romania: March 2008 Archives

Today Barnaby went to visit the famous Bran castle in the Carpathian Mountains.  The castle was closed, so instead he found a nice local cheese farmer to talk to.

Nicu Solovastru has 300 sheep and 10 cows, which spend their summers grazing in the meadows high above the castle.  He is proud of the fact he uses 100% natural products and traditional methods.

Even the cheese moulds are natural: the smoked sheep's cheeses (caşcaval fumat), which Barnaby thought tasted not unlike Polish oscypek, are shaped in wooden moulds Nicu carves himself, and the cow's cheeses (brȃnza de burduf) are aged in either large sheepskin sacks or perfectly round calves' bladders.

Barnaby wanted to buy a bladdered cheese but Anna and Matt prefered the smoked cheese so he had to settle for that.  Domnul Solovastru has kindly invited Barnaby to come back next summer to make cheese with him in the mountains, so that will be his chance to get properly bladdered.

Barnaby was intrigued to find a natural well of salty water in Botiza, a village in the Maramureş region of Romania (where we stayed after we got stuck in the mud).  We watched as one after the other, villagers came to collect a bucket or two of salty water using the long sticks.

One man kindly invited Barnaby to his home and let him taste the water.  Ugh!  It was really salty.  It's used to preserve meat, cabbage, cucumbers and other things.  How convenient to have ready salted water on hand, thought Barnaby.

“Bunică ştie” is something you might find yourself observing on numerous occasions while spending time in the villages of Transylvania.  For every grandmother you would have the good fortune to meet would know an awful lot, about everything.  And everybody knows that granny knows (best).

She knows about looking after animals, and bringing up the grandchildren.  She knows how to milk the cows and turn the milk into butter and cheese.  She knows how to butcher the pig and turn it into bacon, ham, salami and more.  She can make ...

With hindsight, we can see that we made several less-than-perfect decisions on the day we left Săpântă to go exploring rural Maramureş in northern Romania.  

Firstly, it was not a great idea to take the cross-country back roads through the hills on the first sunny day after heavy snow, however enticing the little village names looked on the map.  Secondly, we failed to pick up on the signals when several ‘roads’ we tried disintegrated into streams/fields/forests ...

Today Barnaby happened upon this whirlpool bath while exploring the village of Săpânta in the beautiful Maramureş region of Romania. 

At first he thought it must be some kind of jacuzzi for small people like him, and he would've jumped in were it not so very cold.

Later he discovered it is in fact a vâltoare - a cunning eco-washing machine, created by tapping off a stream from the river and channelling it into a large slatted basin. 

It's used by the women of the village to wash the rugs they have woven so as to fluff the tassles and tighten the weave.  Each rug has a little coloured thread at the edge to identify its creator.  The women of Săpânta are famous for their rugs, and have been using vâltoare to finish them off for decades, if not hundreds of years.

Being fluffy enough already, Barnaby opted to buy one of the lovely rugs rather than jump in the vâltoare with them.

This weekend Barnaby was lucky enough to be staying with the Dindelegan family in Zalău, who celebrate both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters, due to a Greek Catholic connection.  This meant Barnaby got to eat delicious roast baby lamb and other yummy things expertly cooked by Ileana Dindelegan. 

But not before taking part in the Romanian custom of egg cracking...  Brightly coloured boiled eggs, traditionally red round here although painted with intricate patterns in other regions, are employed in a competitive round-the-table contest not unlike the British schoolyard game of conkers - if your egg stays intact, you win.  Barnaby turned out to be a champion egg cracker.