Feast: Transylvania
The dirt road into the village of Okland, Romania, is carved and rutted by heavy rains, cars and the hooves of horses and cows. As I arrive in this Transylvanian village, a parade of cows appears from the nearby pastures. As each cow reaches her home gate, she peels off and lows impatiently for the gate to open. Each day, this 30-strong herd comes and goes with little human intervention.
I am welcomed to my four-week stay in Transylvania with a glass of pálinka, the regional alcoholic drink. In its finest form, pálinka is flavored by apple, quince or plum; at its most common and gentle, it is mixed with sugar water and infused with cumin seeds. A strong drink that complements many occasions, it is suited for the arrival of village guests and honored citizens; the communal work of pig killing, bread baking and the corn harvest; and the gathering of friends late into the night. This drink will accompany me, steel me and pave my way through Transylvania.
Transylvania occupies traditional Hungarian lands in the remote Carpathian basin, part of Romania since the early 20th century. Owing to its location and the legacy of decades of communist repression, rural Transylvanians continue to live a largely subsistence-based existence. They follow a model of sustainable agriculture that has yet to be disrupted by the forces that shape production and consumption in much of the modern world. Theirs is a system in balance. They are rooted in the land by history, frugality and spirituality rather than the privilege of choice.
In some ways, things have changed. While most houses in the region still have dome-shaped wood-fired ovens for baking, few families still use them. Bread comes from a store. However, the bread bakers from the neighboring village of Ùjifalu still make traditional bread weekly. On bread-baking day, a strong fire is built in the oven, and 15 kilograms of wet dough is brought into the baking room in an old four-handled wooden trough. Tools are few, rustic and precise. The baker tempers the fire and wipes clean the oven floor with a wet cornhusk mop, charred by many days of baking.
The dough, redolent with the smell of natural yeasts, sticks to our hands as we shape and place each loaf on a blanched cabbage leaf. The leaf protects the loaf from the oven floor and brands it with the imprint of cabbage leaf veins. The loaves emerge from the oven two hours later, double in size, with a thick burnt black crust that the bakers chip and file away until the loaves are smooth golden orbs. This week’s bread is not sold or eaten but passed on to the village minister for the coming Thanksgiving holy day, when it and the community’s wine will be consecrated to serve the entire village communion.
The morning after bread baking, a small congregation forms at the cultural center. Pálinka is passed around as a 90-kilogram sow arrives for the killing. I take two quick shots, willingly keeping pace with the village men. I have killed and butchered a pig before—it is never easy. I can reconcile the conflict between the animal’s life and human food, yet the blunt loss of life remains shocking. The pálinka steadies my nerves and eases me into the kill and butchering, which for those around me is as commonplace as a trip to the supermarket is for an American.
Within minutes, the sow is immobilized on her right side. The butcher, Dénes-bacsi, sticks the sow’s throat quickly, pumping her heart empty and collecting the blood in a red and white enameled bowl. I see him calm her as she dies, and I appreciate the regard that surrounds her course from life to meat, pig to pork.
The carcass is laid out on the grass and covered in straw, which is then ignited to burn away the hair. Within two hours, the sow has been killed, butchered and completely broken up into usable parts. There are bones for broth and blood, offal and scrap for sausage. There are hams for curing and fatback for szalona, a regional cured fat. And there is crisped skin and sweet fresh meat for nibbling on during the work.
Meanwhile, the women in the kitchen are grinding the meat scraps, thickening the blood, braising the entrails and cleaning the intestines. The dense smell of hot intestinal gasses permeates the community kitchen. I trust that tonight more pálinka will burnish my memory of this smell as I eat the traditional pig-killing dinner of fresh kolbász and hurkás (sausages) made from the meat scraps, blood, liver, lung and heart.
Within a few weeks, the weather has turned. The days are short, and the morning frost is perfect for sweetening the wild rose hips that grow in the region. The hips are harvested by hand and made into a jam unlike any I know: velvety thick, sweet, tangy and nutrient dense. It is eaten with bread and cheese at breakfast and with a bowl of cornmeal mush for dinner.
Enough jam must be made to last until next year’s harvest, and this takes time. The hips are sorted and boiled, then ground in a meat grinder to pulverize the flesh and loosen the seeds. The mash is worked through two sieves—one coarse to remove the seeds and another, finer, to remove the tiny rose hip hairs. All told, it takes 48 hours—three women working two full days—to make this year’s batch of rose hip jam for two families. It takes another two weeks for the tiny rose hip hairs imbedded in my forearms to dissolve and the irritation to heal.
Most of the foods I eat during my stay in Transylvania are in one way or another threatened “food species.” International agribusiness, regulations and economies of scale are poised to steal the autonomy of the commons by making highly processed, cheap food a replacement for tradition. Rose hip jam, village-distilled pálinka, small-scale animal raising and home baking are all endangered cultural treasures that have renewed my appreciation for them both at home and around the world.
