CHEESE

Cheese was not such a rarity, the peasants sold it here and there, under cover, as it were. In stores they only had curdled milk, that thick coarse cheese pasta to which a whole generation of young people grew addicted. They won?t eat anything else now but that rubber cheese. You could make balls out of it and play ping-pong with them, it worked. (114)

CHRISTMAS

A lot of foreigners could not understand the discrepancy between the visible scarcity of food of Romanians, the daily lamentations concerning nutrition and on the other hand, the opulence of the festive meals. They should have understood that behind the wealth of a few feasts in a year was the work of the months in which people ran, asking here and there, gathering things for the holiday. The holiday shines in normal times too, but especially in the desert of socialism. The rich holiday table that we were so keen on was also a way of defying the state. It was a victory.

In 1987, I was invited by Nadia and Vlad to spend the Christmas with them. Nadia still keeps a list with all the foods and drinks from back then: pike from Valeni, Cuban rum, meat balls out of chicken breast, smoked fish, white wine, apples filled with celery salad, with beet-root and horse radish, endives with capers and oranges with cream, pickled cucumbers filled with chicken breast, tongue salad, pineapple, Chinese mushrooms, mayo with cream, smoked lard, onion and mint salad, chicken lived boiled in milk with nutmeg, oeufs en cocotte, Albanian shells salad, forced meat rolls in cabbage or vine leaves with cream and horse radish, pork steak with pickles and baked apples, coffee. There were 9-10 degrees in the house.

Merisor and her brother Dan invited their German teacher from the Goethe Institute to celebrate with us his last Christmas in Romania. The teacher brought grapes, bananas, oranges and yellow cheese, and we prepared 14 dishes. There was this madness of plenty that responded to the general madness of emptiness. We had cabbage pie, meatballs, boeuf salad, numberless stakes, the meat had been kept for a whole day into an enameled washbasin, forced meat rolls in cabbage or vine leaves, meringue cake with nuts an cream, etc.