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Romania Journal by Peter Rashkin August 10--First Romanian meal Calin met us at the airport; we drove through Bucharest and into the country. Right away we saw horse-drawn wagons, even before we left the city. Drove across the flat plain...fields of corn and sunflowers...in the larger towns there were blocks of rectangular Ceausescu-era apartment buildings looking somewhat shabby but not too bad. Proletarian housing, all the same, but each apartment had a balcony, many with hanging laundry or potted plants. After a while we started to see low hills, and of course the claias, the ubiquitous Romanian haystack of which we would see so much and which, for me, became a symbol of the peasant life that still has room for working horses who have to be fed in winter. After maybe three hours we were in the mountains. It was dark by the time we reached Calin's folks home in Baia de Fier (iron mine). Calin's mom, Elena, set out our first Romanian meal. Since our party consisted of one vegetarian, one pseudo-vegetarian and omnivorous me, we anticipated food problems. "There's plenty of vegetarian food in Romania," I had read somewhere, "but it all has pork in it." Not so! No problems! Of course, we were in Romania eight days before we even ate in a restaurant, and our two host families were extremely solicitous. I had told Calin about the vegetarians, and he must have told his mother. "Don't worry," he wrote me, "we have a big vegetable garden with plenty of fresh vegetables." 
I have lived in some very rural US settings, and visited in Mexican
villages as well, but I don't think I've ever been in a community
that was quite as self-sufficient in food as Baia de Fier. Practically
everything on the table was grown and processed in the village, if
not in the home itself. Bread and coffee were exceptions; in the morning
Calin would run downtown for a couple of unwrapped, unsliced, round
loaves and a packet of coffee. Most everything else seemed to come
from the garden. I made some notes on that first impressive meal, which was typical of the feasts we would be enjoying for the next 10 days: eggplant salad, fresh tomatoes and cukes, a couple of different cheeses (one from cow milk, one from sheep milk) a mushroom loaf, stuffed cabbage leaves for the carnivores, and a seemingly endless supply of pale grape wine and plum brandy (tsuica), both made at home with grapes and plums from the garden. Neither pitchers nor glasses were permitted to sit empty. By the end of the evening I had thoroughly learned a new Romanian vocabulary word: "Narok!" Good Luck! (Clink of glass.) |
