Jesse's Book Reviews! Carpathia: The Food from the Heart of Romania, by Irina Georgescu.

 

So here's the scene: I'm walking through Barnes and Noble.  I try not to spend too much time there, but my wife had a long doctor's appointment in the neighborhood, and I was killing time.  I had Skid Row's I Remember You stuck in my head at the time.  Not the version by Skid Row, mind you.  It was the pandemic shut-down, and I'd been spending far, far too much time on YouTube.  I discovered this fantastic teenage Romanian cover band called the Iron Cross, and it was their version, in my brain, on repeat.  (They are simply delightful.  You can find them here.  They cover 80's hard rock songs, and they are so endearingly sincere.  They don't seem to have a great handle on what's cool, but they are so confident, it doesn't matter.  Also, their FB page said they were from LA, which is so preposterous it made me laugh out loud.)

Let me back-track.  A few days before, I was watching a Q&A video with these adorable central-European metal dorks, and someone asked them their favorite food.  They all answered 'sarmale!'  I looked it up, and it's this cabbage-roll-type dish, where meatball filling is wrapped in cabbage and baked in a casserole, similar to the Polish dish, except that in Romania, they use whole-leaf sauerkraut.  How cool is that?  I filed it on my list of dishes to try at some point.  

So anyway, back to Barnes and Noble.  I'm looking around for new cookbooks, maybe something I didn't really have on my radar.  And with little Andreea Munteanu's belting rendition Sebastian Bach's howling paean to love lost cranking through my head, over, and over, my eyes settled on the book you see above.  Carpathian cuisine.  Dracula's stomping grounds.  I picked the book up and had a look.  It opened immediately to a method for making lardo in an apartment kitchen.  "Okay," I thought, "this book looks like the real deal.  Let's see if it has a sarmale recipe.  Give me a chance to make those Romanian kids proud."  And sure as shit, it did, and I bought it immediately.

The Specs: 220 pages, around 100 recipes, so it was pretty manageable in scope.  The recipes were broken into sections for apps/salads, breads, soups, main courses, desserts, pickles and preserves, and basic recipes.  Of particular note were the bread, soup, and dessert chapters.  The bread chapter was notable for including many baked bread-like items.  Apparently Romania has a great tradition of stuffed and filled breads as street food.  The soup section was interesting because it discussed the two different types of Romanian soup.  It turns out, most soups in Romania are served soured, but they are divided into categories based on how they are soured.  Ciorba are soured with a little vinegar, whereas bors are soured using a homemade fermented grain liquid.  (Of course I had to try both.)  The dessert chapter was just really exhaustive.  Too often, the dessert chapter is a bit of an afterthought, but for this book, the author seemed as committed to baking as she was to cooking, so there are a ton of great-looking recipes in this guy.  

What's Good: Well, the best compliment I can give this book is that I tried something like a dozen recipes out of it.  That's pretty impressive!  The recipes were relatively easy and straightforward, with a few exceptions, and used ingredients I could get, especially because Charleston has Euro Foods, a fantastic central-European grocery.  The photography was terrific, and as I said, there was great attention paid to baking, as well as cooking.  But for me, the very best part was that this was a cuisine I knew nearly nothing about, and this book took me from being totally unexposed to reasonably conversant in the the basics and classics, and I really appreciate that.  

Another reason to like this book is the author's purpose in writing it.  She grew up in communist-controlled Romania, and saw how government-controlled farm practices were crushing the life out of the native cuisine.  She decided to take it onto herself to preserve traditional recipes, to help keep old-world Romanian cuisine alive for future generations.  That's respectable, and commendable.

What Stinks: Well, the book isn't perfect.  The recipes were closer to the housewife-type teacher than the culinary professional.  Think more Julia Child, less Thomas Keller.  As a result, there were occasional lapses in precision, and my culinary training kicked in more than a few times, with me adding in a step the book hadn't mentioned, because I knew it wouldn't work otherwise.  The book would gloss over minor-yet-important steps in some recipes, and then be oddly specific with others, adding odd steps that didn't really seem to affect the final product.  This kind of thing is an absolutely common problem in cookbooks, and rare is the one that doesn't have this kind of issue.  One problem I had that was unique to this book in particular was the occasional wonky choice of ingredients.  What I mean is, the book will have the reader salt-cure their own fresh pork fatback in the fridge for 3 months, and have the reader painstakingly ferment grain into a lactic-acid vehicle over the course of a week, and then call for canned lima beans.  What cook is going to make their own lardo, and then be all in for canned lima beans?  

Similarly, the cheese selections were oddly dismissive.  The Romanians use a lot of cheese, but the recipes called for English (the book is British) equivalents.  Instead of naming Romanian cheeses by name, or calling for substitutes from that part of Europe, they would always just call for cheddar, for instance, or blue cheese.  Lady, I have a great European grocery 2 miles from my house.  Give me the benefit of the doubt!  She should have at least listed which cheeses she would have used in the old country, and then named a couple of substitutes, some from central Europe, and then some last-resort-type supermarket subs.

Another issue was the metric/standard conversion.  The recipes included amounts given in grams and standard volumetric measurements, but it was hard to say which to use.  The author seems to have gravitated towards round numbers, every time, and as a result, there were occasionally inconsistencies in ratios between amounts of specific ingredients.  [To illustrate, one recipe calls for a cup of water (228g) or 250g.  In baked goods, this kind of thing can really make a difference.]  There were a couple times, particularly in the baked goods, where things didn't come out quite perfectly, and I wondered whether it was because I followed the wrong conversion path.  It's just frustrating, because the round numbers don't significantly decrease the difficulty of a recipe.  They especially don't decrease the difficulty compared to recipes filled with little inaccuracies.  Bad choice.  If you're going to go to the trouble of converting, convert accurately.  Measuring 228g isn't any more trouble than measuring 250g, but the recipes don't give us the tools to know which was the original measurement.  Boo.

Okay, enough negativity.  Let's get down to business.  Recipes Tested:

Ardei Copti (Charred Pepper Salad with Garlic Vinaigrette): Peppers, roasted over an open flame, dressed in a vinaigrette that was punchy with raw garlic.  Easy.  Good party snack.  Nice little hors d'oeuvre.  The recipe called for bell or romano peppers, which, if you go by the photo, are long, narrow red peppers.  I found these mixed lunchbox peppers at Harris Teeter, and they worked out fantastically.

Salata de Vinete (Eggplant Caviar with Red Onion and Fennel Seed) [Pictured here on potato bread, topped with heirloom tomatoes and crumbled cheese]: This was great.  It looked like baba ghanouj, but with fennel and onion instead of garlic and curry.  However, there was one really big difference.  To make this, the eggplant are cooked entirely by charring them over an open burner.  I thought 'that will never work,' but I was wrong.  The eggplant was completely suffused with this amazing smokiness.  The char became the character.  It was simply fantastic.  I had a friend over whose mother-in-law used to make this dish, and she confirmed, it was right.  (Note: when using cookbooks being marketed in Europe, I've noticed they usually assume our eggplants are smaller.  American eggplants are huge.  Take care with eggplant recipes in Euro cookbooks, you may need to boost other ingredients.)

Slanina (Pork Lardo): This was the reason I took this book seriously in the first place.  Salt, pepper, garlic, and a huge chunk of pork fatback, aged for three months.  The results were delicious.  I've been using it in other dishes that call for lardo.  Finding the pork fat is the hard part.  The stuff is damn handy to have around.  Here is some on potato bread toast with raw onion, a traditional way to have it:

Salata de Fasole Verde (Green and Yellow French Bean Salad with Onion Vinaigrette): This one was a lot of fun.  A simple bean salad (I did all green, couldn't find yellow wax beans, so I did a mix of haricots verts and sugarsnaps, instead), dressed with a simple vinaigrette with lots of onion and a little garlic, and tossed with some feta and almonds.  The recipe was not without its perplexing moments.  The onion in the dressing was called for 'finely diced,' and I really think she meant 'minced.'  Also, the recipe said to cook the beans at a low simmer for 15 minutes, and I refused to do that.  I just big-pot-blanched them, just like we all know how to do.  

Pita cu Carcofi (Potato Bread, Baked in Cabbage Leaves): This was an interesting one.  The bread was a pretty straightforward white loaf, except that the pre-ferment was made with mashed potatoes, in addition to the flour and yeast, and that it was baked in a bread pan lined with cabbage leaves.  I'm not convinced the cabbage leaves really did anything for the bread, but it certainly made the oven smell interesting when I was checking it.

Sadly, the loaf came out a little dense and under-leavened.  The problem was obvious.  A whole bunch of CO2 made that huge, balloon-like bubble in the top of the loaf, instead of being distributed throughout the loaf, as would have been ideal.  I'm not too sure what I could have done to prevent this.  Maybe knead more?  I'm not a bread expert.  At any rate, the bread worked fine for building canapes on, which was all I needed it for, but I definitely think I could do better if I tried again.

Placinta cu Cirrese de Peste Prut ("Across the Prut" Pie, Stuffed with Cherries):  This dish's quirky name refers to the Prut river, which creates the border between Romania and Moldova.  Essentially a hand-made poptart, this little pie consists of hand-rolled puff pastry, folded around a cherry filling.  It was ok.  There were a couple of issues.  First, the dough seemed super-stiff, and was hard to work (I have to wonder if this was a conversion issue).  Second, the cherries in the filling cooked down to almost nothing!  I had to make a second batch of jam filling, and even then, I was a little short.  The recipe just called for 'cherries.'  I used Ranier.  Do different varieties cook down at different rates?  Or was this just a sloppily-written recipe?  Hard to say, but given this book's overall lack of precision, I'm being pretty sparing with benefit of the doubt.  

Still, the little pies were pretty good.  I served them as a dessert, with some ice cream.

Bors de Fasole cu Carnati Afumati (Lima Bean Bors with Smoked Sausage and Red Onion Salsa: This dish was absolutely fantastic.  If you recall from above, a bors is a soup soured with bors, the ingredient, which is a fermented grain slurry.  I had to make that first, and it took me a week.

The bors (the ingredient) was an interesting process.  The recipe called for a 3L jar, which is a nearly impossible-to-find size, so I built it in two 1.5L jars that I obtained from the Evil Empire.  Into the jars went water, wheat bran, polenta, burnt toast (or, in my case, because I forgot to buy bread, burnt pizza crust from d'Al's), parsley, and bay leaves.  This sat for a week, getting stirred once a day.  Interestingly, the ferment totally took in one of the jars, and didn't take in the other.  As a result, after a week, I had one happily fizzing, yeasty-lactic-acidy-smelling ferment in one jar, and moldy, non-fizzing, smelling-like-literal-dogshit slop in the other.  It was very satisfying to throw the second jar's product away.  But the first worked out nice.  I strained it, and the smell of it was reminiscent of the smell of Josh Keeler's fermented yellow peppers (to which I was powerfully addicted during my time at 492), so I guessed it would all be ok.  Fermentation freaks me out a little bit, especially out of a book whose precision issues I have personally documented.

Anyway, the soup was a snap to throw together after that.  It began with a stock made with meaty pork bones (I had to resort to spareribs... $$ ouch!) and mirepoix, along with parsley, thyme, and peppercorns.  (The stock was one of those extra-steps-for-no-reason recipes, adding the aromatics at arbitrarily different stages, and needlessly involving a food processor, but next time, I'll just make a damn stock.)  Then, you add browned smoked sausage (I found a really nice Slavic one at my local central European grocery), bell pepper, tomato, lima beans (I didn't use canned... I refuse, I used frozen,). and the bors, and simmer it for a little while.  The result was delicious!  

Important note:  This dish (along with others from the book) show one of the most interesting aspects of Romanian cuisine: it ties north-central European flavors (cabbage/sauerkraur, smoked pork, caraway, raw onion) with the Mediterranean/Adriatic flavors of Asia Minor (tomato, eggplant, bell pepper, garlic).  When you look at a map, you can see that Romania is bordered to the north by Ukraine and Hungary, but to the south by Macedonia and Bulgaria.  Bucharest is closer to Istanbul than it is to Budapest, Warsaw, or Kiev.  For me, that was the single coolest aspect of all this, coming to understand how Romanian cuisine was the product of being this cultural corridor of sorts.

Ciorba de Varza Acra (Caraway Sauerkraut Ciorba with Potatoes): Well, I'd tried a bors (soup soured with fermented grain juice), so I had to try a vinegar-soured ciorba too, right?   This little soup was quick to throw together.  Sauerkraut, potatoes, onions, paprika, and carraway are simmered up in a nice vegetable stock, before being seasoned to taste with salt, pepper, thyme, and cider vinegar.  Nice little country-style starter.  I ended up goosing my batch up with a little sauerkraut juice and additional salt.  Really nice, easy dish.  It'd be a great side dish for a pork chop, for instance.

Sarmale!!:  Here it is, the reason I bought this book.  A pork meatball mix serves as filling, packed with arborio rice, garlic, onion, bacon, and egg.  This gets wrapped into rolls in whole-leaf sauerkraut (Nate tried to make some for me, but it's not easy to get whole leaf cabbage to cure evenly...  thanks anyway, Dogg...  I ended up finding some at Euro Foods, which allowed me to make this incredible dish).  Then, the rolls get layered with onions, bay leaves, juniper berries, and thyme in a large dutch oven, covered over with tomato passata (thicker than puree, thinner than paste, you can just add some paste to puree to thicken it if you can't find it), and baked until the whole thing is cooked through.

If you'll recall, this was the dish advocated by my little teeny-bopper internet cover band, and they are not goddamned wrong.  The dish is absolutely FANTASTIC.  This will be a mainstay in my repertoire for years to come.  It's a great potluck dish!  How one would refine it for fine dining, I couldn't tell you, but holy BALLS is it amazing.  One of the best traditional dishes I've ever made.  As you can see in the picture, it's served with a dollop of sour cream and some sliced pickled hot peppers.

(This is another one where you can see the north-central-Europe/mediterranean cuisine culture clash.  Sauerkraut, ground pork, sour cream, and juniper berries on one side, tomatoes, garlic, and pickled hot peppers on the other.  Goddamn, what a fascinating cuisine.)

Mici "Littles" (Sour Cream Meat Sausage):  This dish could more accurately be called a meatball than a sausage.  It actually resembles Turkish kofta as much as it does anything else.  It's a meatball mix, made with pork, beef, ground lardo, bread, garlic, spices, sour cream, and beef bouillon (it actually specifies stock cubes, and I knuckled under and used them, because it might have effected salt balance).  Then, they are browned, baked, and served on bread with mustard and raw onion.  This is a street food, apparently, and they were goddamn amazing.  Because if the high fat content, they were soft and yielding in the center, when they were cooked through.

Piperchi (Peppers, Fricasee Style):  This dish was nice, but could have been nicer.  You just take bell peppers, cook them down in oil and tomato puree and wilt in some cherry tomatoes, almost like you're making a piperade.  Then, you stir in cheese, and broil it for a bit.  The picture in the book didn't make it obvious how the cheese was supposed to be incorporated, but I stirred most of it in, and then added just a bit to the top, which is what the recipe said to do, but man, their pic was a lot better than mine.  Also, this was one of the dishes that said to use cheddar, and gave no indication of what cheese would be used traditionally.  I went with Kashkaval, the one in the foreground, a nice sheep's milk melter from my friends at Euro Foods.  It's from Bulgaria, which shares a large border with Romania, so my guess is it's a little more authentic.  To be honest, the cheese sort of buried the subtlety of the dish, but who am I to argue with tradition?  It was still pretty good.

Prajitura cu Caise (Apricot Yogurt Cake): This one was great!  Basically just an apricot clafoutis.  I wasn't going to mess with this one, but then, at random, I came across some great-looking fresh apricots (an extreme rarity in the States, even in season), and I just had to.  The batter is just eggs, sugar, oil, yogurt, vanilla, and a small amount of flour.  I wish I could have another go at this one.  I under-baked mine just a little bit.  The dough was meant to be dense and moist, but there were a few parts where it was a little gooey.  Still, great dish.  I really liked the addition of tarragon, and it went great with some vanilla gelato from Whole Foods.

Dobos Torte (Seven-Layer Hungarian Layer Cake): Okay, this may look impressive, but I've made one before.  It was a mainstay in the Restaurant Desserts and Baking class at my alma mater, Kendall College.  That cool fan-blade look is definitely a Kendall touch.  The cake consists of seven layers of a sponge that is more-or-less like a dense genoise.  Between these layers is a mocha buttercream (butter, sugar, instant coffee, melted chocolate, eggs).  The outside is dusted with crushed walnuts, and the top layer is kept separate, glazed in caramel, and cut into wedges before the caramel hardens.  The book has you just laying the caramel wedges onto the top of the cake, but if you want to do the cool fan-blade trick, here's what you do: 1) Using a long knife, mark the top of the cake [which should, at this point, be covered in a smooth layer of buttercream] into 8 wedges.  2) Using a large star tip, pipe a large rosette of buttercream into the outer-right corner of each slice.  3) Lay the left edge of a caramel-coated layer triangle onto the left border of each slice, propping the right edge of the caramel triangle up on the rosette of buttercream.

And, if you can figure out what I meant by all that, Bob's your uncle!

Now, it didn't come out perfect.  The buttercream called for instant coffee, and the crystals never really dissolved.  Not a huge issue, but in the professional kitchen, I'd probably just use trablit.  Also, the layers were a little tough and dry, almost like ladyfingers, rather than genoise.  I wonder if there was a conversion issue.  Part of the problem, I think, was that there wasn't quite enough batter to go into my seven 7" cake pans, to make the layers full enough.  They were a little thin, I think, and ended up a little dry.  Next time, I will make a larger amount of the batter, and make the layers a little more even.  Also, next time, I will seriously consider making a flavored syrup (say, 2 parts simple syrup, one part flamed-off Kahlua, one part flamed-off Nocino) to brush onto the layers, if they want to get all dry on me.

Still, it came out pretty well:

The Verdict: Pretty fun book!  It benefits greatly from the fact that there just isn't much in English on this particular topic.  Think about that.  When the topic is, say, French cuisine, every author is jumping into an arena with a lot of competition.  Not so, in the world of Romanian cuisine.  Still, anyone that decides to take the plunge with this should be warned, the recipes suffer from occasional precision issues, and the baked good recipes are not perfect, and will reward experimentation and repetition.  Not a ton of instant gratification, here.  However, I am going to go ahead and give this book my full-throated recommendation for anyone that's interesting in Romanian cuisine.  And if anyone isn't interested in Romanian cuisine, you bloody-well should be.

-JS