Romanian Cuisine

Romanian cuisine is the traditional cooking of Romania, shaped by the country's varied geography, pastoral traditions and agricultural heritage, and blending dishes developed locally with influences absorbed through Roman legacy, Balkan tradition, Central European contact, Ottoman rule and French taste. The cuisine is closely tied to Eastern Orthodox religious observance, with many dishes arranged around the seasonal calendar of fasts and feasts, and it emphasizes vegetables, cereals, fruit, honey, milk and dairy products alongside meat and game, with pork the dominant protein. A signature category is ciorba, a broad family of sour soups soured with lemon juice, sauerkraut brine, vinegar or fermented bran, complemented by tuica, a strong plum brandy. Mamaliga, a cornmeal polenta served as a side dish or a foundation for other preparations, stuffed vegetables such as ardei umpluti and sarmale, and a range of cheeses round out a table where maize and potatoes, introduced from the Americas, became central staples by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.