Lard and roux (“rantas” in Romanian) are also largely used for preparing main meals. “Rantas” is obtained from stewed onion which is then fried with some flour in a sauce pan. Transylvanians cooks would use traditionally white dressing but sometimes they are not afraid to make use of red ones, with lots of paprika! You should not be surprised if you taste a salad and it is a bit sweet – it is common in this region to add some sugar to salads and dressings.

Cabbage à la Cluj is a dish as famous as the sarmale or the Oltenian sausages. Chopped cabbage (actually it has to be sauerkraut) is mixed up with minced meat and rice in a pan and baked in the oven, when ready it is served with sour cream and it is indeed very tasty. If you go to a local restaurant and want to order a portion of sarmale you should be careful how many of them you order: Transylvanian sarmale are giant and it can easily happen that 2 or 3 of them weigh the same as 8 – 9 Moldavian ones! But Transylvanian meals would always end with a cake or something sweet picked up from an impressive list of desserts.

There are many types of fruit and cheese pies, cozonaci (panettone), langosi and gogosi (different kinds of doughnuts), pancakes and the delicious “gomboti cu prune ” ( a kind of dumplings made of potatoes, eggs and flour, filled with plums and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar and “pesmet” – a kind of crushed dried bread).

Author: Irina Petre

Pages: Page 1 Page 2

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