Moldavian Cuisine

Long since Moldavia has been closely connected with Ancient Greece and Bythantine, and it couldn’t but affect its national cuisine. A number of Greek dishes successfully entered Moldavian cuisine, besides Moldavians themselves adopted and mastered the methods of Mediterranean cuisines — the preference of oily and flaky paste, wide usage of olive oil, adding dry wine to vegetable and meat dishes. The Tatar yoke had an enormous influence on the process of forming of Moldavian national cuisine, it gave birth to the names of many dishes and the usage of mutton.

The modern Moldavian cuisine is characterized by combining grape and tomato juices, used as sauces for meat dishes. Such additions make meat more piquant and softer.

Brynza

One of the traditional branches of agriculture in Moldavia is sheep-breeding, so brynza is widely used in this country, both as a snack and as an addition to different dishes. Brynza is one of sorts of cheese, made of sheep milk. It is enough to keep it to mature for a week, and it is ready to be used as food.

Mamalyga

In the 18th century maize was considered to be the daily food of the poor, and only with the flow of time people learned to cook various dishes from it. The most famous of them is mamalyga, national maize porridge. But the usage of maize in cooking isn’t limited by this, for maize is used for making soups and for garnishing, and even for baking confectionery.

Vegetables in Moldavian Cuisine

Vegetables play a very important role in Moldavian national cuisine. The most wide-spread of them are corn and leguminous haricot beans, tomatoes, aubergines, lentil, sweet pepper and squash. Moldavians cook various garnishes and independent dishes — stuffed, baked, boiled and stewed.

Haricot beans, as well as other beans, are mostly whipped with butter and onions in the form of puree.

Aubergines, sweet peppers are stuffed with rice and meat or with other vegetables. In Moldavia different vegetable stews are very popular. Among them we may mention ghivech and moussaku, which have pleasant piquant taste. For cooking them vegetables are stewed on slow fire with addition of spices, brynza or sour cream, which gives a special sour taste to the stew.

Meat a-la Moldavia

In Moldavian cuisine all sorts of meat (beef, mutton, pork, and poultry) found their usage. Mutton is used for cooking chorba, ghivech, moussaku; pork is used for making costitza and mushka; beef — for miteteis and poultry for rissoles. The corresponding vegetables and spices are selected for every sort of meat. Sometimes some kinds of fruits are added to meat, for example, quince to veal and apricots to turkey. As it has been already mentioned above, Modern Moldavian cuisine is characterized by a combination of grape wine and tomato juice, used as sauces for meat dishes.

Meat is mostly roasted on gratara, a thick iron lattice, placed over burning ashes. The lattice is oiled and only after that meat is put on it — either in a single piece or chopped.

Moldavian Sweets

Moldavian Sweets are distinguished by their rather unusual taste. Mostly they are cooked from grapes or other fruits — apples, apricots, cherries, plumes. Marmalade and pastila are widely used, as well as a special sort of jelly — pelti, boiled from berry and fruit juices. In Moldavian cuisine grape moust is widely used for cooking desserts. It represents a thick grape juice, which hasn’t been filtered and elucidated.

Moldavians bake different confectionery from flaky paste with addition of the prepared fruit sweets. They also adore halva and nut nougat. Generally, walnuts are universally used in Moldavian cuisine.