Because Romania came into existence as a country in the 19th century-regions of it always being part of one empire or another (Ottoman, Habsburg or Russian)-its history has been seen as ‘interstitial’, difficult to study or uninteresting. However, the history of one dish, mămăliga, can shed a new light on aspects that may have seemed obscure otherwise.
No other food has played a more significant role than mămăliga throughout the Romanian history. Alex Drace- Francis, the author of “The Making of Mămăligă. Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish” calls it“a cultural signifier, fitting into the category of ‘untranslatables’, indicating “ ethnic identity, social status and mores”.
It is cooked in the same way all over the world, by mixing maize flour into boiled water in a cauldron and stirring thoroughly, but known under different names: mămăligă in Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine and Poland, polenta in Italy, or gomi in Georgia.
But the question is: how did maize arrive (from probably Mexico) in Romania and when?
What we know is that in 1493, Christopher Columbus introduced maize kernels to Europe. They were sent to the Vatican and then spread all over Europe, by either water (ships connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Sea) or land. This is how maize reached the Ottoman Empire, despite the Christian-Ottoman conflict. Maybe this explains some Europeans’ reluctance to adopt maize, seen as an ‘exotic’ plant because of its Turkish label. Maize is mentioned for the first time in the first half of the 17th century under the name of ‘Turkish wheat’. It is grown by some Hungarian nobles for swine feeding, then for feeding the troops in wars, spreading to Wallachia and Moldavia afterwards. It was an ‘escape crop’ allowing peasants and their farm animals to survive in times of famine.
When it began to be grown extensively, boyars realized that it could be an excellent source of cereal-based spirits, which determined Sultan Abdul Hamid I to issue a decree banning the production and consumption of spirits in Moldavia because of the damage such drinks do to the ‘spirit of wisdom’ and because maize (therefore, mămăligă) was an essential ingredient of the daily nutrition of the inhabitants. Historians say that because mămăliga was the staple diet of the poor people, it may have played a significant role in the population growth, due to the independence (from other food products) and autonomy it offered. Actually, because it was ”as common as air”, according to travellers and observers in the 19th century, it explains how the Romanians managed to survive under Austrian, Ottoman and Russian rule.
One of he most spectacular stories related to mămăligă is the one around vampirism, reported by the medical specialists hired by Empress Maria Theresa, trying to find explanations for such strange and sudden incidences in Banat andWallachia. One of the doctors put the blame on mămăligă!
As time passed, mămăliga grew in popularity. It was eaten not only by peasants, but also by boyars, bishops and princes, served with cheese and many other dishes. It is part of early and modern Romanian cookbooks and adopted by other cuisines (the French one) and is contained in hundreds of idiomatic expressions in the Romanian language, one of the most famous ones being „a explodat mămăliga, which can be translated by ” mămăliga exploded”, referring to the apparent lack of vitality of the Romanian people who, once in a while, react to social or political events in a violent way.
Alex Drace-Francis, the Dutch historian who has been inhabiting the Romanian culture for over thirty years, offers us an extremely precious and humorous insight into our own life and history at the very core of which lies the mămăliga itself.