Food is what binds us all together, to quote my favorite food YouTuber, Beryl Shereshewsky: Food is my love language. Food is something that you can share and enjoy with others. It is the type of experience that crosses the cultural divide. Food connects us to our past, grounds us in the present, and helps us be hopeful about the future. Can you see yourself in the past waiting for grandma’s cooking? You were really hopeful about the future, were you not?
I found some food stories that will give you a sense of our history:
Ciorba Radauteana the Northern alternative of the Tripe Soup
It’s made with a combination of chicken, onions, sweet red pepper, celery, carrots, lemon juice, garlic, parsley, sour cream, and finished with some lemon. This recipe was developed by Cornelia Dumitrescu in the 1970s.
There are multiple interpretations of the story of how this sour soup came to be, but what we know for sure is that Cornelia is fighting a crusade against Tripe Soup (Ciorba de Burta) in a joking way as it isn’t very popular in the North of Romania. Also important is the fact that her husband suggested adding chicken to the mix. The first version was made with turkey, but due to the difficulty of finding turkey during communism, the recipe stuck with chicken.
This recipe became greatly appreciated in the 80’s and blew up in popularity across Romania. Nowadays, Cornelia has her own restaurant, keeping the exact proportions of the recipe a secret.
Dracula has been to the restaurant and talked to one of the waiters. The secret has more to do with the quality of the ingredients. Just one example of the quality of the sour cream is that you can just eat it with bread, as I tried multiple types of foods.
There is no point in explaining how good it is; rather, go to Restaurant National to enjoy the soup in the birthplace of the soup: Google Maps
Related articles:
Dracula's Guide to Romania 
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