20 YEARS IN THE SERVICE OF ROMANIAN HERITAGE AND COMMUNITIES
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Recettes de Cuisine, Maria Cantili Golescu
Coordinator: Mona Petre
Editorial consultancy: Mirela Duculescu
Project coordination „“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments””: Andreea Machidon
Translation of the original recipes: Nona Henți, Aura Pandele, Mona Petre
Recipe texts recreated: Andrei Chelaru, Oana Coantă, Irina Georgescu, Cristina Mehedințeanu, Mara Elena Oană, Alex Petricean, Mădălina Roman, Horia Simon, Adriana Sohodoleanu, Adela Trofin
During the five days of the Heritage Caravan workshops at the Enescu House in Mihăileni together with the team of children involved we researched the subject “How do we discover and creatively tell stories about the place we live in?” We had very intense work days, but with much satisfaction at the end for both the children and the inhabitants of Mihăileni.
The first day was dedicated to establishing the clues for Mihăileni. Each of the 22 participating children from the village earned one of the Mihăileni clues, “fought” as a warm-up for the history fragments by participating in fun and sporty team games. The elements of the village were then redrawn by the children in the context of history and the future they themselves imagine.
All these elements were then put together in a DIY frame book by the children, through which they learned an ancient Japanese bookbinding technique. The creations and other complementary textiles were finally personalised with linocut stamps.
Outdoor games and board games rounded off the autumn-tempered afternoon at the Enescu house.
The second day of workshops followed the theme and resource already developed last year in the Enescu Workbook – available in the Foundation’s free resource library. The previously created “on foot” route round Mihăileni was brought to life this year with a dynamic circuit with marker posts and interactive panels at the most interesting points of the village.
The children have worked hard to create four complex panels dedicated to the past, present and future of the Enescu House, the Zahacinski Museum, the former Town Hall and the Ceramics Factory.
The other destinations of Mihăileni were thus enriched with small wooden signposts to be mounted on the site.
On the third day we received new friends. Actress Irina Artenii defied the tiring Bucharest-Mihăileni distance and came for a short but intense workshop. The children got behind the curtains and played in like young actors. The end of the games gathered all the energies in a series of mini skits with secrets they couldn’t seem to get enough of.
The shadow theatre in the second part of the workshops was not only a new and novel experience for everyone but also an opportunity to create our models for the following day’s filming.
There was much laughter and applause at the end of the four teams’ scenes.
Getting ready, editing and filming!
The most excitement was probably reserved for this day, the fourth of the educational workshops in Mihăileni. With minimal training by our friend Alin Iacob and some home-made exercises, the four team coordinators became for one day directors and responsible for editing four short films with the enthusiastic teams of child actors, already prepared the day before for the audience and the camera.
Each of the four chosen locations — the George Enescu House, the Former Town Hall, the Zahacinski Museum and the Ceramics Factory — were creatively, playfully and amusingly told from the perspective of the past, the present and the future imagined by the children themselves.
Costumes were assembled, metaphors were written, recordings of voices, music and old objects collected by the children, all to tell the story of a series of places we all want to continue living for the benefit of the community.
All the videos can be accessed online on the Pro Patrimonio Foundation’s You Tube channel as well as next to each storyboard created by the children, via an attached QR code.
MUZEUL ZAHACINSKI din Mihăileni
FABRICA DE CERMAICĂ din Mihăileni
The last and probably the most loved day of the Heritage Caravan was the day dedicated to sports and culinary competitions, exhibition of works and film evenings.
We made the tour of the 20 landmarks on the Mihăileni Map – also available online https://me-qr.com/4037478 – with the whole group of children, mounting the signposts they themselves had made.
The award ceremony was attended by parents. They too came prepared for the cooking competition. Tensions were high, as they are every year, when the votes were counted.
The film evening started with the 4 creations of the children and trainers and continued, in the spirit of the caravan, with a screening of the animated film accompanied by pizza and lots of good cheer.
The feedback notes collected urgently send us back to the community to continue our work in the future, with the children unanimously confirming that they love the proposed activities and want more. And having said that, all the fatigue gathered in preparing and organizing the camp pales when compared to the joy and fulfilment of doing things of real use to the community, in the spirit of discovery and creative transformation of tangible and intangible heritage.
None of this could have been done without the phenomenal help of the trainers and volunteers involved on time and throughout all of this year’s truly demanding activities. So special thanks:
– Ana Maria Apostoiu – for her dedication, for being with us for years and for being the fastest trainer-raiser we know
– Răzvan Bogză – for his creativity, inventiveness and integration into the team as if we had known each other all our lives
– Ruben Mardaru – for his openness, competitive spirit in all activities, hard work to make things go according to plan and continuous involvement in the management of the Enescu House
– Cosmina Manolache – for her perfect integration in the team and in the spirit of Pro Patrimonio activities, professionalism and open-mindedness
– Delia, Teona and Carmen for their punctual involvement
In order to signpost the route for discovering the town of Mihăileni, we had the agreement of the Municipality of Mihăileni. This route has been mapped and narrated since last year in the George Enescu House Notebook, available online bit.ly/3PIAoW5 and bit.ly/31OQSYA
We thank UiPath Foundation for the partnership and trust it has shown for three years in supporting educational programs and caring for the heritage object, the George Enescu House in Mihăileni.
Read also:
Worksite diary – Landscape and Art Workshop
Landscape and Sound Workshop Log
From 2 to 6 August 2022, the George Enescu House in Mihăileni, Botoșani County, will host for the third consecutive year the Heritage Caravan of the Pro Patrimonio Foundation. The theme for the five days of educational workshops is “The story of my city”.
Around 20 children from the community benefit from an intensive series of practical and creative workshops. These will be coordinated around the theme of discovering their own town and its rich cultural and natural context. The town of Mihăileni, an old border town on the Siret, will be narrated to the children through games and clues, bookbinding, linocuts, interactive panels and on-site signage, theatre workshop, shadow theatre, sketches and video montage. Learning through play is complemented, as tradition has it, by sports and cooking competitions with prizes, an exhibition and film evening that are open, limited places available, to anyone who is curious.
In order to signpost the discovery route of Mihaileni, we appreciate the agreement of Mihaileni Town Hall. This route has been mapped and described since last year in the George Enescu House Notebook, available online https://www.propatrimonio.org/caietul-casei-enescu-ghid-interactiv-de-explorare/
We thank UiPath Foundation for the partnership and trust it has shown for the last three years in supporting educational projects and the care for the heritage building, the George Enescu House in Mihăileni.
Read also:
Worksite diary – Landscape and Art Workshop
Landscape and Sound Workshop Log
On Friday 29 and Saturday 30 of July 2022, the Heritage Caravan inaugurated a new workshop location in Botoșani County. The “Cai de Vis” Pension in Vârfu Câmpului commune hosted us for two intense days of experiments related to architecture, nature and music.
20 children from the local community took part with enthusiasm and joy in sports, creative and practical games where they tested: different botanical printing techniques, Japanese bookbinding, linocutting, working with DIY tools and many sports.
During the game-lessons the children created, assisted by trainers, t-shirts and various botanically printed textiles, personalized Art Nouveau-style notebooks. They learnt how to make musical houses for five great Romanian artists: George Enescu, Dinu Lipatti, Ciprian Porumbescu, Mihail Jora and Sergiu Celibidache and even made their own handmade musical instruments: guitars, drums, rain sticks and xylophones.
Competitions enlivened the days with more excitement and surprise prizes, and the finale was crowned with an evening of film, dance and song.
The children delighted us with lots of involvement and playfulness, the host space was very suitable, so we hope to be able to add Vârfu Câmpului station to the Heritage Caravan again.
Bucharest, June 16, 2022
Pro Patrimonio Foundation is conducting a cultural, creative, interdisciplinary project in Câmpulung Muscel throughout 2022, bringing together translators and linguists, chefs and gastronomic experts, students and craftsmen, in a unique concept dedicated to the tangible and intangible heritage of the Golescu Villa. The project follows four levels: documentation, gastronomy, heritage education and craftsmanship.
The project started from the discoveries made during the pandemic in the Golescu family’s vast library, namely two recipe notebooks from around 1900 written by Maria Cantili Golescu, Vasile Golescu’s wife. At the beginning of this year, the project team started to document and creatively exploit these materials as part of the intangible heritage belonging to the house and the town of Câmpulung Muscel.
“All the hidden details of this recipe book open up a surprising universe of that period’s bourgeois class and we hope to capture it as best we can in the materials we will reveal and develop throughout the project.” – architect Andreea Machidon, coordinator of the Education for Heritage project, Pro Patrimonio Foundation
Therefore, each page of one of the two notebooks was carefully photocopied and digitised, followed by the transcription of the original recipes, their translation into Romanian and text editing so that the language becomes easy to understand for the contemporary reader. A translation of a cookbook from 1900, written in four languages and carried by the author from Paris to Bacău and Câmpulung at the beginning of the last century, thus becomes more than a simple translation. It becomes an immersion in the culinary context of an era on the borderline between old and modern and an active collaboration between translators, linguists and historians.
The gathered details reveal an unexpectedly cosmopolitan way of cooking and dining, deeply influenced by Western European culinary trends, especially French, but also English, Iberian, German and Italian. Maria Cantili Golescu belonged to a privileged social class at the time, highly educated, multilingual, widely travelled and who had had the opportunity to live in several European cities. The multiculturalism of the Golescu family, and perhaps of an entire local elite, comes through in these glimpses of everyday life suggested by the way they ate and reveals an interesting piece of Romanian gastronomic history from a decade not yet covered by other sources.
The first developed resource material is the scanned digitised notebook, “Recettes de Cuisine”, which can be found in the Foundation’s useful resource library, and will be presented along with the fully translated and reinterpreted notebook.
Maria Cantili Golescu notebook extract
At the beginning of the summer holidays, between 17-20 June, 15 children from the communities of Câmpulung Muscel will take part in three days of activities in the Golescu Villa’s courtyard. The agenda prepared will include on the first day “Plant Day in the edible garden”, then “Notebook, drawing and calligraphy day” and at the end they will go through “Art installation day” with stops in the universe of: culinary objects from the villa, portraits of Maria Cantili, “bizarre” words from manuscripts, family tree and advice from Maria Cantili Golescu.
Thus, children will build, research, interpret, create and play, being mentored by a series of expert guests who will complete the educational journey with valuable information and unique working techniques. The final evening will offer an open-air film in the Golescu Villa garden in the tradition of the Pro Patrimonio Foundation’s Heritage Education Caravan.
The children’s works and explorations will be the subject not only of an online exhibition, but especially of a physical exhibition during the “Festive Community Day” planned for the autumn, when the results of the whole project ” Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary – recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” — the culinary journal, the dedicated objects and the presentation film — will be launched and opened to the interested public.
Also part of the project, the recipes in the notebook were subjected to a selection process with the help of guest culinary experts. Each of them chose two recipes to explore and adapt, and then present them as creatively as possible to their online audience. The selection of recipes will take into account both each individual expert’s preferences and the final content of the Recipe Book, which aims to document and bring to the public’s attention a collection of recipes that is as diverse and rich as possible in terms of both taste and the story that accompanies each tasteful memory. Participants will “translate” and transform the language of the notebook notes into recipes with marked ingredients and clear steps to follow for today’s user. The materials will ultimately form Maria Cantili Golescu’s Recipe Notebook, accessible in both physical and digital formats.
Here are those we invited to bring these old recipes back to life: Andrei Chelaru (Fragment, Cluj), Oana Coantă (Bistro de l’Arte, Brasov), Irina Georgescu (author of the cookbook “Carpathia”), Cristina Mehedințeanu (Horeca Culinary School, Bucharest), Mara Oană (Viscri 32), Mona Petre (Ierburi Uitate), Alex Petricean (Noua, Bucharest), Mădălina Roman (Szikra, Sf. Gheorghe), Horia Simon (Clubul Gastronomic Transilvan), the team of Adriana Sohodoleanu and Cosmin Dragomir (Gastroart) and Adela Trofin (Slow Food Edinburgh).
Over the summer these story fragments and images will gradually be presented on the Pro Patrimonio Foundation website.
“Meringues with violets”, cake prepared by Mădălina Roman (Szikra, Sf. Gheorghe) following the original recipe from Maria Cantili Golescu’s notebook
The same culinary resources and elements of Maria Cantili Golescu’s life will also form the basis of a new Honest Goods collection dedicated to these discoveries. Children and adults alike will experience recipes and related stories throughout the project through games, competitions, challenges and hands-on projects.
The objects will be made in the spirit of the existing Honest Goods collection, using local materials and craftsmen, with designs prepared by two designers. The resulting objects will be featured on the dedicated Honest Goods object page, each of which will contain in its presentation the recipe that influenced its making.
Honest Goods collection, clay objects
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“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” is a cultural project of Pro Patrimonio Foundation co-financed by AFCN.
Media partners: Scena 9, Rock FM, Muscel TV, Zeppelin Magazine; Friend project: Ierburi Uitate
The digitized booklet, “Recettes de Cuisine”, can be found in the Foundation’s library of useful resources here
Read more
Standerul de haine cu garderoba Mariei Cantili Golescu şi alte poveşti
„Recettes de Cuisine”, caietul digitalizat
Girdle, ustensilă istorică de gătit
Zece Experimente Contemporane din Jurnalul Culinar Maria Cantili Golescu
Ansamblul Golescu. Observator de Peisaj Cultural în Câmpulung Muscel
Ansamblul Golescu. Trasee botanice în Parcul Golescu
Honest Goods. Colecţia Golescu
The heritage education component of the interdisciplinary project “Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary – recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” took place at Golescu Villa in Câmpulung Muscel during the long weekend at the beginning of the summer holidays.
The group of children was extremely active and was able to accomplish the whole three-day program of intense activities coordinated by Andreea Machidon and supported by guest trainers Răzvan Bogza, Cosmin Simion, Irina Melente and Ana Maria Apostoiu.
Friday in the children’s workshop at the Golescu Villa in Câmpulung was Plant Day in the edible garden. The children came in the morning, participated in workshops, lunch and games, training for the Sunday sports competitions and small continuations of the workshops in the first part of the day for those who wanted.
The second day of the children’s workshop was taken up with making botanical prints on t-shirts. Inspired by “Recettes de Cuisine” — Maria Cantili Golescu’s 1900’s notebook of recipes and advice — the children started building their own notebook by replicating the cardboard covers with textile and making their personal “coat of arms” with the initials of their name using the linocut technique.
In the afternoon we had Delia Zahareanu, a graphic designer specialized in abstract art, calligraphy and graphic design, as our guest. Delia gave us a short and applied introduction to the art of calligraphy, with practical exercises right on the newly made notebooks using tools from the props of professionals in this field.
The last day of the children’s workshop at Golescu Villa in Câmpulung was reserved for the construction of four thematic installations directly related to Maria Cantili Golescu’s Notebook – “Recettes de Cuisine” and to the times she lived in. All those who will visit us at the official launch event of the rewritten Cantili’s Notebook and the Festive Day at the end of September will be able to browse:
The evening closed with an outdoor film, in the tradition of the Foundation’s Heritage Education Caravan.
The workshop and exploration phase with the children from Câmpulung is over for now but we are moving forward and will constantly present the research project of the translated notebook resources, the collaboration with the ten culinary experts as well as the collaboration with craftsmen from the Muscelu area for the continuation of the Honest Goods collection.
For those curious to feel the atmosphere of this year’s workshops, the editorial team of MuscelTV Câmpulung has made a conclusive report.
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“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” is a cultural project of Pro Patrimonio Foundation co-financed by AFCN.
Media partners: Scena 9, Rock FM, Muscel TV, Zeppelin Magazine; Friend project: Ierburi Uitate
The digitized booklet, “Recettes de Cuisine”, can be found in the Foundation’s library of useful resources here
Read more:
Comunicat de presă. Jurnal culinar Maria Cantili Golescu – rețete, gusturi, obiecte și experimente
Zece Experimente Contemporane din Jurnalul Culinar Maria Cantili Golescu
Girdle, ustensilă istorică de gătit
„Recettes de Cuisine”, caietul digitalizat
Ansamblul Golescu. Observator de Peisaj Cultural în Câmpulung Muscel
Ansamblul Golescu. Trasee botanice în Parcul Golescu
Honest Goods. Colecţia Golescu
The constant, step-by-step restoration of the Neamțu Manor in Olari has been started since 2018. Currently undergoing restoration, the manor is an important landmark for the local community. Started in 2021 together with the UiPath Foundation the project “Experimental Centre for Studies and Education at the Neamțu Manor in Olari” is dedicated to this place. As in all other interventions carried out by Pro Patrimonio, the restoration, the construction site and all efforts to activate, educate and involve the local community are open, public processes.
After completig the facades’ restoration in 2022, this year we are focusing our efforts to carry out repairs and restoration of the finishes in the interior spaces of the manor floor.
Thus, we have started working on the ceilings, where the manor largely kept only the roof structure beams. There are a few exceptions: in the room facing the main façade, a large part of the vaulted ceiling has been preserved, and in the loggia on the north-west side, fragments of the wooden panelling covering the ceiling have been preserved.
The threadlike wooden battens substructure of the ceiling plaster has now been rebuilt and the first layer of mineral wool is being laid in the attic. We are using modern materials (basaltic mineral wool, generously sponsored by Rockwool România, thank you!) in order not to add extra weight to the existing structure and to increase the interior comfort of the floor, limiting heat loss during cold periods, when we will heat and use the spaces.
At the same time, we are also adding the electrical installation for lighting, sockets and switches, in compliance with all the technical safety regulations.
We have also started to install the canopy at the secondary entrance. This was dismantled last year to complete repairs to the facade plaster. The team of carpenters led by Mr. Florin Ganea — who has helped us for years with specialized work on the Wooden Church from Urși — cleaned the wooden pieces and filled in what was missing, in order to rebuild the entire canopy.
At the „Experimental Centre for Studies and Education at the Neamțu Manor in Olari” we have been testing over the past year soil stability solutions for dry, parched land types. This agricultural experiment for the garden at the Neamțu Manor in Olari showed that it is necessary to work on smaller segments to create areas of favourable microclimate. These can then be slowly extended over the whole field.
For this purpose, for the northern windbreak, we continued planting branches of wicker (Salix Viminalis), a plant that exists in the vineyard areas where it is used to tie the vine ropes. The rest of the land is still used for small production crops ( sunflower and corn – local varieties).
The manor’s caretakers weed the crops by hand. We would like to be able to purchase a professional tiller to make the work and the labour more efficient. The caretakers are employed from the local community and also work to help the teams of craftsmen restoring the manor.
June
The room we call the “chapel” is beginning to take shape thanks to the architectural details. The restoration craftsmen together with the caretakers of the manor have repaired the ceiling, installed the electrical fittings and just finished the plastering, so the space suddenly looks much more airy.
July
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Written between 1900 and 1901, Maria Cantili Golescu’s recipe book covers a fascinating period in the history of Romanian gastronomy, as it contributes to the specific literature with culinary material from a decade from which no other cookbook survives.
Cantili most likely gathered her recipes from various French, English, German and Romanian materials available during the Golescu couple’s travels across the European continent, but certainly also through an exchange of recipes “housewife to housewife”, as was the custom before the widespread diffusion of culinary publications. They reflect a predilection for cosmopolitan, Western cuisine, under the auspices of French gastronomic trends, considered at the time to be the height of culinary refinement. These trends had already been announced by 19th-century cookbooks (Kogălniceanu-Negruzzi, Hințescu, Ionnin, Maurer, Steriadi), but also by those that followed in the next decades, in the midst of the inter-war era (Bacalbașa, Marin).
Set on the border between centuries, but also at the crossroads between traditional and modern cooking styles, the recipe book also offers some exciting insights into the design of old kitchens before the widespread adoption of modern cooking equipment. Among these small details, easily missed on a quick read, we were intrigued by the description of how to make a cake called “Spice cake” and the utensils mentioned by the author.
”— Spice cake*—
“1 pound of flour, 3 ½ ounces of dripping, a small teaspoonful of salt, well rubbed together; 3 ounces of fresh currants mashed and dried, all mixed well together with the flour etc. make it a medium paste with a little mill, roll,, it about half an inch thick, then put it into a creed girdle or frying pan, bake on one side for a ¼ of an hour, moving it round 2 or 3 times to prevent it burning, turn it over and do the same. Try to do the edges in front of the fire. “ (-*despite the name of this dish, the spices are not mentioned. Traditionally, a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves is also put in the composition of such a cake).
The girdle mentioned here is a historic cooking utensil – almost forgotten today – a practical and useful object especially for cooking over an open fire or hearth. It was most often made of cast iron, but also of other metals, was round or rectangular in shape and, characteristically, had a looped handle that allowed it to be hung over a fire or a hot pan. It was used extensively throughout European culinary history, in times when the source of fire in the kitchen were wood-burning fireplaces or cheminées. The object is coming back into fashion especially among historical gastronomy and culinary reenactment enthusiasts, but also among those interested in traditional, sustainable and durable cooking objects.
Photo sources:
“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” is a cultural project of Pro Patrimonio Foundation co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration.
Media partners: Scena 9, Rock FM, Muscel TV, Revista Zeppelin
Friend project: “Ierburi uitate”
The digitised workbook, “Recettes de Cuisine”, can be found in the Foundation’s library of useful resources here
Read also:
Zece Experimente Contemporane din Jurnalul Culinar Maria Cantili Golescu
Digitized Booklet “Recettes de Cusine”
The Culinary Diary of Maria Cantili Golescu-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments
The story of the notebook with “cooking recipes”, as Maria Cantili Golescu called it in 1900, enters a new stage in our project entitled „Maria Cantili Golescu – Culinary Recipe Book – recipes, tastes, objects and experiences”, carried out during this year aims to recover these fragments of taste over a century old, to give access to information for the public passionate about our culinary heritage and offer a small contribution to the enrichment of local gastronomic literature by publishing this notebook in a digital version that will be freely accessible in the ProPatromonio archive starting this autumn.
Maria Cantili’s recipes were written in four languages at the beginning of the last century, in a splendid calligraphy specific those times, and describe an unexpectedly cosmopolitan way of cooking and dining, deeply influenced by Western European culinary trends, especially French, but also English, Iberian, German and Italian. It should not be forgotten that the author belonged to a privileged social category at the time, highly educated, multilingual, well-travelled and having had the opportunity to live in several European cities. The multiculturalism of the Golescu family, and perhaps of an entire local elite, is reflected in these glimpses of everyday life suggested by the way they ate, and reveals an interesting piece of Romanian gastronomic history from a decade not yet covered by other sources.
In the first part of the project, we carefully photocopied and digitised every page of the notebook, followed by many weeks working on transcribing the original recipes, translating them into Romanian and editing the texts so that the language became easy to understand for the contemporary reader.
The first page of Maria Cantili Golescu’s notebook
This summer, we’re entering a new and even more spectacular phase of work, with 10 professional and amateur chefs joining the project to help us bring to life a series of recipes from the notebook. These recipes, narrated and cooked by our chefs, will be published in a new “cookbook”, with clearly explained texts and photos, also aimed for the public.
We have therefore invited Andrei Chelaru (Fragment, Cluj), Oana Coantă (Bistro de l’Arte, Brasov), Irina Georgescu (author of the cookbook “Carpathia”), Cristina Mehedințeanu (Horeca Culinary School, Bucharest), Mara Oană (Viscri 32), Mona Petre (Ierburi Uitate), Alex Petricean (Noua, Bucharest), Mădălina Roman (Szikra, Sf. Gheorghe), Horia Simon ( Transylvanian Gastronomic Club), the team of Adriana Sohodoleanu and Cosmin Dragomir (Gastroart) and Adela Trofin (Slow Food Edinburgh).
This summer, as our chefs venture out to bring these old recipes back to the table, we’ll share with you glimpses (in stories and pictures) of the process.
“Violet meringues”, cake prepared by Mădălina Roman (Szikra, Sf. Gheorghe) following the original recipe from Maria Cantili Golescu’s notebook
Browsing through Maria Cantili Golescu’s 1900 recipe book, Chef Andrei Chelaru – a frequent collaborator of several fine dining establishments in the country and winner of a Gault & Millau Romania award in 2019 – found inspiration to choose three of the recipes from the book and combine them in a unique, particularly tasty and contemporary dish.
“I was very delighted when I leafed through this precious book of recipes and it was hard to choose, as they were all very interesting. In the end, I chose three recipes: one for borsch, a dish with which I have a special relationship, as I originally come from Moldova, and which I often use, replacing lemon juice or vinegar. The second recipe is the biscuits manqués, which go perfectly with the 3rd chosen recipe, strawberry mousse. All three, paired on the same plate made a light, aromatic, tart-sweet dessert with a subtle home-made borsch flavour, perfect for hot summer days.”
Andrei, shared his encounter with these century-old recipes and deconstructed each working stage in very simple steps explained on his culinary blog, so that anyone can cook at home the three recipes, simple or combined as he creatively combined and served them.
Mădălina Roman joined the project with two recipes chosen from Maria Cantili Golescu’s recipe book. We now present the first of them, a seasonal dish based on the classic recipe of stuffed aubergines, to which Mădălina has managed to give her own twist in a style that defines her.
Mădălina, who studied culinary arts at the “Paul Bocusse” institute in Lyon, is currently head chef at “Szikra” in Sfântu Gheorghe (CV), passionate about the “secrets” of food chemistry, old recipes and wild plants, but also an active promoter of sustainability in gastronomy and respect for nature. “Szikra” quickly became a landmark for new Romanian gastronomy, surprising both by reinterpreting old recipes and by the original combinations and innovative techniques.
About this dish, she told us: “Since it’s their season, and this summer is busy with the publishing of Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary, I chose to play with a stuffed eggplant recipe. Following the 1900 recipe, I slightly adjusted both the ingredients and the cooking technique. Beside very young beet leaves, I added orach leaves, and green onions and ramson in the stuffing. In addition, to soften the bread, I used a reduction of borsch and a little vegetable stock soup. Half of the sauce I left with the leaves inside and the other half I blended into a thin sauce placed on the plate next to the baked eggplant. At the end, I added green ramson fruits and onion blossoms which completed the dish wonderfully adding a crunchy touch.”
Inspirați de vară și ingrediente de sezon, echipa formată din Adriana Sohodoleanu și Cosmin Dragomir a ales și gătit din caietul de rețete de la 1900 al Mariei Cantili Golescu o foarte potrivită mâncare estivală — biban de mare cu ierburi aromatice. Felurile cu pește erau favorite în multe din casele mari ale epocii, iar Vila Golescu din Câmpulung Muscel n-a fost mai prejos. Se prepara o paletă poate surprinzător de variată de specii de pește și crustacee, iar mâncărurile erau puternic influențate de bucătăria franceză și mediteraneană, cu siguranță un gust căpătat în călătoriile cuplului în Franța, dar și sub tendința generală a epocii, în care ”la cuisine française” se impusese ca idealul gastronomic pentru orice familie cu pretenții.
Maria Cantili scria: ”Peștele, evident foarte proaspăt, trebuie spălat, curățat și eviscerat. Înfășurați-l cu o foaie de hârtie unsă bine cu unt. Coaceți la cuptor până capătă o culoare frumoasă. Pregătiți, în acest timp, un vas foarte cald, în care puneți peștele scos din hârtie. Sărați și decorați atât peștele cât și vasul cu unt amestecat cu plante aromatice. Untul se va topi pe jumătate, așa și trebuie. Serviți fierbinte. Coacerea trebuie supravegheată foarte bine; focul nu trebuie nici foarte tare, nici redus. În aceasta constă tot secretul.”
Adriana Sohodoleanu are un doctorat în ”noua bucătărie romanească” și scrie despre mâncare, istorii și trenduri culinare pe biscuit.ro, implicându-se adesea în proiecte felurite de istorie gastronomică și chiar în ceea ce s-ar putea numi reenactment culinar. Ea a abordat această rețetă scrisă acum mai bine de 120 de ani dintr-o perspectivă cât mai apropiată de textul original, detaliind tot procesul de lucru, ingredientele și etapele într-un articol cuprinzător și explicativ, ce poate fi citit aici: https://biscuit.ro/2022/07/08/biban/
Cosmin Dragomir este istoric culinar amator, fondatorul editurii Gastroart, unde a publicat o serie de cărți de bucate istorice, unele într-o ediție nouă la mai mult de un secol și jumătate de la prima apariție. Cosmin este și inițiatorul sau co-inițiatorul mai multor proiecte de cercetare și aducere în atenția publicului larg a patrimoniului culinar național, prin articole, podcasturi și evenimente conexe.
We are delighted to benefit within the project “Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary – recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” from the vision of Irina Georgescu, culinary writer and author of the book “Carpathia”. Irina has published her cookbook in the UK, presenting to the British public, in a specific format, Romanian food as it is prepared in households in various regions of the country. Since then, “Carpathia” has been translated into several languages, taking our recipes overseas. In addition, Irina is preparing a new book to be released this autumn called “Tava”, a collection of tray-cooked dishes inspired by rural and contemporary cuisine.
Browsing through Maria Cantili’s notebook from 1900, she chose two recipes for cakes, of which we present today the delicious rice muffins.
The recipe goes like this: “Two cups of cold cooked rice, 570 g flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, half a teaspoon baking powder or yeast, 285 ml milk, 3 eggs. Mash the rice to remove lumps and add the other ingredients. Bake in muffin tins for 15 minutes.”
For their preparation, Irina followed closely the tips from the original recipe, adding just a little personal twist and detailing the method on her website – link
Mara Elena Oană – Viscri 32
Born in Deva, in a multicultural family, with Romanian and Hungarian grandparents from Maramureș and Hunedoara, Mara Elena Oană worked for over 10 years as a lawyer in Bucharest, before leaving everything and moving to Viscri, a UNESCO-listed village. Here, together with her partner, they founded the Viscri 32 project, a small retreat with a strong gastronomic component. Together they restored an old Saxon house using local craftsmen and converted the former barn on the property into a Slow Food restaurant.
Mara is focused on using seasonal ingredients grown by local family producers in the region, as well as documenting and promoting recipes specific to Transylvania.
Involved in the project “Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary – recipes, tastes, objects and experiments”, Mara chose to recreate two recipes based on easily accessible seasonal ingredients: „cauliflower bread” and apples a la russe, two dishes cooked in the oven and served in earthen bowls.
As Mara recently posted an explanatory video about “cauliflower bread” on the Viscri 32 account, today we present this special dessert served with butter, apricot jam, toasted walnuts and cherry palinca, following closely Maria Cantili’s recipe from 1900:
” Remove the apple peel and scoop out the interior. Put them in a deep, ovenproof dish and add butter and powdered sugar. Place in the oven on low heat. Then arrange the apples in a bowl and drizzle them, while still warm, with a sauce made from apricot marmalade, mashed and diluted with 2-3 tablespoons of kirsch. This dish is served warm or, conversely, very cold.”
As we do at the beginning of every weekend this summer, we propose a new and appetizing seasonal dish inspired by Maria Cantili Golescu’s 1900 cookbook. Our guest Adela Trofin has chosen to recreate a famous Provençal fish soup, Bouillabaisse, found in the pages of this notebook: “In a pot, add chopped onions, tomatoes, parsley, thyme, bay leaves, garlic and cloves, 700-800 g of fish and shellfish cut evenly. Season generously. Sprinkle with saffron, pour in a glass of oil, two decilitres of white wine and finish by adding fish stock or water to cover half the fish. Simmer over high heat for 15-18 minutes. Arrange the fish on a platter, ladle the soup into a soup tureen in which you have also placed pieces of bread.”
Following Maria Cantili’s advice closely, Adela says: “For me, this soup is not Provençal, it’s not Scottish, it’s not Romanian. It’s comfort and warmth. It has a bit of the memory of Romanian fish soups, but it also intensely reflects the feeling that food is relaxation and connection. Each time I prepare it, its taste and texture are slightly different, depending on what I find at the fish market that day, but its warmth and intensity remain the same, making it one of my favorite dishes.”
Adela Trofin was born in a small town in northeastern Romania, into a family with Romanian, Austrian and Greek roots. She learned from her grandmother about home-cooked meals and stories about seasonal ingredients, either grown or gathered from the surroundings, but also about values closely connected to conviviality and loyalty to the natural course of nature, sustainable agriculture and small local producers with minimal environmental impact. Involved in the Slow Food movement since 2012, Adela has been the leader of the Slow Food Iași Convivium for 6 years contributing among other things to the development of the first ASAT (for supporting peasant agriculture) consumer group in the region. Relocated to Scotland, Adela quickly joined the Slow Food Edinburgh board, getting involved in the local effort to bring back to light forgotten or lost ingredients of Scottish culinary history and culture, without forgetting her origins and concern for Romanian gastronomy.
Following her chef training course, Cristina Mehedințeanu worked in several prestigious London restaurants and bakeries, such as Ottolenghi and Harrods, where she gained experience as a pastry chef. Back in the country, she became a trainer and instructor for pastry chefs and confectioners at the Horeca School in Bucharest, where she conducts pastry chef qualification trainings and masterclasses. Recently, she opened her own business in the capital, Cofetăria Zmeur.
Cristina chose from Maria Cantili Golescu’s notebook two cakes dating back to 1900, giving them even more sparkle and contemporary flair: a Chantilly cream cake with blackcurrants, great seasonal fruits, and a recipe for chocolate pricomigdalas to which she added a decadent ganache.
About the first recipe, she writes: “I love blackcurrants. They are hardly ever used in confectionery. More popular are blueberries, although they don’t have much taste or flavor. This recipe uses blackcurrants to the full, in a sweet-sour marmalade, a thick sauce that naturally sweetens and colors a creamy Chantilly with whipped cream and mascarpone for decoration. A delight!”
Both dishes are detailed on Cristina’s website, cristinamehedinteanu.ro, where, in addition to the text of the original recipe, the ingredients used and all the working steps are explained in detail, allowing anyone to try to reproduce this culinary jewel.
“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” is a cultural project of Pro Patrimonio Foundation co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration.
Media partners: Scena 9, Rock FM, Muscel TV, Revista Zeppelin. Friend project: “Ierburi uitate”
The digitised workbook, “Recettes de Cuisine”, can be found in the Foundation’s library of useful resources here
Read more:
Standerul de haine cu garderoba Mariei Cantili Golescu şi alte poveşti
Comunicat de presă. Jurnal culinar Maria Cantili Golescu – rețete, gusturi, obiecte și experimente
„Recettes de Cuisine”, caietul digitalizat
Girdle, ustensilă istorică de gătit
Ansamblul Golescu. Observator de Peisaj Cultural în Câmpulung Muscel
Ansamblul Golescu. Trasee botanice în Parcul Golescu
Honest Goods. Colecţia Golescu
A translation of a recipe notebook from 1900, written in four languages and taken by the author all the way from Paris to Bacău and Câmpulung at the beginning of the last century, cannot today remain a mere translation. It is, first and foremost, an immersion in the culinary context of an era on the borderline between old and modern.
While working on transcribing and understanding the dishes presented in Maria Cantilli Golescu’s notebook – together with Mona Petre, Nona Henti and Aura Pandele – we reveal small fragments of national culinary history heavily influenced, as was the case at the time and continued until after the middle of the 20th century, by French cuisine, but also archaic, extremely picturesque ways of cooking, or, as we find in the recipe we offer as an example, a series of ingredients surrounded by an aura of mystery.
This is also the case of the Chiffonnette cake (in transcripts and translations booklet on page 64) described as follows:
”Détremper 250 grammes de beurre dans l’eau tiède; quand il sera amolli, le mettre dans un mortier et, avec un pilon, incorporer dans le beurre 300 grammes, 500 grammes de fleur de farine, douze jaunes d’œufs crus et une poignée de fleur d’oranger pralinée et écrasée préalablement. Fouetter 6 blancs d’œufset les ajouter au mélange, puis beurrer une tourtière, y verser le gâteau et faire cuire au four.” – original French transcript
“Soak 250 g of butter in lukewarm water; when the butter has softened, place it in a mortar and pestle and stir in 300 g of sugar, 500 g of very fine flour, twelve raw yolks and a handful of orange blossoms, pralinée and crushed beforehand. Beat 6 egg whites and add them to the above mixture, grease a pie tin with butter, pour in the cake and bake in the oven.”
“Praline orange flowers”. A mystery ingredient for us today, on which we asked the advice of our chef friends involved in this notebook and dishes recovery project. Should orange blossoms simply be sugared, as they are made with egg white and powdered sugar? Or are they truly pralined in the red, brittle crust of melted sugar? Contemporary gateau chiffon recipes have lost this special ingredient along the way and offer no clarification. It’s a (seemingly) small detail, perhaps easily overlooked at a first reading, but in the eyes of those fond of the cuisine of past centuries it is nothing short of a small gem.
Photo sources:
“Maria Cantili Golescu’s Culinary Diary-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments” is a cultural project of Pro Patrimonio Foundation co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration.
Media partners: Scena 9, Rock FM, Muscel TV
Friend project: “Ierburi uitate”
The digitised workbook, “Recettes de Cusine”, can be found in the Foundation’s library of useful resources here
Read also:
The Culinary Diary of Maria Cantili Golescu-recipes, tastes, objects and experiments
