Albanian bread has a long tradition.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

George Relles, a self-employed audio engineer and former bluegrass musician, holds a New Year's Day party each year where he and his guests work together to prepare Albanian-style sausages, shkacat (a bread), pasta with tomato sauce, a salad and pieces of "cardone" (cardoon stalk) that are boiled, breaded, fried and served as an hors d'oeuvre.

"The other thing that started way back in the beginning was that there was always bluegrass music," Relles said. "My bluegrass musician friends would always show up, and so there always would be music in one room going on while there's cooking in the other room, and the die-hard football fans are in another room watching the game."

Shkacat (pronounced ska-chat) is a focaccia-style bread topped with the same tomato sauce that's used to flavor the pasta.

Relles learned the recipes from his grandmother, a member of the Tabaresh, a clan of Albanians who fled the Ottoman Empire and relocated to Sicily hundreds of years ago. She grew up in the village of Piana near Palermo before coming to the United States to live in Chicago and later Sacramento, Calif.

Specialty: "I've got my grandmother's recipes that were never written down. I just learned from her. And those are very dear to my heart. I guess those would be my specialties," he said.

Relles said he's sure the original Albanian style of cooking must have melded with the Italian style over the years, but the members of the Albanian clan would never admit that. So the details of the recipes' transformation remains a mystery.

"But I do know that the recipes that she had are quite unique, especially the sausage," he said.

"The sausage is different from any other kind of sausage I've ever tasted. Primarily, it uses a lot of sweet kind of spices. So it uses cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and clove, with red wine and garlic. No basil, no fennel, no oregano, none of those Italian spices you would normally see in Italian sausages. It's two parts pork to one part beef sausage ... So it has a real unique flavor to it."

Relles was one of 27 grandchildren in that large family. Every Sunday, while he was growing up in Sacramento, his family would go to Grandma's house for dessert and, sometimes, dinner of pasta and meatballs or squid.

On Wednesdays, she would make shkacat, which his father would bring home for dinner. And for New Year's, she would make sausage, cardone, shkacat and pasta, Relles said.

`I was going to the University of Oregon at the time, and when I went home to visit (at New Year's), my uncles collared me and said, `Why don't you come and learn these recipes because someone's got to carry this on' ... So I stuck around and they showed me how to make the sausage, and my grandmother showed me how to make the shkacat and the cardone. And so I got interested in that.

"It was a year later that I decided I wanted to make this stuff, and so I had a party on New Year's Day in 1973, I think it was. That was my first sausage party, and we've had it every year ever since - 31 years now."

How he began cooking: "It just slowly evolved," he said. "I think I enjoyed cooking a little bit when I was a teenager. After high school, I think I started just enjoying making steaks and things like that. Making marinades for steaks, I remember. Then I came up to school here. But I didn't really start taking cooking seriously until after I got out of school.

"I never really picked up recipes from cookbooks," he said, explaining that he more often would try to replicate something he had eaten in a restaurant.

"I'd go to a place like Cafe Sport in San Francisco and I'd come and just try and duplicate what I thought something tasted like. For instance, their pesto is a good example and their pasta puttanesca. ... I remember coming home and trying to re-create those dishes.

"I'm really a cook like my grandmother, which is I cook by feel and taste and smell," he said. "It's like the sausage that I make. Yeah, I kind of start with so many tablespoons of this and this and this. But the end result is really my smelling it and feeling it. It has a certain feel to it.

"For instance, when we add the anise seed to it, I go for the prickly feel. There's a certain density of that prickly feel that's right and I know when that's right. So I guess I have to say I'm a cook by the seat of your pants. I'm a pinch-and-a-handful kind of person as opposed to a teaspoon-tablespoon kind of cook."

His biggest cooking success: "My sausage party, I think, is my success, and partly because I feel a lot of satisfaction in that I've been able to carry this tradition on for over 30 years now, and whole families have actually grown up on this sausage party," he said.

"There are kids who come back who are completely grown now - you know, in their late 20s, some of them, actually, in their 30s - who remember it when they were little kids, who come back and talk to me about the way I would talk to my grandmother, how much it meant to them and how much they remember the smells.

"There's just something about walking into the house on that New Year that brings it all back to these people, with all the memories and the smells and the sounds. It's been the same for 30 years. It hasn't changed. That's what I feel is my biggest accomplishment is the fact I've been able to carry on this tradition."

His biggest cooking failure: "Probably making an Orange Kiss Me Cake, which is a cake that my grandmother made, and putting baking powder instead of baking soda in," he said. "It came out as a tart instead of a cake. It just didn't rise."

Shkacat

For the sauce:

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil 

2 medium onions, chopped

8 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed whole

3 tablespoons wine vinegar

2 cups fresh parsley, chopped

1/2 cup dried basil

1 (12-ounce) can tomato paste

12 ounces sweet vermouth (use the tomato paste can to measure 1 can of vermouth)

12 ounces Burgundy wine (use the tomato paste can to measure 1 can of burgundy)

12 ounces water (use the tomato paste can to measure 1 can of water)

1 large ripe tomato, chopped

2 bay leaves, crumbled

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

For the dough:

2 cups warm water

2 tablespoons active dry yeast

5 cups King Arthur bread flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

For the topping:

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 (2-ounce) can anchovy fillets

1 medium onion, diced

4 tablespoons dried basil

2 tablespoons dried rosemary

1/3 cup fresh grated Parmesan cheese

To make the sauce: Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy fry pan. Add the onion and garlic and saute with the vinegar until almost soft. Add the chopped parsley and basil and cook for about 3 minutes.

In a saucepan, dissolve tomato paste with the sweet vermouth, Burgundy and water over medium heat. Add to this the contents from the frying pan along with the chopped tomato, bay leaves, salt and pepper. Simmer for 1 hour.

To make the dough: Combine the warm water and yeast in a small bowl and let sit for 5 minutes to proof. Place the flour in a large bowl and create a crater in the center of the flour. Place the sugar and salt in the crater and then cover the crater with flour. Add the yeast mixture and mix the dough by hand. When the dough begins to come together, add the olive oil and knead for about 3 minutes until smooth.

Cover with several towels and let rise in a warm area for 1 1/2 hours. Push down and let rise for another 1 1/2 hours.

Grease a 14-inch-by-10-inch pan and add the dough, pressing down until flat. Move excess dough to edges of pan. Cover with towels and let rise again for 1 hour in a warm place.

Final assembly: Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Drizzle olive oil over the top of the dough. Tear off approximately 1/2 -inch pieces of anchovy fillets and push them into the dough approximately every 2 inches. Spread the sauce over the dough and then sprinkle the fresh chopped onion over the sauce. Sprinkle on basil, rosemary and Parmesan cheese. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until edges are crunchy.

To nominate a cook for this feature, send mail to Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363, or [phone]; or e-mail [e-mail]. Include the nominee's name and phone number.