I like cooking. But, arguably my home-cooked palate hasn’t been the most varied lately. I used to try out new recipes every week, but adjusting to living alone has made me less adventurous in my culinary pursuits than I was before. Generally I will be making one of my dozen or so well-tested recipes and won’t complicate things further. This selection consists of a bunch of Hungarian dishes I brought from home, staple breakfast food, the two Asian dishes I know and the tomato sauce mom taught me.
This revelation occurred to me as we sat in our Romanian class, discussing culture, food and cooking. We talked about a bunch of new food and I wanted to try so many of them. Then a thought struck me. What if did I triy making one of them? Exams being over and no imminent responsibility in sight, I finally had time to experiment. So I decided to dust off my old method of learning new stuff to cook and try making something Romanian.
Firstly, I had to choose a recipe. I looked through our hand-outs, and some Google results. There were a stammering of interesting foodstuffs, and my choice fell on Sarmale (Romanian stuffed cabbage). The recipe looked quick and easy, not requiring special ingredients or equipment (in retrospect I was quite wrong about this, but more on that later), and the dish itself was somewhat familiar to me. We, Hungarians have something called töltött káposzta, translating to “filled cabbage”, which is a very similar food, one that I encountered a lot in my childhood. However, I never liked the Hungarian version, nor tried making it. So, I decided it would be the perfect candidate to challenge both my culinary complacency and what I thought of this dish in its old and new context.
Next, I did what likely anyone would do when trying something new in the kitchen. I googled the thing, read through the first few results and ran with one that seemed decent. As there are a million blog posts about how to make Sarmale written by better writers than myself, this entry will try not to be one of them. Rather, I’d like to document my trials and tribulations making it and say something about the difficulties of cooking a dish foreign to the country one lives in. So, if the reader would like to try the same as I did, head to the link below and work from the original source.
After, I skimmed through the page I headed out to buy the ingredients and alas ran into my first problem. One of the crucial ingredients is sour cabbage leaves, into which the filling is wrapped. This is an integral part of the recipe, as this sourness is what sets the Romanian version apart from other Eastern European variants. But it was nowhere to be found. I looked in Lidl, I looked in Sainsbury’s and I looked in Tesco, but to no avail. The only thing I did find, was German Sauerkraut, which, while strictly speaking is sour cabbage, it is not fit for wrapping purposes seeing as it is shredded into a salad.
Luckily I managed to come up with a solution. I grabbed a head of cabbage and a bottle of white wine vinegar and ran home with my spoils. I remembered one of the recipes I read in my scouting phase. It mentioned you could make your own wrapping if you did not want the cabbage to be sour. All you had to do was wash and peel off the cabbage leaves and cook them for 3-6 minutes. So, after I arrived home I did so, then grabbed my one and only plastic bowl and set the leaves soaking in vinegar to give them their taste. At this point it was nearing midnight, since I had to run around Camden in my pursuit of ingredients and I had to wake up for tomorrow’s lecture (as will later become apparent, I am not great at time management). I decided to let the leaves soak overnight so they may actually have some flavour and decided to come back to the project the next day.
The following day after a lecture, language session, group work and some time spent at the British Museum with an estranged friend, I arrived home ready to cook. I took out my ingredients (pictured below) and noted that it was somewhat past 8. I could finally start.
The knife is for decoration, it did not end up in the Sarmale.
First I chopped up everything that could be chopped: the dill, the parsley, the onion and the garlic. The latter was not included in the written recipe, but my parents taught me that very few meals were made worse with its addition, so I decided to include it.
I sautéed the onion and garlic in a pan, until the former turned translucent, then added a random amount of rice to be toasted. After I deemed them crispy enough, I removed the pan from the heat and let it cool for a while. When I was confident it would not melt my bowl, I combined the oniony rice with the chopped dill-parsley mix, the pork, salt and pepper. With this, my filling was completed.
At this point, it would be wise to mention that I mostly eyeballed the proportions, trusting my experience over written instruction. I think it turned out fine (a later taste test confirms).
I let the previously prepared cabbage leaves soak a bit in water to remove the harsher flavours. While they bathed I fried the bacon a bit. The bacon was actually one of the reasons I choose this recipe. It is not a traditional ingredient, but come on. Everything is better with bacon. The recipe doesn’t say to fry the bacon beforehand, but I found English bacon to be uncooperatively greasy, so I wanted to remove some of the fat before putting the Sarmale into the oven.
Before baking I had one more thing to do. Wrap the rolls. This had a bit of a learning curve (two YouTube videos and one failed roll to be exact), but in the end I managed to fill the tray with nice looking little wraps.
Empty 
Filled 
Rolled
My instructions said to cover the rolls in tomato juice for baking but I decided against it. I had some leftover homemade tomato sauce and I used that instead. I also added a bit of water to the tray to prevent the rolls from drying out.
Without sauce and bacon 
With sauce and bacon
With the tray nicely prepared I covered it in tin foil and put it in the oven at ~195C° (375F°, as the recipe would put it). It was about 10 pm at this point. I leaned back safe in the knowledge that in 2 hours I would have a ready dish. Just to make sure, I skimmed through the recipe once more. That was when I realized I did not read the last line of the technical instruction. Not enough that I thought the first stage was 2 hours, instead of the actual 3 hours, but it turned out there was also a second stage, taking another 1,5-2. A blank grimace stretched across my face. My dreams of a good night’s sleep evaporated in an instant.
With a deflated soul I set to make my side, another Romanian classic Mămăligă. This is basically a version of oatmeal, but made with corn instead of oats. To make it, all you need to do to, is boil some water, add butter, a bit of salt and a generous heap of polenta (cornmeal). It is really quite straightforward.
If you decide to make it, please show me the results. I did not exactly get there. In my mental despair, my capabilities diminished, I ended up with a yellow sludge not resembling anything edible. I would show you this monstrosity, but it did not charitably lend itself to visual documentation.
Finally, at around 4 pm, I was finally done. The food turned out fine, but I was dead tired, so much so that I forgot to take a picture, so the one I have is made the next morning. I slumped into my bed thinking that I would taste the fruit of my labour in the morning accompanied by a bottle of coffee.
(It made for a really nice breakfast)
In conclusion Sarmale, as likely other Romanian food as well, is a nice dish, so much so that it will make me reconsider my position towards its Hungarian counterpart. It isn’t too easy or fast to make, but it is filling, unique and you will have some leftovers to sustain you for days.
However, if there is one takeaway from this: Read the recipe.
Always read the recipe.
PS: Here is the recipe I used if anyone wants to recreate my exploits.
European London 