Romanians tend to love their holyday feasts. So much so that the news next day has a section dedicated to how swamped the ambulances were by people sick from overeating or over drinking. Binging is often the norm, for reasons, I assume, and can be the subject of some sort of study or other.
Were I inclined to speculation, and luck would have it, I happen to be, I would say that partially it has to do with being a poor country with a history of privation. People who don’t usually get to indulge, pick a few holydays, save money, make effort and sacrifice other things, and have a couple of big meals. It may be a status thing – show your wealth via a big feast. Maybe it’s just a hang up from pre-modern times. Romanian weddings can be quite excessively lavish, for similar reasons.
It may be the long lent before Easter. Seven weeks of no animal products, no meat, no eggs, no dairy, in late winter and early spring when most of the fruits and vegetables that would make going vegan easier do not grow, and the staples are potatoes, beans, cabbage, and maybe zacusca. Although few keep full lent these days.
But this is not about why Romanians binge on Easter. It is about what they binge on. Which is lamb. And usually lots of eggs. And spring onions. And combinations of the above. Traditionally, a family buys a whole lamb, which is cooked and eaten nose to tail. Little is thrown away, and trying all the different dishes may be a reason for overeating.
My family’s lamb was 11 kilograms this year, but as we do not really overeat as much as other Romanians (never has someone gotten sick from too much food), some of it goes to the deep freeze. Other parts are cooked as you may see in the following pictures of a full Romanian Easter Feast. I will not claim it to be typical of all or even most Romanians, but let’s say it’s authentic enough.
The day starts with coloured eggs, which are smashed together before eating. One person holds an egg, another hits it with his own. The one doing the hitting says “Christ has risen” and the one on the receiving end answers “Truly He has risen.” And this goes on until as many eggs are smashed as people want to eat. The eggs are simply peeled and eaten with salt, pepper, and maybe mustard, with some cheese, radishes, and spring onions.
The meal is usually supplemented with drob, which is an Easter dish made thus: take the organs of the lamb and maybe a little meat, boil, chop finely, mix with beaten eggs and fine chopped spring onions, season to taste, stuff in the lambs stomach – properly cleaned in advance – and roast in the oven. White wine is generally drunk during this morning meal, although beer can be a substitute.
The second meal of the day – first lunch, around 1 pm, and usually my favourite, is Ciorbă, which I am not always sure how to describe. It’s a type of soup which Romanians differentiate from other type of soup, which is just called soup. More often than not, Ciorbă is sour, but not always. Wikipedia link for the curious. Ciorbă depends on the ingredients and the souring agent, which is often Borș (more wikipedia) of similar etymology but different from Russian borsch, but it can also be soured with lemon, vinegar, pickled cabbage juice, or a type of Verjuice made from unripe fruit, most often grapes or cherry plums.
The base of the ciorbă is mostly large bones of the lamb with a little meat – the best parts of meat are saved for grilling and roasting – the bors and all sorts of vegetables and greens. Easter being in spring, usually all sort of weeds start growing and are added for flavour. Sorrel, Rumex patientia, which I don’t know how to properly say in English, ramsons, and others. What is never missing is lovage, added during cooking and fresh chopped as a garnish before eating. My mother makes the ciorbă more sour than most – bors and sorrel contribute to this, which is how I like it and also makes a decent hangover helper.
Besides the liquid, you get an piece of bone with some meat on it. The choice piece is traditionally the whole lamb’s head, especially for the brains – Romanians eat brains in lots of ways, mostly formed into patties, breaded and fried. I never liked the texture of brain so avoid it – this was considered strange when, as a kid people offered me the brain as a special treat, and I refused. Anyway, I don’t care for a whole lamb’s head, though my cousins liked it so much that my aunt had a huge pot and boiled five whole heads bought from the butchers in her ciorbă so each member of the family got one.
By afternoon some barbecued lamb is made – usually ribs and chops and such – and the red wine is brought forth. The lamb usually does not have any sides – it is eaten with a lot of mixed greens salad. Not much to say about this one, it is meat on charcoal really.
Whomever is hungry in the evening eats some of the over roast meat – with a sauce based on a ton of green onions and some wine.
During the day traditional pastry is also eaten.
Pasca, which basically means Easter cake, is made of a pastry with lots of cheese, not too sweet. Cozonac is pastry with various fillings – most often walnut or cocoa, sometimes Turkish delight. I prefer the walnut myself. The pastry also goes well with a nice glass of wine. In fact there is an old Romanian saying – Is there anything better in life than cozonac with wine? Yes, wine…
And that is about it for this. Here’s some pheasants on the lawn on Easter day…
Comments
117 responses to “Easter in Romania”
Good eatin’ on a pheasant.
Heh….a pheasant would last about 20 seconds in my father in law’s yard, just enough time for him to grab a shotgun. That man is a pheasant-hunting fiend.
Would he be able to get both of those?
I’m the wrong guy to ask. I’m that rare firearm enthusiast who doesn’t like hunting much. I’ve gone with him for deer a few times, that’s it.
Shooting pheasant in the wild is like shooting trap. The pheasants will not flush until you almost step on them. A good shooter with a multiple shot gun should be able to take two birds together.
Provided you don’t shit yourself when the bird jumps right in front of you.
When I have been pheasant hunting, we didn’t shoot the hens (even though I think its legal). More pheasants to eat next year, that way.
Yeah, I might prefer that over the lamb heads and innards.
So you’re calling dibs on the Pheasant brain and giblets?
“Save the neck for me, Clark!”
It’s fine. Just a little dry.
Save seconds of the cat food jello for me.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CBjNzmvcUF8
I have an out-of-print Monica Sheridan cookbook, The Art of Irish Cooking and was texting with a Dubliner of my acquaintance about some of the contents like a half-sheep’s head. He was not amused.
The best is when she talks about killing pigs while growing up on a farm and describes their death scream as like a jet plane taking off.
There’s an art to boiling things?
It was more a post-war period “Hey, our food doesn’t have to be shitty” movement. She was a contemporary of Julia Child.
BF doesn’t like mint or peas, so I keep threatening to serve minted peas with everything…because I’m a dick.
There’s actually a very good little hole-in-the-wall restaurant here run by an older Romanian couple, but oddly enough they only serve a couple of their native dishes. The rest is an eclectic mix of European dishes – spaghetti and meatballs, eggplant parm, shwarma, wienerschnitzel, goulash, etc.
How many servings of lamb’s brain do you think they’d be able to get their customers to buy?
“Snout to tail” restaurants are still a trendy thing, aren’t they?
Besides, I’m sure they eat a few other things besides brains……or DO they?
Never seen one – but that doesn’t mean anything.
I know they were a big deal a few years ago, although apparently the one I went to in town here became an upscale Chinese joint, so maybe that time has passed.
Kind of funny how “Lips to Assholes” restaurants are considered “cool” and “green”, but pink slime and hot dogs are considered gauche for using the normally discarded parts of meat.
I like sausage… but chopping the worst parts of the animal into tiny bits and mixing it with a shitload of spices is the only way to make it acceptable to me. Trendoids can keep their offal joints.
A pity I am not a fan of onions… but some of that looks and sounds good.
I didn’t realize you were so broken, Swiss.
*prepares kid gloves for future Swiss handling*
OK, I will go through this once…
What gives onion its distinctive smell. Sulfur.
When a preacher is giving a sermon on the perils of Hell it is called …? “Fire and Brimstone” sermon.
Brimstone is…? Sulfur.
QED, onions are the Devil’s plant.
But it makes for a helluva meal.
You Know What Else is the Devil’s plant?
Konjac?
If you’re allergic to it, poison oak.
*cuts onion, weeps for Swiss*
*applause*
Yay more for me
“The meal is usually supplemented with drob, which is an Easter dish made thus: take the organs of the lamb and maybe a little meat, boil, chop finely, mix with beaten eggs and fine chopped spring onions, season to taste, stuff in the lambs stomach – properly cleaned in advance – and roast in the oven.”
So, haggis?
Sounds like it. But maybe with different seasoning?
Haggis contains oats. This has eggs. Clearly not the same.
Haggis contains oats… and whatever else happens to be scraped up off the floor of the butcher’s shop.
*narrows gaze, cracks open a wee heavy and contemplates giving Bobarian the ‘Glaswegian Kiss’*
What’s with all the foreign foods? This is a libertarian site. You should be teaching me how to hunt and cook squirrel or the most dangerous game (while not getting caught).
Squirrel isn’t the most dangerous game. The most dangerous game is mourning doves.
This is what it sounds like when doves fry?
I thought it was dangerous because of the prion disorders.
Prions are the scariest shit ever. Not just because of their deadliness. (And their incidence, so far, is blessedly nothing to be paranoid about.) But because of their durability, and in particular the unholy *manner* of their durability. You cannot kill them with sterilization because THEY ARE NOT EVEN ALIVE. That is some straight-up fiction shit right there. I remember how unsettled I was as a little kid when I heard that viruses were not, technically speaking, fully alive, in a way as much machine as they are creature. But this shit just takes that creepiness to a whole new level entirely.
It’s also pretty scary that you could get them today, experience no symptoms for 20 years, then all of a sudden, your brain gets eaten away until it looks like an old rotten dish sponge.
It’s not the squirrel that’s dangerous. It’s when moose comes looking for revenge.
“Hey Rocky, watch me pull a revenge murder out of my hat!”
We need to learn foreign cuisine should the progs take complete control and we have to flee.
You can go to Romania. The rest of us will just conquer the heathens in Canada and impose our cuisine there.
Step 1: Go to Romania
Step 2: Drink all the wine
That’s enough of a plan for me!
Need a good project officer to help with that plan?
I could use a second!
I have never eaten anything that was encased in an animals stomach. Is it similar to sausage casings? I would imagine a stomach is more substantial than an intestine.
This is how I’m use to eating stomach.
http://www.clovegarden.com/recipes/amm_caucau1.html
It is meaty and slightly chewy.
Whit, ye pure techt tae teel me ‘at yoo’ve ne’er eaten haggis? what’s wrang wi’ ye?
what’s wrang wi’ ye?
Lots, none of has to do with availability of haggis in my market.
Anyone who is anyone seems to laugh derisively at the idea that American-legal “haggis” could ever be the real thing. Is this mere senseless ontological snobbery, or is the omission of ground-up lung (a rather substantial portion of the mix, to be sure) actually something you can taste?
Am I gonna have to pull down the mid-century Romanian cookbook my friend from Baia Mare gave me?
… Yes.
*holds hand over mouth*
er, no thanks.
That bread looks amazing. As for the rest, well, holiday tradition has always been a great way to get people to happily eat stuff they normally wouldn’t be overly excited about.
Damn it. I knew I forgot to do something this Easter. I was going to do a braided rich bread a la tsoureki
Except here in America, where we ate nothing but ham, mashed potatoes, and sautéed carrots, followed by pie. ‘MURICA!
Rumex patientia, which I don’t know how to properly say in English
In English it is called patience dock, or monks rhubarb.
I am extremely disappointed there wasn’t a single “Dracula” joke made anywhere here.
Or Viggo from ghost busters 2.
The Scourge of Carpathia, the Sorrow of Moldavia
Hell yeah, egg smashing is the best part of Easter! There can be only one Hardest Egg!
Nice trick is to make a basket of painted eggs for the kids but have one raw egg among all the hard-boiled ones.
Peasants do not belong on the lawn.
Oh! Pheasants! They do not belong on the lawn either. They belong in the oven.
Sounds like a very interesting menu Pie. Thank you. By the way, around here brains (sheep or pig) are mostly eaten whipped into eggs and then fried. this makes them a lot more palatable. It is really just scrambled eggs. The exception is the common practice of eating squirrel brains whole.
My grandfather ate hog brains and eggs and gravy at least once a week.
He wasn’t a pleasant man, to say the least, so I found that a fitting meal for him
Could be worse. In the first episode ever of the Dukes of Hazzard, Boss Hogg is shown eating his favorite breakfast of raw liver. Sorrell Booke, being a method actor, actually ate raw liver in that scene. No, you can’t ask me why the fuck I know this.
Fun fact: Sorrell Booke had an MA in fine arts from Yale and was a Navy counterintelligence officer who spoke five languages fluently.
YOND shall teachest those Duke knaves!
Rather enlightened of you to exclude the *peasants* from the oven, my good libertarian friend. I do agree they can be rather gamey.
*Pretends to take a bite of Romanian “food”*
Mmm man that is sure is delicious. So stuffed I can’t take another bite!
The walnut bread looks good, at least
I’m not a certified Derpetologist and I don’t even play one on TV, but I stumbled across this exercise in delusion in defending socialism against the stain of Venezuela. What’s interesting to me here isn’t the standard variety denials that failed socialist state is in fact socialist, but the fact that these people claim to know what the words they are using mean when they are in blatant contradiction of one another (along with the basic definitions used by, well, every academic from Marx to the present). These fuckers don’t know what socialism is, but desperately want to force it upon the rest of us. They’re Marxists who have never read Marx let alone what came after. Their entire worldview is predicated on naval gazing articles on Salon.
I suspect there’s a strong overlap here with the cunts running around pretending to be ‘antifa.’
Interesting footnote =
2 things that i’ve noticed have been changed in the past 12 months
1 – the Wikipedia entry for “Bigotry” (now directs to ‘prejudice’)
2 – the Wikepedia entry for “Socialism”
Both were previously more narrowly-defined and specific
e.g. – ‘Bigotry’ was introduced first by describing the etymology of the word and its historical origins, and clearly defining it as “intolerance of ideas other than one’s own” – a rejection of pluralism –
Basically, it downplayed the nature of bigotry as being especially about ‘race’, and emphasized its essential ‘intolerance’, unwillingness to consider alternatives.
re: Socialism… it was similar – noting that it historically required very specific structural economic conditions, and not just “Any kind of risk-sharing”, whereby one can pretend that Co-operative enterprise is “socialistic” (adjective). Basically, it rejected the soft-forms, and emphasized the hard “noun” of Socialism as something very historically specific, and grounded in Marxism.
Both are now completely revised, where they emphasize that both ideas are “Wide ranging” and include a spectrum of definitions.
Of course, wikipedia is always changing and evolving, and its possible that this is all just coincidental. But its also notable that was constantly seeing people being directed to the Wiki entries on BOTH topics in response to accusations about “Trump’s bigotry” or claims made about the socialism of Sweden, or other SJW bugbears.
My suspicion, of course, is that rather than improve their arguments, they just ‘changed the dictionary’.
Socialism is wide ranging. But what isn’t wide ranging is that it requires the state to own the means of production.
Which means socialism is a continuum, depending on how much the state owns/controls (controlling the means of production is a mild form of ownership, just like zoning).
Kids these days think a potluck-dinner is “Socialist”
Not just the kids, I have been hearing that kind of shit for 30 years.
I have heard people call the NFL socialist because of the way they share TV money and etc.
Its like they have never heard the word “cartel”.
Who was the old semi-troll on that other site that always claimed HOAs were a form of government?
Never mind, DanT, I remembered while typing.
Actually HOA’s are a form of con; a system setup specifically for bribery, graft and extortion.
*scratches head*
In a word – socialism
Everyone brings chips, but there is no meat to be found.
The host provides the meat and organizes the sides to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Doesn’t everyone know this?
At a normal one, yes. You bring a bunch of “socialists” together and then you’ll be asking.
I dunno. Wouldn’t that have been considered broadly socialist before explicitly Marxist socialism sucked all the air out of the room?
I guess we’d call it communitarian now though.
My definition came (to me) from Mises Socialism. It was published in 1922. So we have been working with this definition for AT LEAST 95 years.
AT LEAST 95 years.
K. that’s still after Marx’s definition sucked all the air out of the room, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Its long enough for no one alive to be using the term wrong.
Ah yes, the first definition of any word when ranked by order of popularity is the only correct one, all of the rest are the “wrong term” how silly of me to forget that we had an Académie Anglais to enforce everyone using robc’s preferred definition consistently.
The concept that prejudice =/= bigotry/racism has been a pet peeve of mine forever, particularly when I hear “all white people are at least somewhat racist”. Bigotry and racism are a type of prejudice, but they are hardly all-inclusive. Everyone harbors some form of prejudice, because at its core prejudice simple means stereotyping.
but they are hardly all-inclusive
If they were all-inclusive they wouldn’t be prejudices, now would they?
Well, let me check my notes…….
*rifles furiously though the filing cabinet*
Yes, I believe you’re correct!
“Both were previously more narrowly-defined and specific”
“rather than improve their arguments, they just ‘changed the dictionary’.”
“I never said ‘global warming’, I said ‘climate change’.”
Whenever a bullshit artist gets called on their bullshit the bullshit always evolves, usually incrementally, into unverifiable, unfalsifiable ethereal shadow. It’s science dude.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6e/15/93/6e1593d8c0744cced085c4502a9be969.gif
I would wreck this entire meal
Right?!? I love lamb. I did a Bedouin leg of lamb on the grill that still makes me drool when I think of it.
OT: Mask slippage
This guy is a Democratic politician in NYC
It’s right there in his bio
Half of his tweets are headlined [GREEDY JEWISH LANDLORD]
its true, jews own a lot of real estate in NY. and guess what? the reason they have such a stranglehold is because of scumbag politicians just like this guy
most people don’t like investing in real-estate in the ghetto – the people who do tend to want favors and guarantees and regulations which help reduce their risk-exposure.
this guy knows uptown property is going to be a goldmine as soon as the whole brooklyn expansion gets played out. and he wants to get his fangs into it ASAP.
There’s also this, from an article about him (that he actually links to on his feed, so apparently he’s proud of it) about an earlier run for council that he dropped out of:
And unsurprisingly, he’s a real estate agent
This is exactly what i’m saying.
He’s basically trying to use race-politics to justify some kind of real-estate re-appropriation scheme. e.g. allow “black investors” to buy these properties at city-govt-subsized rates. Or something like that. I assure you, at the root of the jew-baiting gibberish is just some desperate attempt to try and get *exactly the same kind of crony-favors he thinks jews get*
NYC politics at the street level is some seriously ugly scumbag shit that makes the mafia blush.
Hypothetical:
What areas would explode if (yeah, crazy talk) NYC got rid of rent control? Where would all the new lower income housing be being built? What areas would boom in value?
Anyplace where pre-war walkups still predominate within 3-5 blocks of a subway station.
He’s also a fucking lunatic. Look at that shit. Modern social media, having been nursed on bedtime spook stories of MySpace, formats everything tightly enough to make everyone look superficially normal and keep the freak flags nice and furled. But you only need five seconds on a *personal* site for a clinical-standard DSM-IV diagnosis. This dude is about three years’ prognosis away from the Time Cube.
Anyone can fancy themself a politician, and the profession is a magnet for the disturbed in any party, “mainstream” or otherwise.
I have always loved how the Romanians are very, very Eastern Christians but speak an **extremely** Romance language. (It sounds almost Italian.) Just a pocket of Latin isolated way the fuck out there after the Slavs moved south through the Balkans.
Since orthography tends to track religious rather than linguistic lineage (for obvious historical reasons), for centuries Romanian was, opposite to Polish, a Romance language written in Slavonic characters! That changed some time ago in Romania (and more recently in Moldova, save for the full-on neo-Soviet breakaway sliver on the East). It also has recently changed (in practical terms) for Orthodox speakers of Serbo-Croat–in Montenegro and, shockingly enough, in Serbia itself. (In Bosnia Latin vs. Cyrillic road signs are matters of life or death, but apparently in Serbia people will merrily compose their “Death to America” screeds in elegant Latinica.)
Latin Christians have slowly abandoned the veganesque Lenten fast since the Middle Ages. Despite New Orleans’s love of Fat Tuesday, the Americas were **always** exempted out of accommodation for our hardscrabble frontier existence, and by the early Twentieth Century the rest of the world had all but caught up. I don’t quite know what Easterners, always far more zealous Lenters than we, do nowadays. But I wish them a Blessed Easter on this rare year that both East and West coincide.
I remember PJ O’Rourke observing from his travels to the Balkans in the 1990s – the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians are all pretty much the same people, killing each other over religions they largely don’t even practice anymore.
Recommended reading = The Bridge on the Drina
probably one of the best books of the 20th century
While it’s really good (and so are the rest of his works), the single best reading is probably Black Lamb, Grey Falcon.
Somethings along the lines of they are fighting over whether to not attend mass, church, or mosque. He worded it better.
Rachel Maddow knows who is the ultimate culprit in Venezuela.
Wow.
Trump is in the pocket of Caracas! Did you know they produce billions of barrels of fossil fuels every year and do not even have same-sex marriage?
Maduro interfered in our election!
I just….
Can’t even…
I was wrong all along. Now that I see true insanity I am pretty sure Alex Jones is sane.
That feast sounds delicious.