When Milunka Radicevic was a girl, she and her siblings would spend holidays and summer breaks with their mother’s family in New York. Those were carefree times spent with aunts and grandparents, and inevitably good food. Traditional food. Patricia, Milunka’s mother, was reared in New York, celebrating customs passed down from her father’s Irish ancestors and her mother’s Lithuanian culture. And what the kids looked forward to eating were the specialties that marked special occasions, dishes like Irish soda bread and Lithuanian kruschiki, a deep-fried pastry.

Patricia has carried the traditions forward, and they continue to blend past and present here in this melting-pot city. Patricia has run their Bay View Serbian restaurant, Three Brothers, for over 52 years, most of that time with her late husband, Branko, whose heritage is reflected in the cuisine. When Patricia brought her food traditions to Milwaukee, they melded with Branko’s and the extended Three Brothers family, as Milunka likes to call it.

“My grandparents would come for the Serbian holidays, and when they were retired, they would visit more, they would come and help,” says Milunka. “My grandfather would wash the dishes, my grandfather would help make the Serbian sausages, my grandfather would sit with the copper kettle and make plum pudding. And even though my grandmother didn't speak much English and my grandfather didn’t speak Serbian, my [mother] would be so pleased to see my grandfather in a tank top sweating, making the bread [and] making this kruschiki, and so it was like the families got to know each other through food.”

The soda bread was one of Branko’s favorites, but then, all bread was, and bread figures heavily in Serbian cuisine, too. Milunka’s father loved to dip his wife’s bread into the Serbian goulash. You have that “caraway flavor in the beef stew, and then you have that hint of sweetness from the raisins or the currants,” Milunka says.

This beloved loaf shines with other dishes, too. They ran specials at the restaurant, serving the bread with ajvar, a Serbian red pepper spread – “You wouldn’t necessarily think that it would go well because the peppers are so crazy sweet. If my mother hadn't told me that this was my grandfather's recipe, and she just made it, I would have thought it was my grandmother's Serbian-side recipes.” This soda bread belongs to everyone.