Medieval Romanian Cookery in translation: "Add in a foot of veal for inquiring"

One of the neat things about having a counter is that I can see how people reach this website. One reader, for example, searched for "medieval romanian cookbook" and, because I mentioned Nicholas Orme's Medieval Schools in a previous post, was offered this blog as a first-page result on Google.

This made me, of course, do the same search, which led me to a couple of websites, both associated with Society for Creative Anachronism activities. One offers some page scans from a 1997 edition of a seventeenth-century cookbook. (And yes, the seventeenth-century was still the Middle Ages in Romania. Long story.) The modern edition, by Ioana Constantinescu and Matei Cazacu, is titled, "O lume într-o carte de bucate: manuscris din epoca brâncovenească." For those of you who read Romanian, David D. Friedman offers a section on fish preparations here.

Headcheese and Brains

When a friend wrote recently on his blog, Food With Legs, about making brawn, headcheese, pâté de tête, whatever you want to call it, I wrote him saying that I knew the food well from my childhood as piftie. And there was nothing that could ever get me to eat it again.

I should probably explain that the Romanian version of headcheese not only involves odd pig parts suspended in gelatine, but the aspic is also garlic-flavoured. Now I love garlic, and regularly double the amount of garlic I put in every recipe, but the smell of the garlic-gelatine permeating the house as my parents cooked this piftie was really something else. I would carefully avoid the dining room, where the headcheese was put to cool, as long as it was there, and had a look of sheer disgust on my teenage face for as long as the piftie was around.