Q9: "How's the food in Romania?"

Dan asks, "How's the food in Romania?"

Nice timing on this question, Dan. I saw it just before Kim and I left for the weekend to the countryside, where traditional Romanian food seems to have remained a staple. (In Iasi, pizza and pastries seem to have trumped most else, although there are still some pretty good traditional restaurants.)

We wanted to see the painted monasteries of the Southern Bucovina region, so we took a train north to Suceava, where we rented a Daewoo Matiz. From Suceava, we drove the itsy-bitsy blue car in a loop, stopping to see the monasteries at Humor, Voret, Moldvita and Sucevita. The monasteries were impressive -- the exterior paintings have lasted 500 years in some instances, and the illustrations of biblical and historical scenes are very attractive -- but the food was equally memorable.

During our two nights on the road we stayed at cozy "pensiunes", the Romanian versions of bed and breakfasts that also serve cornucopian traditional dinners. We spent the first night at at Casa Ancuta in Humor, where dinner included:

- Homemade blueberry liqueur, as an aperitif
- Vegetable soup, served with bread and sour cream on the side
- Shredded cabbage salad
- Mashed potatoes
- Veal cutlets in a mushroom and cream sauce
- Homemade pickles
- "Gogoasi": Romanian-style doughnuts (no hole in the middle, no icing) with blueberry jam
- Coffee

We shared all this with just one other guest. (During the summer, these pensuines are extremely popular with Romanian city-dwellers who come to the countryside for vacation, but we learned that during the winter most pensiunes are either closed or deserted.) Breakfast was only slightly less overwhelming:

- Eggs, omelet-style
- A bunch of small pieces of five types of cured meat, each about the size of a pat of butter: 1/4-inch-thick bacon; slices of sausage; slices of some cut of veal; a mysterious, marbled meat; and cured lard, still on the pigskin.
- Crepes filled with sweet cheese and cinnamon
- Bread with butter, blueberry jam, and a jammy applesauce
- More doughnuts
- A feta-like cheese
- Coffee and tea

We stayed the second night at Pensiune Felicea in Sucevita, where we were the only guests. (The friendly owners weren't expecting guests at all: it took an hour of cleaning and heating the wood-burning stove before our room was ready. They kindly gave us tea and some lemon-walnut cake while we waited.) Dinner here was a healthier but no less bountiful meal:

- Homemade blueberry liqueur
- Beet, potato and bell pepper soup, served with bread
- "Mamaliga": a dense cornmeal polenta, served with sour cream
- "Sarmale": pork-and-chicken dumplings wrapped in steamed cabbage leaves
- Red wine
- Apple tart/cake

Breakfast, however, was just tea, bread, raspberry jam, butter, honey, and a pepper-mushroom spread.

On our drive home, we passed a small town which no doubt grows the most cabbage per capita, enough to wrap a country's-worth of sarmale. Almost every home seemed to have a field of cabbages growing or recently harvested, and I counted no fewer than five horse-drawn carts burdened with what looked like a half-ton of cabbage heads each.

### click here to ask another question! ###