Romania’s Most Famous Cookbook

“In alcătuirea acestei carti m’am condus înainte de toate de practica zilnica. Am ţinut astfel ca bunele mele tovarăşe intru gospodărie sa poată lesne inţelege si urmări pregatirea felurilor de măncari inşirate aici. Am avut incă o preocupare, aceia de a ocoli pe cât cu putinţa împestriţirea textului cu expresiuni străine, nu de ori-cine pricepute. Nu am mărit textul prin inşirarea felurilor de mâncari ce se bizuie pe material care nu se prea gaseşte la noi. In schimb am introdus cât mai multe reţete cu mâncaruri româneşti, unele regionale, dar bazate pe materialul abundent din cuprinsul ţării.”—Sanda Marin, Carte de Bucate, 1943, p. 112In this anniversary issue of Gastronomica, I celebrate one of Romania’s most known authors, Cecilia Maria Simionescu (later, after marriage, Cecilia Zapan, and with the pen name Sanda Marin). Marin’s cookbook, Carte de Bucate,3 was published in more than twelve editions4 since 1936, witnessing some of the country’s key nation-making moments in the past century. In the 1930s, the cookbook featured close to 1,500 recipes embodying the richness of ingredients and regional diversity of Romanian cuisine. Later editions, republished during Communism in the 1950s and later in the 1960s,5 documented the food scarcity experienced by Romanians. As well, the 1960s editions bear witness to the censorship of recipes that were considered too opulent and cosmopolitan for the times, such as béchamel sauce or kugelhopf cake (Bârna 2005; Ulieriu and Popescu 2018). After the fall of Communism in 1989, Marin’s cookbook continued to be published in anniversary editions, beginning in 2005, with the latest publication in 2023.Rather than focusing on the book’s transition into Communism, in this short reflection I am interested in how Romania’s culinary culture was imagined by Marin in the 1930s and 1940s before the country’s regime shift. The quote at the top of the article, from the cookbook’s Introduction, stood out to me as it emphasized Romanian cooking based on regionality and local abundance, with a stated intention to focus less on “foreign expressions,” which I interpret as the author’s trust in the strengths of her national cuisine. I had not spent much time with Sanda Marin’s cookbooks until I wrote this piece, and my experience delving into her multiple editions throughout was one of renewed curiosity about Romania’s pre-Communist culinary cultures. My encounter with her cookbook challenged me to confront my own knowledge gaps and assumptions about Romanian cooking prior to the 1940s, especially in relation to the global-ness of ingredients and recipes, which somehow beautifully conversed with rural and regional dishes.My decision to focus on the early editions of Carte de Bucate is a very intentional choice, and it coincides with my goal of broadening the curiosity about Romania’s culture beyond its history of Communism. It is also an attempt to liberate myself from many of the associations I carry within me as I navigate Romania’s post-Communism from the diaspora. It’s easy to forget that Romania had a pre-Communist past that is beautifully captured through its cookbooks. I recently picked up Jacob Mikanowski’s publication, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (2023). Right at the very start of the volume, he writes about the damaging stereotypes that circulate globally about Eastern Europe that have resulted in a general impression that Eastern Europe (where Romania is located) is a “gray place, where no one ever laughed” (Mikanowski 2023: xv). This grayness is no doubt informed by Communism, which Mikanowski calls “the glue that held [Eastern Europe] together” (Mikanowski 2023: xvi) in the imaginary of many outsiders—and of many insiders as well, since this grayness is deeply internalized in the psyche of those who survived Communism, especially those living in the diaspora, like me.In 2023, one of my mother’s friends gave me a book—it was a recently published Romanian translation of an English-language study of one of Romania’s national dishes.6 The book, that will surely be cited as a foundational source on this dish, was not written by a Romanian,7 and while I generally believe that multiple perspectives from diverse cultural positions enrich a topic, I was surprised by the author’s identity and by my own reaction to their identity. Writing a national dish into academic discourse requires a level of knowledge that benefits from lived experiences and localized memories. Four decades of Communism and the violence of censorship created a significant gap in national pride which manifested in delayed confidence in writing critically and historically about Romania’s past. While academics in non-authoritarian nations were contributing to emerging fields such as food studies, Romanian academics and writers were slowly learning to write freely and without consequence. Adding to this layer of reticence is Romanians’ relation with food memories. While good cooking took place during Communism, restrictions, rationing, and policing of people’s diets resulted in complicated and tense processes of post-Communist memory-making. I wonder if it is the grayness internalized by many Romanians living in a post-Communist world that discouraged academics and writers in the diaspora to center Romania’s food cultures in their research and to advocate for the complexities of Romania’s food culture beyond its post-1947 history.8On my desk, I currently have three cookbooks (see Figure 1)—all three are different editions of Romanian cookbook author Sanda Marin’s Carte de Bucate, from 1943, 1968, and 2005. The 1943 edition is the book’s eighth, published by Cartea Româneascǎ, Romania’s oldest publishing house, only five years before it was closed by the Communist regime. This edition is the closest in content to the first edition, published in 1936,9 including an introduction by Marin and a preface by a prominent Romanian author and publisher who further contextualized the cookbook as having a definite Romanian identity. Marin dedicated the cookbook to her fellow housewives, hoping that the recipes, advice, and encouragements would help them balance good cooking with economical choices without compromising the taste of their meals. Most importantly, Marin encouraged the cooks to take advantage of the bounty of produce, meats, and dairy available to Romanians in the 30s and 40s. The author’s own upbringing, in a family of middle-class Romanian intellectuals (her father was the director of the publishing house where the book first appeared as well as a famed academic), her education in France, her interest in culture, especially literature and music (Patrulius 2005), as well as her genuine curiosity about cooking were all translated into the structure, content, and tone of the cookbook.In the book’s “Introduction” and “Note from the Publisher,” cookbooks were identified as core educational resources for women in charge of homemaking and cooking in the Romanian context, which was praised for its richness of foods and ingredients. As well, the “Note from the Publisher” explained that many other nations had a long tradition of cookbook publishing, but Romania was lacking in this important domain, suggesting that Marin’s cookbook was intended to fill a gap. The readers also found out that the publisher, Cartea Românească, was expanding its portfolio by adding cookbooks to its roster to respond to the growth of home economics in the country and to provide ideas and resources for home cooks.10 Setting up the book as an essential educational text for all households across Romania’s regions, the publisher pointed out the inclusion of full-page colored photographs and illustrations, some depicting cooked dishes, while some were instructions for how to fold pastry dough or identify cuts of meat. Also, the book included numerous black and white graphics throughout most of its twenty-three chapters (see Figure 2). The recipe-based chapters are accompanied by several shorter articles with nutritional information and advice for a balanced diet that includes fats, carbohydrates, and vitamin-rich vegetables and fruits.11 All these nutritional requirements promoted by Marin were not intended to impede creativity or to replace taste and diversity in daily menus.While Carte de Bucate continues to be Romania’s most famous cookbook, not very much is known about its author, Sanda Marin. And even what is known is based on memories of friends and family, short journalistic accounts, and the cookbook contents themselves.12 Her niece, Ioana-Maria Isac (2005), remembers that Sanda Marin was a traditional housewife, caring for the cooking and all other household duties, while, at the same time, was invested in numerous cultural activities, entertained very important members of Romania’s intelligentsia, drove an automobile, and appeared on television in the 1950s (Isac 2005: 12). The well-known Romanian historian and intellectual Radu Anton Roman (1998) wrote that Sanda Marin’s recipes reflected what Romanians cooked with and ate at the time, the traditions, and the realities of people’s lives. This assertion makes Marin’s cookbook even more powerful in a post-Communist context where retrieval of pre-Communist memories relies on insufficient and incomplete resources. The trusted and loved cookbook is a glimpse into a past that many in the present do not have access to through other means but food memories.Sanda Marin lived in Bucharest, but her family owned a farm close to the city, where she experimented with food and entertained guests with her recipes, many of them cooked with produce and meats from the farm. Butter, for example, features prominently in many of her recipes, with an entire section dedicated to making flavored butter. In the advice sections, Sanda Marin suggested that all creamed soups should be enriched with a generous dollop of butter. Her travels to Paris and other European cities exposed her to foodways from abroad, which are infused in the cookbook without overwhelming the otherwise Romanian contents. She managed to infuse the cookbook with global inspirations without losing the focus on Romania’s cuisines. Readers found, especially in the pastry and desserts chapters, several recipes such as Baba, numerous variations for savarin, éclairs, baclava, or cataif, and French or German cooking techniques (see Figure 3). In the savory chapters, “Sauce mousseline” shared the pages with dill and sour cream sauce or “Mujdeiu de usturoi” (very finely mashed garlic mixed with warm water), two sauces that Romanians would recognize as essential to a Romanian meal. Italian ingredients such as pasta and dishes like risotto were adapted for meals that would have been familiar to Romanians. For example, macaroni and cheese baked pies or casseroles in several variations could be found in the cookbook but with Romanian cheeses and fresh farm eggs as star ingredients.Despite being a Romanian and as such familiar with some of the ingredients and dishes, this cookbook presented me with a version of my country’s culinary culture that was unknown and surprising. One of the most surprising findings for me was the richness of fish and seafood available to Romanians in the 1930s and 1940s. Fish such as turbot (calcan), pike (ştiucă), carp (crap), and seabass (biban) were consumed in soups, appetizers, stews, baked, and as fillings for stuffed tomatoes and artichokes across the country. Alongside these, other local products, such as crayfish and mussels, were incorporated in salads, pilafs, and sauces. Sardines, dried and salted (“Sardines Lissa”) imported primarily from Croatia, were popular as appetizers or in salads as was herring, deep fried for simple summer meals, accompanied by a slice of bread or mămăliga (polenta), typically slathered in garlic.Foods of my childhood share the page with dishes that I am only now aware that Romanians ate prior to the shift in political regime in the late 1940s. So much loss happened to the culinary traditions of Romania during Communism (which is a story for another article) yet the vibrancy, richness, and diversity of the meals in Carte de Bucate have reconnected many generations of Romanians with their history and heritage!