn it properly, but not being so afraid of tradition that we never touch it.

Some things I will make exactly as I remember them. Some things I will question. Some things will probably upset somebody’s aunt in the Balkans.

I can live with that.

What matters is integrity.

Know where something came from. Know why it matters. Then, if you change it, have a reason.

And this is not only for people from Yugoslavia.

It is for us, yes. For the person who sees šape and suddenly remembers a kitchen they have not thought about in twenty years.

It is for our children too. Kids who may speak imperfect Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, Albanian — or none of it. Kids whose idea of home might be Queens, Chicago, Stockholm, or Melbourne.

They inherit fragments.

Food can be one of those fragments.

But this is also for the New Yorker who has never heard the word šape.

You do not need my history to know if a cookie is good.

The story may get you curious.

The food has to make you come back.

For a long time, people from places like ours became very good at surviving. War. Migration. Starting over. Working. Assimilating. Building another life.

All necessary.

But survival is not the same thing as living.

At some point you get to ask a different question.

What did we lose?

And then another one:

What can we build with what remains?

That is what interests me now.

Last of the Yugos is my attempt to take something from the world that made me and carry it into the world that made the rest of me.

Sarajevo and New York.

Memory and technique.

Walnuts and butter.

Old forms and new ideas.

I do not know exactly what this becomes yet. That is part of why I am writing this.

I will write about the recipes, the history, the arguments, the failures, the regional differences, the business, and the strange process of deciding what deserves to stay untouched and what deserves another life.

And we will eat along the way.

Because countries disappear. People move. Names change.

But somebody somewhere still pulls out a bowl, measures flour, cracks walnuts, turns on the oven, and makes the thing they remember.

We did.

We do.

And, inshallah, we will make something worth passing on.

The country disappeared.

We kept baking.

Born in the Balkans. Baked in NYC.