I came up with a new business idea, to sell t-shirts and bumper stickers with the slogan “I survived the holiday season in Romania”. It was that bad, really 🙂 I’ve never seen so much food in my life. Romanians like to eat a lot on holidays, especially after a month of Christmas fasting. I was talking to a guy who lived in France for the last 20 years and he was in owe: “You come here, people seem poor. You go to visit them for some casual lunch or dinner and they set up a table like they’re throwing a wedding reception. I’ve never seen so much food, maybe except for US” he said. That’s the way it is in Romania. People like to feed their guests until they’re about to pop. On holidays it’s worse 🙂 Everyone cooks the traditional dishes. You get invited to ten meals in three days, and in every house you have to taste the cooking. The moment you enter the door you are asked “Would you like to eat something?” and no matter of the answer you will be served something even though you just ate two hours ago. You end up eating a lot more than you want. You have to do it, otherwise the hosts get upset. Nothing gets wasted or thrown away. And so I did eat a lot. Since I don’t cook the traditional dishes while I’m in California this was my occasion to try them and I didn’t refuse anything that was offered. I’ll probably have to diet when I return to California.
Traditional goodies
The dish considered the most traditional is sarmale, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, meat and herbs usually served with sour cream and with mamaliga, a cornmeal similar to polenta (many of our neighbours like Serbia or Bulgaria have sarmale too but the serving with polenta is I believe truly Romanian)
The traditional drink is tuica, a strong brandy made of plums. If it’s twice distilled than we get the much stronger palinca (a term we can’t use anymore since it became a Hungarian brand)
Fresh wine made by Cris’ dad
Pickles
In the end some dessert, a traditional cake that people bake for Christmas or Easter called cozonac
Actually, I think all this food looks delicious. Is there a good Romanian restaurant in San Francisco? Or anywhere in the States?
I think it’s interesting how all the northern world likes to wrap things in cabbage leaves. From cabbage rolls to kim chee.
That’s exactly the problem, that they are very delicious so I ate and ate and ate 🙂
There isn’t any Romanian restaurant in San Francisco but there’s one about an hour south of SF. I don’t go there often, it’s expensive and I don’t like their cooking too much. It’s northern Romanian cooking and I’m from the south. There are many Romanian restaurants in NY, I used to go there when I was living in NJ.
Funny is, the Romanian diet is heavily based on potatoes, but still our national dish is made of cabbage.
sarmale are far from being traditionally Romanian, they’re Turkish. also, I really don’t see what’s so different between Transylvanian food and southern foods, probably the fact that you people cook everything a bit more sour? I don’t know.. anyway, it’s a real shame that Romanian restaurant in los Gatos closed down because there weren’t enough Americans “adventurous” enough to try some schnitzels or soups and other barbaric foods! horrid, tell me about it. and they eat mashed potatoes too? oh em gee.