Eating lessons from a mother goddess
Part 4- Final notes from a journey to Romania
Elena’s food was some of the best I’ve eaten. Hearty, flavourful, simple. Never more than a handful of ingredients. She was a big woman. Big, like the flavours in her cooking. Stout, full bellied, thick thighed. She had the figure of a mother goddess. A shape that us women have been carving into stone for centuries.
The Spanish would say Elena had ‘duende’: a heightened state of emotion, expression & authenticity. This could all be tasted in her cooking. Cooking for Elena meant more than feeding. In the same way flamenco means far more than dancing. Cooking was a means of expression, a way to communicate something beyond words. Eating Elena’s food invoked a similar feeling to being lost in an ancient myth. There was a sense of entanglement, a communing with the past. The worlds she created through flavour offered a connection to the culture & people of Maramures. Her food offered nuances & subtleties that words would only reduce. Eating Elena’s food deepened my understanding of Breb.
Elena’s food spoke of the land. We gobbled foraged mushrooms & fresh from the garden vegetables. We ate pickled & fermented delicacies from last years harvest & enjoyed cheese & butter that had been hand churned by Elena & her sister in law, so fresh you could taste the grass the goats had eaten. With these flavours came a heightened awareness of the rituals of food, the stories, the intimacy between humans, place & seasons. The cycles of foraging, pickling, preserving, tending, kneading & baking follow the moon through these seasons. What I ate in June will not be eaten in November & so on.
Foraging is something I’ve practiced for many years now. My belly is well accustomed to the delights of wild microbes. These thoughts & observations aren’t coming from the novelty of eating foraged mushrooms for the first time. Rather, Elena’s cooking made tangible the beauty of how relationships are transferred: food has the capacity to communicate intricate, trans-contextual relationships without the need of words. Eating Elena’s food became a way of observing multiple descriptions of relationships & contexts across time. The cheese told the story of the grass, the grass told the story of the soil, the soil told the story of the onions, garlic & cabbages, the pickles told the story of the harvest, the harvest told the story of the tending, the tending told the story of Elena’s hands.
Being in a new place, a place where the customs & traditions aren’t known to me exemplified my experience of eating. My mouth savoured the nuances of these flavours & relationships. I absorbed my surroundings & digested my perceptions through a curiosity I can often neglect at home. I felt a heightened sense of connection to this Romanian village because of the flavour, smells, appearance, textures & nourishment Elena’s garden offered us. This experience of connectedness to a new culture was bound up with the dislocation between land & plate in my own. The village I am from has one of the highest rates of poverty in the UK. Many families rely on food banks to feed themselves & their families, a phenomenon which is growing across England as energy prices soar & wages decrease.
“New research by the Independent Food Aid Network (Ifan) found that almost 90% of food banks surveyed reported increased demand in December 2022 and January 2023 compared with a year earlier…Food inflation is at 16.7% and the cost of gas is nearly 130% higher than a year ago. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast in November that households’ disposable income would fall by 4.3% in 2022-23, the largest drop since comparable records began in 1956.”(Myranda Bryant, Guardian 2023)
Participating in a ritual of eating & cooking that has been passed between mother & daughter for centuries felt like a luxury in this climate. The experience was steeped in tradition & traditional living, right down to the hand painted ceramics we ate our meals in.
Elena & Jonuts’ home was a far cry from the food culture I was raised within. I am the daughter of a single mother who had two jobs, three children under five & a home to pay for. There was no time or emotional energy to cook a home grown meal from scratch after a full day at work. Meal times were occupied with feeding hungry children quickly, they weren’t concerned with the rituals of tradition & the alchemy of cooking. Despite the toil of my mother, the absence of these relationships has characterised the interests I’ve developed through my adult life.
Food isn’t just nutrients. It’s relationships. It’s the possibility of new relationships, new connections, new experiences, sharing moments with people you love, stories, making memories, understanding the land, living in rhythm with the seasons. The excitement of foraging wild greens, berries & mushrooms, the sound & smell of freshly baked bread, the joy of sinking teeth into homemade stew & dumplings, they cultivate a feeling of intimacy with my humanness, they nurture the bond between me, the world & the beings that live within it. When I’m participating with land & food in this way I feel I am able to scratch a deep & often unreachable itch. An itch that grows ever more irritable in a world where food is more commonly gathered from a screen & eaten in front of one.
The food I eat carries with it an un-named grief. It expresses a culture that does not have space, land or time. It points towards a violent history of land enclosures and the collapse of the commons; the experience of witnessing families compromise their nutrition because they have to choose between a warm house or an empty belly. A cycle is broken when I cannot tend to the food I eat. When I cannot nurture it from seed to plate, I feel an absence, a longing for something more. There is a fundamental quality of aliveness lost, a deep learning of what it means to be in relationship with land. I find that there’s an element of being human that remains unperceivable while ever I am buying my groceries from a supermarket. When this cycle is broken, significant relationships are neglected, abandoned. I am left grasping at the wind for the pappus of Dandelions, blowing wishes into the ether.
I say this whilst recognising the luxury & privilege of convenience. How many of the Irish might have survived the famine if they had means to source other food? I know to speak in this way is to romanticise a life on the land, it glamourises the growing of my own vegetables while I have the opportunity to get good quality organic veg brought to my door. My sentimentality towards this life is one that is bias & part fantasy. I see that having a choice significantly dilutes the intensive labour & challenge of having to feed myself. Having a choice is fundamentally different to not having one.
And still, I am saddened by the absence of the vegetables in my garden, the despairing lawns, the allotment waiting lists, the un-used land that could feed hungry communities. I am saddened by the severed & lost relationships. The broken traditions, the handwritten recipes my grandma never gave me. The nights my family didn’t sit around the table to eat a home cooked meal. Food is something that reaches far deeper than politics. It is deeply personal.
When we left Elena’s, we left with a belly full of Romanian pastries, a bag full of delicacies & a hug that felt the way her freshly baked bread tasted. In that hug I felt as though my interior landscape had been kneaded, the slough of her hands had rubbed off on parts of me. I felt full with a humbled appreciation, a desire to break bread with those I love & to cook for those people far more frequently than I do. Elena gave us a big smile & a promise; she would share with me the recipes of my favourite meals.
It goes without saying that I’m not going to share her recipes on here, to do so would invite the gobbling eyes of the internet into a tradition that is centuries old. Instead, I’ll share versions of her recipes so you can taste some of Elena’s love & the flavours of Maramures for yourself.
For Elena, share these with the people you love & smile.
x
Recipes
Salt Brined Pickled Chilli
Salt brine pickling is ridiculously easy but since the process involves a “good” bacteria activity, the hygiene is crucial to avoid “bad” bacteria. Make sure the jars are absolutely clean, wash well the vegetables (also the garlic!) and remember that during the fermenting process all the chillies have to be thoroughly covered by the brine. Of course they will have the tendency to float, so use a cup or a saucer (also clean) or anything heavy and clean to maintain them under the brine.
I have no idea why but the best salt for pickling is supposed to be grey rock salt. I’m sure any other type of salt will be ok, but if you have a choice, try grey rock salt.
If white ‘skin’ appears on the surface of the brine, throw them away. It means something goes wrong with fermentation (air access, products not clean enough, fermentation temperature too high, etc.).
Ingredients
Preparation: 30 minutes + four days up to one week + 15-20 minutes
1/2 kg chilli peppers
1 litre water
30 g salt
5-10 whole garlic cloves, peeled
Method
Wash the garlic cloves and the chillies. If you intend to pickle whole chillies, leave them as they are. If you want smaller, ready-to-eat pieces, remove the stems and cut up the chillies into bite-sized pieces, removing as many seeds as possible (unless you want to increase the heat level).
Put the chillies and the garlic cloves into one or several clean jars.
Bring the water and salt brine to a boil.
When the brine is still warm, but no longer hot, pour over the chilli peppers, leaving about 2,5 – 3 cm (about 1 inch) empty at the top of the jar.
The chillies will have a tendency to float, so place a smaller teacup or cup into each jar (the size should be big enough to keep the chillies covered in the brine, but of course it shouldn’t drown). Make sure the brine doesn’t overflow once the teacup/cup or another object is placed to keep the chillies covered in brine.
Close the jars (not too hard, so that you can remove the lid easily).
Place the jars at room temperature, covered loosely with a lid (but don’t close them completely!).
Wait at least a couple of weeks before opening the jars. As do most pickles, this one improves with time.
Placinte
(Romanian Cheese Pies)
Ingredients
500 g/ 1.1 lbs/ 4 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 sachet instant dry yeast
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
250 ml/ 8.4 fl.oz/ 1 cup lukewarm water
350 g/ 12.3 oz feta cheese preferably sheep's feta
3 green onions
1 small bunch dill
fine sea salt and pepper
a little oil for frying
Method
Yeast Dough:
In a large bowl mix together the flour, yeast, sugar, and salt.
Slowly start adding the lukewarm water, mixing with a spoon until the flour is incorporated. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes or until it stops sticking too much to the walls of the bowl, flouring your hands from time to time if necessary.
Cover the bowl with a kitchen cloth and let rise in a warm place for about 1 hour or until doubled in size.
Alternatively, you can prepare the yeast dough in a food processor using the appropriate kneading accessories. I knead this kind of dough for about 3-4 minutes in the stand mixer.
Filling:
Crumble the feta cheese finely, but don't turn it to a paste, it is enough if you use a fork to crumble it.
Chop the scallions and the dill very finely.
Mix everything together and adjust the taste with salt and pepper.
Shape the pies:
Knead the risen dough very shortly to bring it in shape again. Divide it into 10 parts and form 10 balls. Roll each ball into a thin circle.
I did not require extra flour for rolling but do sprinkle the working surface and the rolling pin very lightly with flour if the dough starts to stick.
Place some filling in the middle of the circle and form a pocket by bringing together all the sides of the circle and pressing lightly to seal the pocket.
Roll the pocket again to make it flat. (See pictures above)
Place the pies on a piece of baking paper and let rest for 10 minutes.
Fry:
Heat a large non-stick pan. Brush it or spray it with a little oil and fry the pies about 2-3 minutes on each side.
You will have to work in two or three batches. Keep the finished pies warm in the lightly heated oven. Serve immediately.