When there was no food, meat was scarce: it was vegetables and legumes that substantiated the household economy. Cook and author Irina Georgescu recounts the foods of Eastern Europe through an interesting historical excursus. And lots of recipes!
The Danube and its cuisine: the tales of Irina Georgescu
If Johann Strauss's Danube was blue, Irina Georgescu's takes on shades of green. In “Danube, Recipes from Eastern Europe' ” her latest book, the Romanian writer, a naturalized British citizen, uses more than eighty recipes to recount the everyday cuisine of Eastern European countries. In flipping through the pages of the book surprisingly, one discovers that the everyday cuisine of these places lacks meat and the protagonists are vegetables, fruits and legumes. “When one thinks of Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian gastronomy...one imagines a lot of meat, because restaurant menus are different from what people cook at home. Except on a few rare occasions our home cooking is centered on vegetables. Almost everyone behind the house has a small vegetable garden. Summer temperatures are very high; it is a paradise for tomatoes. Unlike what you might think there is the right climate for vegetables, so: green beans, peas, peppers, eggplant...," he tells the Independent.
Apparently goulash, bigos and other succulent stews are the business of restaurateurs and tourists: true Eastern European home cooking, however, finds its ultimate expression in the plant world, a realm that pervades all ten states traversed by the great Danube. "Our great river when it enters Romania (through the Iron Gates Gorge) becomes the border between Romania and Serbia, further east is Bulgaria, and then it turns into the beautiful Danube delta - a UNESCO site - and flows into the Romanian Black Sea. A river that sometimes serves as a political border but, in reality, merges peoples, traditions and gastronomy of people also united by a common past, that of the communist regime. Thus Irina, who was 12 years old when the USSR fell, recounts, “ My earliest memories related to food are the long lines to buy oil, butter, or sometimes...we would stand in line for hours and often the stock in the store would run out. Cooking meant doing as much as we could with what we had, at times when electricity, gas or water were available.
I have many memories - especially before the fall of the regime - of canning and fermenting, a national sport for us! In order to eat the produce of the earth in the colder months we would make compotes, jams, slow-roasted peppers, eggplants, onions: we would put everything in a jar and preserve it for the rest of the year...otherwise we would not have sermale, the national Christmas and Easter dish. Without sarmale in Romania it is not Christmas. We rarely ate meat, only during the holidays. My uncle lived in Transylvania, every December we would drive six to eight hours to go to him and get a pig. We would put the meat in the car and drive back to our apartment. There wasn't much food around: for us, that was big-ticket shopping." “Danube,” however, recounts not only the importance of vegetables in Eastern European cuisine, but also the widespread presence of another major player: corn.
Cornmeal has always been an essential element in Romanian gastronomy whose meals are often punctuated by the presence of polenta in numerous versions: hot, creamy polenta with jam for breakfast; cold polenta cut into slices like bread and served with soup; polenta cut thinly in layers for a version of lasagna. "Historically, for us, wheat was very valuable; corn, on the other hand, was not cheap and easier to grow even in hilly areas. It was introduced to these lands in the 17th century during the Ottoman Empire, and at that time it was not taxed, so landowners were encouraged to plant corn to feed the poor and to use it as 'plan B' if the wheat crop failed. So our culinary tradition was enriched with dishes made from cornmeal,” Georgescu explains.
Not only carbohydrates and fiber, but also proteins, those of fish, make their foray into “Danube,” and it could not be otherwise given the title of the book and the abundance of fish guarded by the long river: carp, catfish and trout are ingredients that unite all these countries. “The close connection between the land, the river and the dishes hints at the influence that the Danube has had on the people who inhabit these lands; although it sometimes constitutes a border the common traditions of those who live here are emblematic of how people long to merge and draw closer together."
