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.

Salata de vinete, variation

A while ago, I made the claim that when it came to eggplant salad, the roasted eggplants had to be mixed with raw onions "or else." This was not as reckless a statement as it might seem, seeing as, at the time, I had spent almost twenty-nine years on this earth, most of them eating salata de vinete, and in all these years, I had never liked anything as much as eggplant salad with chopped, raw onions.

Imagine the shock I had a few months ago when I tasted an eggplant salad that did not, indeed, have raw onions, and lo, I found it good. Yea, even better than the eggplant salad of yore. So, this week, when my fridge broke down and I had to do something with the now-melted roasted eggplant I had stowed away in my freezer, I decided to try something similar: I lightly fried the chopped onion in the oil until it was translucent, and then added all of it to the eggplant.

The result is salata de vinete that you can eat for breakfast without worrying about your breath. (Though, I had it for lunch with raw green onions dipped in salt, but that just meant I was able to consume two kinds of onions rather than one!) It is also, and this should be noted as a possible strategic error, a salata de vinete that my boyfriend seems to enjoy more, and eat more eagerly, than the raw onion variety.


Note that it is also possible to mix a raw egg into this to make it even more creamy. I'm too scared of salmonella to do this myself, though by some magical effect, I'm not too scared of it to eat the result when someone else has mixed raw egg into a recipe.

Zacusca - Vegetable spread

When I think of Romanian cuisine, the words "slow" and "arduous" come immediately to mind. No wonder I've always been more attracted to Asian cooking, with its promise of lightning-fast stir fry meals. But I'm learning that some Romanian foods can be quite easy, especially if you prepare extra quantities of time-consuming items and freeze them.

Say, for example, that you made salata de vinete, but you roasted two eggplants and froze one in a ziploc bag. Say you roasted some red peppers too, and froze some of those. You're basically ten minutes away from making your own zacusca, a spread very similar to ajvar.

This recipe comes from my grandmother, and she advised using four peppers to one eggplant. I should say that this made way too much, at least for me to consume, but I found another use for it. If I were making it again, I would make half the quantity at most.

So -- coarsely chop an onion, and sautee it in oil. Cut the red peppers into little squares, and add them to the pan:


Add the mushed up roasted eggplant, salt, pepper, and about a spoonful of tomato paste. That's it!


Let it cook for a bit, and the flavours will bind nicely together. I should add that I put some chili powder in this, and I don't think that was a good idea. I think the heat needs to come from the peppers or not at all, and the Romanian version is definitely mild.

In the end, I only managed to eat about half of this, even though it was nice to have in my fridge. (Unfortunately, I made it at the same time as the salata de ardei copti, so it was a bit of a red pepper overload.) But, I "recycled" the rest by frying a bit of garlic and ginger in a pan, some Indian spices (turmeric, cayenne, coriander), and then adding the zacusca (which already had onions). With some rice it made a quick, pseudo-Indian lunch.

Salata de vinete -- Eggplant salad

Inspired by this post on making paneer, I decided to make the curried eggplant with paneer pictured halfway down the page. I found a decent recipe online for Ringan no Ohloh, and as I contemplated making it I realised that oven roasting the eggplants would also give me the basics for salata de vinete.

Just to give a little bit of context: salata de vinete is my absolute favourite food in the entire world. It's my one "desert island" food. It's the one food I could have every day of my life. It's not too dissimilar from other roast eggplant dishes around the world, such as baba ghanouj and various concoctions that go under the name "eggplant caviar." But here's the thing: the way I remember it being made in Romania involved charring the eggplants on a plita, a flat sheet of metal (a kind of sideless pan) that would go over an open flame. This was a smelly and hot process, and somehow my memories of the subsequent removal of the charred skin are also not good. So I've never tried to make this myself, figuring that, as much as I love it, I lacked the equipment (I also don't have a barbecue), and it would be too much work.