A marginally disappointing purchase

"With stunning location and food photography throughout, Danube is your passport to a world of flavours, stories and traditions that will leave you hungry for more."

So says the publisher's blurb on the back of this book which I purchased a week ago after having read various booksellers and foodies praising it to the skies recently. After all I know little about the food of the Danube - or rather 'the diverse cultures of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria in those border regions shaped by the Danube" as the publisher's say.

Don't trust a book by its cover they also say, which is partially, but not entirely true in this case. The cover design does indeed reflect the overall design of the book - a sort of folksy, and yes, Eastern European vibe. Well the front cover declares Eastern Europe and the back hints at Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria. However actually it is virtually all just Romania. And we discover this as we read the introduction from Irina Georgescu - Romanian by birth, and now living in America. I am being a bit unfair because as the book certainly points out that Romania and particularly the Danube lands of Romania is ethnically very diverse - with Turkish, Tatar and Russian traditions also playing their part. So we are exploring, for example, Romanian/Bulgarian cuisine rather than Bulgarian cuisine - which I suppose is probably a bit like Anglo-Indian or American-Italian cuisine.

But I'm being picky. It doesn't really matter does it? After all Irina Georgescu introduces each section of her book and each recipe with lengthy explanations of the traditions, and history of the peoples involved. So yes there are lots of stories and traditions, which may well leave you hungry for more information about them.

It certainly made me hungry for a map, because my geographical knowledge of this area is vague to say the least. And if mine is vague I'm sure that many others would be even more vague. To be honest, and I'm somewhat ashamed to say this, I wasn't even sure if Romania was north or south of the Danube. I think I leant towards the south - but actually it's on the north.

This is the best map that I could find to give you the general idea, but a map for the book would need to be more concentrated on the Danube valley itself and include all the regional names that she mentions.

Last quibble - the landscape photography. For a book of this prestige - at least a hoped for prestige, for the author is a previous James Beard Award winner - I think the landscape photography is poor. Two examples below comparing the book to photographs found in a quick Google search. The first is just a general landscape, I'm not sure where as the pictures are not labelled in any way, compared to a much more spectacular landscape - admittedly elsewhere but still in Romania and yet this part of the river does not get a photograph. Not quite true but its photograph is very boring. Then there is the delta - difficult I know to photograph flat waterlands, but wouldn't you pick a sunnier day and a more interesting sky - as in the photo I found in Google?

The food photography was much better and almost of all the recipes were illustrated. So let's look at the food. There were indeed some interesting and tempting dishes here. Vegetables are obviously big in this area, particularly beans of various kinds. There are very few meat recipes, more fish and some very tempting dessert dishes such as this Catif cu griș which is described in the English translation as Semolina cataif with cherry jam and pistachios. 'Cataif' being kataifi pastry. It's also very simple as it is layers of kataifi, a semolina cream, cherry jam and pistachios. It is also one of the Turkish influenced dishes in the book.

The basics of the cuisine are polenta - called mǎmǎligǎ - straight polenta made without the addition of cheese but with butter; and Pǎine la Țest - ash bread for which the leavened dough is cooked under a clay dome in the embers of a fire with the embers mounded around the domes. If you are being traditional that is. If not you cook it in the oven in a pan with a lid. But the lengthy introduction and a series of photographs does indeed describe yet another ancient and traditional way of making bread.

The next two recipes are really interesting in that even though they are traditional they are also to be found in slightly different and modern ways elsewhere. The first is the most surprising. It's called Brǎnzǎ la cuptor - translated as Bulgarian baked cheese. Now tell me this is not virtually the same as the TikTok viral sensation of baked feta with tomatoes. Apparently the Bulgarians prefer tinned tomatoes for this - half on the bottom of your dish, feta on top, the rest of the tomatoes on top of that, season and drizzle with olive oil and bake for 20 minutes.

It was a Finnish lady who started this modern craze. Did she know what the Bulgarians did with feta or did she make it up? So interesting to ponder on this is it not?

My next dish is described as combining

"our Balkan spirit with our traditional Swabian cuisine. ... Initially, it was a dish of poverty when the pastry was used to cover the pot and keep the potatoes cooking in their own steam."

It's called Pǎtutatǎ pe crumpi (Potato stew with cheese filo crust) and to my mind resembles the recent dishes flooding our cookbooks and foodie media that have a topping of cheese-filled and crumpled filo. I have seen such things everywhere from supermarket magazines to Ottolenghi cookbooks. This one is very humble with potatoes, flavoured with stock, caraway seeds and dill, topped with feta and yoghurt stuffed filo, wound around the top of the potatoes.

There is obviously a Greek, Middle-Eastern influence at play in the above, and also in the Leek and rice pie - Plǎcintǎ cu praz, below, which apparently is associated with the Macedonian and Vlach ethnic groups. Irina Georgescu makes her version with puff pastry, but yes, it is often made with filo by the locals.

And finally a strange mix of Italian and German in this plate of Wide noodles with sauerkraut, (Tǎiței cu varzǎ muratǎ) but then it comes from Transylvania which is further north and closer to the Ukraine and the also the areas once ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire - as was Romania itself. It's an interesting mix however.

I shan't be completely discarding this book and I did indeed learn quite a lot. Her introductions to each section are detailed - in marginally too small print to be easily read I have to say - dense content and dense appearance, so detailed that one's head begins to spin with the number of different ethnicities that seem to have made up the Romanian population - although no mention of the Romanies - maybe they live further north. These mini essays were really where I felt the absence of a map I have to say - a map of the wider area even as much of the information was about the various occupying peoples over the centuries, right up to recent times.

There were indeed a few recipes that I could be tempted to try and they do say that publishers are happy if you make one or two recipes (literally) from a cookbook, so maybe it can be considered a success from that point of view. If the photographs had been better I might have been tempted to visit Romania - if I was younger.

YEARS GONE BY

March 29

2024 - Is this a listicle?

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Confit - from duck to garlic and everything in between

2021 - Tzatziki

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Cheese on a stick

2017 - Champagne makes parting a sweet sorrow