A lot of fast days – our country main religion is Orthodox Christianity and because countrymen were very religious people they used to keep a lot of fast days over the year. The longest fast period is before Easter – 40 days of meals without any kind of meat, eggs or dairy products, by sympathy with Jesus’ 40 days of so called black fast (no food at all) in desert – but there are a lot of other shorter fast periods plus every Wednesday and Friday during the week.

As you can imagine there are a lot of dishes for fast periods and some of them are really delicious.

Rich, heavy meals – yes, indeed one might think Romanians eat like medieval people but there are reasons for these substantial dishes. Like in most other upland regions people had fat heavy meals in order to provide them with energy for cold weather and hard work. Farmers all over the country needed rich meals after long hours of sweaty labour on the field. Boyars and noblemen threw large feasts and it was always important to have as many and varied dishes on the table as possible.
Christmas and New Year banquets – this is the biggest religious festival over the year and in winter times pigs and their meat are the stars in the Romanian cuisine. Why? Because of something that might seem cruel to a lot of foreigners – it still seems cruel to some native city people – but it is part of our folk traditions.

On the 20th of December – day called “Ignat” – pigs in the farmers households are being sacrificed (they are slaughtered having their throat cut) so their organs and meat can be used for various Christmas dishes. Despite some EU rules calling for any pig slaughtered on the farm to be stunned before its throat is cut it is not clear to me that backyard throat slitting – even without stunning – is less humane than sending the pigs packed in trucks to big slaughterhouses, something one can see on roads across other EU states.

Here are some special Christmas dishes, which can be easily found all over the country:

• Carnati – pork based sausages
• Caltabosi – a special type of sausages made from heart, liver, lungs and meat
• Piftie – pork based jelly (aspic) made of pork and leftover organs (such as ears or snouts), garlic and sometimes vegetables like carrots, string beans
• Toba – various cuttings of pork, liver boiled, diced and "packed" in pork stomach like a salami
• Sarmale – rolls of cabbage pickled in brine and filled with minced meat, rice and various spices and herbs. They can be served with sour cream and/or polenta. These are probably the most well known Romanian dish, although similar things can be found in Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovenian, Turkish or Syrian cuisine.
• Cozonac – a special type of pannetone filled with a walnut squash and/or cocoa, raisins, Turkish delight or with poppy squash (poppy seeds dried, smashed and boiled with sugar and milk).

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