#37 Romania
- Jen
- Jun 9, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Famous for Count Dracula, dancing bears and the tallest wooden church in the world, Romania can also boast delicious, hearty cuisine.
Romanian cooking draws on a diverse mix of influences from Turkey, neighbouring Hungary and further afield in Europe. The Eastern Orthodox Church has also influenced Romania’s culinary traditions, with fasting to some degree being required for half the year. Fasting typically means abstinence from animal products, olive oil and wine, but with wine, oil and fish being allowed on certain days. Many dishes are specific to religious holidays, for example pasca, a sweet bread with a creamy, cheesy filling, is made and eaten by most families at Easter. I made a pasca last year for Moldova and it was wonderful.
Mămăligă, very similar to polenta, is the traditional peasant staple, which still remains ever-present in Romania. Balmos is pimped up mămăligă: instead of mixing the cornmeal or polenta with water or stock, it is mixed with a mixture of sour cream and butter, and if that’s not enough to stick to your ribs, plenty of brinza, a sheep’s cheese similar to feta, is melted in for good measure.
One of my favourite sayings is: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. With cold Romanian winters, if you fail to pickle in autumn, you will be in a right pickle come winter. Romanians have traditionally survived winter by pickling everything: cucumber, cauliflower, cabbage, and also vegetables beginning with other letters of the alphabet. These pickles are delicious when served alongside the creamy carbs and/or pork. It seems to me that most meals include at least one part of a pig in Romania. It’s traditional for your family to sacrifice a pig at Christmas and none of it goes to waste.
A favourite Romanian sausage is mici, which has no casing and is usually grilled and served simply with bread and mustard. Perfect with a cold beer. Bacon is called slănină, and it is actually smoked salty pig fat flavoured with garlic, pepper, paprika, and several other spices. Another version of bacon is jumari, which is like a pork scratching, and can be either eaten straight away or preserved in lard through the winter. This and slănină are served accompanying an aperitif, usually plum brandy, before dinner. Romania is the world’s second largest producer of plums, 75% of which go into brandy production.
So, so far we’ve learned that your daily starch should be mixed with three types of dairy product and that bacon is to be taken with brandy. What a place!
Taking a healthier approach, soup, or ciorbă, takes many forms in Romania, from tripe soup, to leek soup to bors, a fermented wheat bran soup. All soups tend to be sour, owing to the use of fermented grains and vegetables or the addition of lemon or vinegar. To make sure that a bowl of ciorbă isn’t too healthy, all Romanian soup should be served with a dollop of sour cream.
Starters in restaurants often comprise of vegetable spreads or dips with plenty of fresh bread. Salată de vinete is one such spread, made from pureed grilled aubergines and mixed with sunflower oil, salt and lemon juice. It’s very similar to the Levantine baba ghanoush but I’m not sure whether the two dishes have evolved individually or are historically linked.
Romanian main meals often comprise of some sort of stew of pork, beef or lamb, which is often served with mămăligă but potatoes and salad accompaniments with plenty of fresh herbs in the spring time are also common.
Romanian cuisine tends to be very savoury but there’s one sweet treat that’s got my attention: papanasi. These are fried doughnuts made with branza de vaci (cow’s cheese), which is similar to cottage cheese. The cheesy fried doughnuts are topped with smetana, a bit like crème fraiche, and blueberry jam. If anyone knows anywhere in south Wales I can get one of these please inform me immediately!
Sarmales
This dish takes various forms in former Ottoman Empire countries, but in Romania and Moldova, sarmales are cabbage leaves stuffed with pork and feature at all celebrations. This is considered to be the national dish of Romania. I stuffed a pepper for Moldova, so I’m stuffing cabbage for Romania!
The secret, so I was told, and was able to later confirm, is to use fermented cabbage leaves, which gives the dish extra oomph. You can find jars of sour or fermented cabbage leaves in your local Polish/eastern European food shop.
The stuffing is very similar to the stuffing for ardei umpluti (stuffed peppers), which I made for Moldova, and are also a popular traditional dish in Romania. This consists of: sauteed onion, rice, minced pork and plenty of fresh parsley and dill. Provided you use white long grain rice, it can go into the stuffing raw and cooks through perfectly inside the sarmales.
I watched several videos on how to roll sarmales and YouTube somehow has perfect cabbage leaves and makes it look straight-forward. See the photographs below for just one of the reasons why I wouldn’t ever get anywhere near MasterChef! Note: I soaked the cabbage leaves in water for an hour or so before construction as the jar liquid is very salty.
Once the fiddly bit’s over, simply throw leftover chopped up cabbage into a tin, followed by the sarmales, smoked bacon and passata, cover and leave in the oven for a couple of hours. Uncover and continue to cook for another couple of hours.
These little cabbage rolls are truly magnificent. They’re basically big fat juicy sausages infused with that delightful dill for fresh sweetness and the smoked lardons and a dollop of sour cream for even more decadence. However, it’s not the bacon or cream that take these babies to the next level; it’s the sour cabbage. Every taste bud in your mouth will thank you for a bite of one of these.
As with many culinary concoctions, they’re even better the next day when the flavours have had time to mature together. They’re even flipping delicious cold…yep, cold cabbage rolls…trust me.
I still have more sour cabbage than one person should ever have at any one time in their fridge, so I hope it’s a traditional ingredient of…BHUTAN.
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