When my country finally makes it into the EU, it will be one of the smallest members of the club – and one whose national identity is strong, shaped by the upheavals of its history. A former Soviet republic, Moldova has been independent since 1991, but we are still living in Russia’s menacing shadow, especially since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
To figure out where Moldova’s national resilience resides, you could do worse than sit down over Christmas with a bowl of hearty red borscht with pork belly and sauerkraut (in the north) or sparrow fricassee (a specialty of the south) and a plate of domcă (festive brioche with walnut) or plachie (rice pudding) for dessert.
Moldovan food is a source of immense national pride. With its mămăliga (polenta), stews, aspic, cheese or pumpkin pies and sour cherry dumplings, it is a regional variety of Romanian cuisine and reflects our shared cultural heritage. The story doesn’t end there: Moldova (including the half that is part of Romania today) and Wallachia (a region of Romania) were both vassal states of the Ottoman empire between the 15th and the 19th centuries, so our cuisines are deeply influenced by Turkish food.
I only learned this by moving to London from Chișinău in 2012. In my first months in the UK, I browsed farmers’ markets in search of white cow’s or ewe’s cheeses, the kind my grandmother makes by leaving the milk to curdle, collecting the cream two or three days later, skimming it, boiling the curdled milk and then placing the cheese in a strainer (which in Grandma’s case is a flower-patterned headscarf) above a bucket into which the whey gets drained. I thought the whole world made this kind of cheese. Little did I know.
I found it years later, in a Turkish shop in Dalston, east London, where I suddenly had the revelation: I am Ottoman. The thought was confirmed once again when I went to have a traditional meal cooked by my Iraqi Kurdish friend’s mother, expecting something I’d never encountered before, only to discover that their dolma (stuffed vine leaves) is a bigger version of what we, Romanians and Moldovans, call sarmale or găluște.
Moldova’s kitchen staples also tell the stories of the country’s minorities: Ukrainian garlic bread, balabuște, the forshmak or hummus of the Jewish minority, the pies called gözleme from the Turkic Christian people of Gagauzia, in the south; chicken or cheese kasha from the Bulgarian tradition, or the Russian cold soup okroshka (also claimed by Ukrainians), and so on.
Many of our cookbooks, and some restaurant menus, feature the Russian dishes – such as Olivier (potato) or shuba (herring and beetroot) salads – that still populate new year tables to this day.
But not Angela Brașoveanu’s. My mother grew up on her mother’s and grandmother’s traditional cooking. So when she set out this year to document Moldova’s food identity, she travelled the length and breadth of the country in search of recipes that predated the Soviet influence and which are in danger of dying out.
She captured the precious knowledge of a generation of grandmothers, probably the last who will voluntarily spend hours over their wood ovens and have every ingredient they need in their own gardens and homes.
Food evokes some of the darkest collective memories from the Soviet era, including the state-engineered famine of 1946-47. Following an arid summer and the disruption of war, officials broke into peasants’ homes and collected any reserves they had, supposedly to distribute to workers in the towns.But sacks of grain were found decaying in railway stations, never reaching the towns. Peasants, with their attachment to land and conservative values, were considered a counter-revolutionary class.
My grandfather, then a child, lost three of his siblings and his father in the famine. Both my mother and Larisa Turea, who interviewed survivors for a book on the famine, found people with recollections of boiling their traditional leather shoes, opinci, to make soup out of them. “It’s the cow that saved us,” my grandma would say of that horrific time.
Like most rural village Moldovans, my grandma continued during the Soviet and post-Soviet era to raise chickens, turkeys, sheep and a cow for eggs, milk, cheese or meat, and to grow fruit and vegetables in her garden, while working full-time as a teacher.
In the 1970s and 80s, the shop shelves had little more than tomato paste, birch tree juice, halva and blue chickens with their feathers and beaks on. “If they brought out bread, immediately a queue of a hundred people would form,” my mother said. So, when she went to university in the 1980s, she relied on parcels from her mother, to be shared with roommates and friends. Then they’d wait for the next person’s provisions to arrive from home.
Food remained such a key part of Moldovan identity that in 1990 hundreds of thousands gathered in the centre of Chișinău chanting for independence and “Mircea Snegur for president!” Snegur, who became the independent nation’s first president the following year, was a newly elected secretary of the Supreme Soviet. But unlike figures usually sent from Moscow, with names such as Ivan Ivanich, he was Moldovan and ethnic Romanian. The Moldovan journalist Alina Radu recalled when he died this year: “His mother lived in a Floresti village and made pickles and cozonaci [sweet Easter or Christmas bread]; he was like us, people from the Moldovan villages … with our language, our script, our names and our own identities.”
Even after independence, the city families’ reliance on their relatives’ food grown in the countryside continued through the poverty-stricken 90s with the decade’s dodgy privatisations that overnight left millions without any savings or investments. Some in the cities even raised their own rabbits or chickens on balconies. I was born in that period.
As a child, I remember how my mother began to embrace the new-found openness; she would cook Chinese or French recipes – dishes that had been inaccessible to her until then – in our one-bedroom flat in a Soviet-era Khrushchevka (block of apartments). It was only after exploring world cuisines that my mother turned back to traditional Moldovan food. Her book was her way of ensuring that recipes will live on: even those that are known only to certain villages, such as scarlet elf cup mushrooms with eggs or mussel stews.
If the traditional food of Moldova was once a necessity, today it has become the luxury that Moldovan migrants crave. During my 10 years in London, I enthusiastically received my mother’s homemade jams, walnuts from my parents’ garden or my grandpa’s wines from home, as well as Moldovan boutique wines or locally produced prunes in chocolate.
I once witnessed a man trying to take a three-litre jar of jumere – the meat, skin and lard resulting from melting pork fat, often eaten with eggs and mămăliga – in his hand luggage at Chișinău airport. Some of my friends in the diaspora always pack seasonal apricots and peaches in their suitcases when they leave Moldova during the summer.
Stuck in London during the pandemic, I relied on family recipes to make lamb soup, nettle borscht and milina from Moldova’s Bulgarian minority. Moldovan cuisine is meat-heavy, but the juicy fruits and vegetables that once went to Russia and are now mainly exported to the EU make for delicious vegetarian options such as cabbage pies, aubergine stews, potatoes with dandelion and parsley or quince-stuffed vine leaves.
When a vegan friend – with Jewish Moldovan roots – came to visit me from the UK, I took her to my grandmother’s, wondering how I could help bridge the cultural gap and get my granny to accept my friend’s diet. It wasn’t that hard. In Orthodox Christianity, fasting means avoiding meat or dairy on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent, and on other religious holidays. I told my grandma: “Look, you fast half of the year, whereas Lauren fasts all the time.” My granny watched my friend in awe at her self-discipline. It worked.
As my mother says: “Politics divides, good food and wine unite. In the kitchen, we are all one – we adopt, adapt, and we look the other way.”
Paula Erizanu is a Moldovan journalist and writer based in Chișinău
