To Romania in a spoon
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While staying in the Carpathians with our friends Anca and Eduard, we had a lot of conversations about jam. I don’t possibly have space here to tell you about everything we learnt (although I’m sure Anna will try soon) – but here’s two things. First, Romanians have a lot of words for jam. Second, two of them, dulceață and șerbet, are things we don’t really have in the UK, involving interesting ingredients like green walnut and aubergine, and mysterious old social rituals involving teaspoons and glasses of water.
It’s often tempting to try to make what you see fit with what you already know. So, given what we already knew about Ottoman influence on Eastern European cuisine, we quickly jumped to the conclusion that this must be a Turkish phenomenon – șerbet is a Turkish word, after all. And when we reached Turkey, we did indeed find delicious walnut and aubergine jams.
But something didn’t quite fit. Why use a Latin word – dulceață – for something Turkish? And although we saw plenty of şerbet in Turkey, we never got offered it in spoons or water. Well, now that we’ve arrived in Greece, we’ve realised it’s much more complicated than we thought …