Transylvanian Food: From Fieldwork to Festivals

Post by Jada Langston

Being here for the last three weeks, I have tried an array of delicious food and drinks. To provide better context I split up this blog post into two separate food stories: an everyday food post where you will learn what we usually eat throughout the day, and a post about food we have eaten at festivals around Romania.

Lunch on site

Everyday Food:

For breakfast and lunch: We usually have a small meal of scrambled eggs or hard-boiled eggs with toast. Then, we pack the lunch cooler before we hurry to leave around 7 am. Around 12 pm at the site we all gather around the cooler to eat lunch. We mainly eat a variety of sandwiches, such as peanut butter and jelly, or ham and salami with mustard, with different fruits on the side. Because one of us is a “ham monster” (Sophia), and because there are so many of us, we go through our basic necessities very quickly. As a result, we have to go shopping almost daily for another kilo of ham, loaves of bread, eggs, and other foods.

Sophia “Ham Monster” Coren, delighted to find a ham vending machine at the Turda Salt Mines.

For dinner: We are much more creative at dinners, where each person has to make a meal for everyone to sit down and share. On a  Saturday or Sunday, everyone chooses a meal to make for the coming week and places the ingredients on a shopping list for Colin and Jess to buy. After we return from the site, one person is assigned to cook that night with a helper. Meals have ranged from shepard’s pie to chicken and dumplings. Once a week, usually on a weekend, we have a leftovers night where we try to finish the meals. In my opinion, and probably everyone else’s,  the best cook of us all is Tina Marcuti.

Langos made by Tina

She make delicious and authentic Romanian food, ranging from langoş, a fried bread that’s stuffed with goat cheese, to bean soup, gulas (a meat and vegetable soup), fasole batuta (a white bean dip) and Romanian meatballs. Tina enthusiastically cooks us food to bring to the site or a small meals to eat throughout the day. Just the other day,  she made deviled eggs that she decorated to look like small ducks.

Tina’s ducks

Festival Food:

So far, I have been two two festivals with food. The biggest one was the Alba Days Fest that lasted from June 8th to 10th. The festival was part of an annual celebration hosted by the city The occasion featured performances from prominent Romanian artists such a Smiley, Inna, and B.U.G Mafia, while also hosting a wide array of food stands throughout the fortress. There was such a variety of different options to partake in, from huge ham steaks the size of your head to a plate of small fried sardines. While I did not have the time (or the stomach space) to eat all of the food, I did try some delicious mici, chicken kebabs with fried potatoes, and fried sardines.

Food from Alba Days

The second festival was a Dacian festival in the town of Cetatea de Balta. Here, we watched re-enactments of the wars between the Roman Empire and the Dacians, which took place in the 1st and 2nd century AD. The Dacians were the people that lived in Romania before the Romans came and conquered the region. Here, we ate placinte, a crepe that can be filled with both savory and sweet concoctions such as the cheese placinte that Lana, Jess, and Colin had and the chocolate-filled placinte that Sophia and I had. The food stands also had boiled corn on the cob and small dessert treats as well.

Romanian sweets from the Dacian Festival

Overall, the food in Romania has been amazing! Thanks to Tina, all of the amazing shops, and festivals, the entire team has been eating fresh food almost daily. I am excited for what other foods are in store for me to eat.

Placinţe at Mama Luţa’s in Ampoiţa

 

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Travelling to Romania for MARBAL 2018

The MARBAL 2018 field season has started with a bang, with most crew members arriving in Alba Iulia over the last several days. We have excavations planned for June and the first week of July, followed by several weeks of outreach, research, and analysis.

This year the project has several students from Hamilton College joining us as part of their Levitt Center Summer Research Group experience. Jada, Lana, and Sophia will be posting regularly throughout the summer.  Here, they describe their experience making their way to the city of Cluj-Napoca before heading south to Alba Iulia, our home for the next two months.

The Hamilton Crew: From left to right, Jada Langston, Lana Dorr, Sophia Coren, and project Co-Director Colin Quinn. Photo credit Sophia Coren.

We arrived in Budapest on Wednesday morning. After a long and sleepless flight, we were all happy to be back on the ground. We were all scheduled to be on the same flight from Philadelphia to Budapest. However, things didn’t go as planned…

JADA
 I left from Chicago O’Hare Airport to Philadelphia to meet the crew and my flight left around 1:45 pm. Flying from Chicago to Philadelphia was peaceful even enjoyable, but the real challenge was the flight from Philly to Budapest. The only country that I have ever been to was Canada for my archaeological field school in British Columbia, so this was a huge step for me to cross the Atlantic Ocean.  When I landed in Philly, I had to rush to my flight since it was already boarding and I was on the opposite side of the airport. Then, I get there and I find that Lana’s flight is delayed and I was little worried (but you will read more about that later). However, we got on the plane, unfortunately without Lana, and took a 9-hour flight to Budapest. When I get on the plane, I was terrified because not only is this my first time flying over the Atlantic, but the plane was one of the old planes you see in movies where it crashes. Plus, I am in a middle seat with no space, I have a lady next to me who thinks I am a footrest, and people constantly bumping into my pillow. After some time passes, we finally took off and overall it was not so bad. Although I did not sleep much (only about 4 out of the 9 hours), the people next to me would not stop talking, and there was a lot of turbulence; the food was good and the movies were not bad. Eventually, we landed in Budapest, got on an 8-hour shuttle from Budapest Airport to Cluj-Napoca in Romania (trying not to fall asleep and failing miserably), and headed over to our hotel for the night.

Budapest Airport

LANA
The quick flight from Boston to Philadelphia seems like it should be the simplest leg of the long journey to a small city in Romania, but a plane with possible lightning strike related mechanical issues, thousands of pounds of extra jet fuel that need to be unloaded, and a failed temperature regulating system kept me from the original schedule of joining the rest of the team in Philadelphia. Between the chaos of being amongst a couple hundred passengers in need of rebooking, many with international connections, and the fear of losing my luggage that was now in the belly of a flightless plane, I thought I might never make it. But, after three trips through security, two airport shuttles, and one frightening moment of being alone in a foreign airport with a dying phone, my first trip across the Atlantic ocean was finally complete. Jess Beck soon found me stumbling out of customs, travel weary and desperate. She revived me with some food and water and next thing I know I’m on a seven-hour shuttle bus with a broken AC, a Las Vegas Youtuber/Motorcyclist originally from Romania, and a teeny tiny teacup yorkie. After that a quick taxi finally got us to the rest of our team making my first international travel experience stressful and imperfect, but ultimately successful.

The shuttle dog

SOPHIA
I woke up early Tuesday morning in order to get to the Asheville Regional Airport in time for my 11:15 flight to Charlotte. My parents drove me to the airport and waved goodbye as I went through security. Being a small airport with only four gates, flights from Asheville, NC are generally short and on small planes; the flight to Charlotte is just 25 minutes. Due to the short nature of these flights, most people do not attempt to sleep. However, to my surprise, the person in front of me leaned his seat all the way back. This was definitely not the most pleasant flying experience I’ve had. Thankfully, my next flight from Charlotte to Philadelphia was uneventful. My layover in Philly was quite short, so I made my way to the gate in hopes of finding the other members of my group. I was the first to arrive in Philadelphia. I texted Lana asking if she was in Philly yet, but learned that her flight had been delayed. While this was not my first transatlantic flight, I was a little nervous– there’s nothing worse than a bad seat partner on a nine-hour flight. Fortunately, this was not the case as I was seated next to a very nice woman and her husband. The plane to Budapest was an older model so there were no seatback screens or outlets. We also had a few technical difficulties with the overhead screens and lights. Before taking off, we listened to the safety video twice because the screens didn’t turn on the first time. Despite this, the flight was quite pleasant.

Cherries in Cluj. Photo credit Sophia Coren.

 

My Introduction to Romanian Food

A more area-based post this time, featuring the best thing in the world next to anthropology: food!

While here, I’ve had the opportunity to work on the MARBAL Project and also eat a lot. One of our nights was spent eating burek, a stuffed filo dough dish:

Burke brânză (with salty sheep’s cheese), burek carne (with ground meat), and burek cu spanac (with spinach)

We all shared a beef burek, a cheese one, and a spinach and cheese burek. They were all good! I think we agreed the cheese one was the best though, can’t go wrong with cheese.

Food number two that I tried was langos. Langos, fried dough topped with sour cream and sheep cheese, quickly became a huge favorite of mine. I had it three times and regret nothing.

Langos cu smântână si brânză (fried dough with sour cream and cheese)

The final night we were there, Jess, Colin, and I had kürtőskalács. Kürtőskalács is spit-cake that is made from yeast dough coated with sugar and butter before being cooked. It is sold at a stand in the center of the Cetatea Alba Carolina, which is normally easy to find because of the groups of excited children clustering around it!

Kürtőskalács, a sweet yeasted dough that is roasted on a spit.

I got a really cool picture of it cooking! Once it’s cooked it can be coated with various toppings. We had ours with cinnamon. 

Roasting the kürtőskalács

Later on I had a stew called pomona porcului that made my night. It had sausage and cubes of pork with polenta in the center. The polenta was great! We had seasoned mushrooms to share which were some of the best mushrooms I’ve ever had.

Pomona Porcului – Pork and polenta stew

It was the perfect end to the field season and helped me get through the overnight train to Budapest!