Why Romanian home cooks are welcoming visitors into their kitchens

“Please, have more. You’ve hardly eaten,” says Marilena, as she ladles some extra sarmale cabbage rolls onto my plate. I’ve had three already, and this is after two bowls of chicken soup and a couple of lichiu, sweet-sour, custardy tarts that Marilena Băcişor hands me between courses, just for good measure. Her husband, Alexandru, pours me a fourth shot of his homemade pălincă plum brandy. “I don’t drink,” he jokes, gulping a fourth shot of his own. We clink glasses, and I tuck into the cabbage rolls. I’m not going to disappoint Marilena, who I’ve begun calling ‘bunică’, Romanian for grandma.

It’s early afternoon, and Marilena’s garden, in the central Romanian village of Apold, is buzzing. Along with bees that provide honey, there are goats, grapevines and cherry and plum trees, plus orderly rows of herbs and greens. Alexandru leads me to a 50-litre vat of fermenting cabbage in the cellar, where there are also glass jars of various pickled vegetables and marmalades, a cask of his pălincă and two more of his wine. Everything in here comes from the garden. Marilena tells me she’s only ever cooked what she’s grown or what comes from her animals — a culinary approach she swears by as her grandmother lived to 103 eating this way.

I’ve long wanted to come to Romania, curious about its unique cuisine. And the country’s culinary heartland is no doubt Transylvania, its largest and most central region. “Cooking in Romania is learned from parents and grandparents,” I was told by Irina Georgescu, the Romanian James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, who helped me plan my trip. “A lot of recipes are very personal. If I make something that’s a bit different from somebody else’s, they’ll say, ‘You’re wrong. It’s not like my grandma’s’. But your mum and grandparents can’t be wrong.”

My next stop is Braşov, a couple of hours’ drive south, a journey that takes the form of a pastoral picture book. Grazing sheep line mountainsides and sheepdogs pause for breath roadside. I pass stalls selling raw milk, cheeses and jams. Seemingly every few minutes there’s a new village with a remarkable fortified stone church and well-preserved Saxon homes.

I pass through the Bucegi mountains for a quick pit stop at a new hilltop restaurant called Stup, within the Matca Hotel. Its panoramic terrace is reason enough to pop by, however, chef Zsolt Deak is using the spectacular setting to inspire his neo-Romanian menu. I keep my order simple and stick to the flavours of the surrounding forests, opting for a roulade filled with mushrooms served with garlic-stuffed mushrooms and, naturally, a mushroom puree. The fungi were foraged on the property and chef Deak’s aim is to capture the ‘earth’ in each dish. He succeeds. The mushrooms taste meaty and a bit nutty, bringing an element of the woods to the plate.

Arriving in Braşov that evening, the sun is setting, making the city’s pastel facades pop just a little bit more. Largely famous for being the gateway to Bran Castle, the legendary home of Dracula, Braşov’s mystical legacy lures horror-lovers and history buffs, but local restaurants have a more tangible heritage.

I head for Pilvax, where owner Emese Gábor, a vet-turned-restaurateur, specialises in duck, served nose-to-tail with a different cut in every course. To start, it’s a charcuterie board featuring duck liver mousse, smoked duck breast and an array of cheeses, including urdă, Transylvania’s answer to ricotta. The duck breast has a smokiness that intensifies its gamey flavour.

Next up is a duck soup that Emese cooks using the bones of the bird, with a semolina dumpling. Seared duck thigh follows, served with redcurrant sauce and cauliflower puree, a sweet-sour combination emblematic of the region. For dessert, there’s vargabéles, a local sweet noodle cheesecake made using thin strands of homemade fettuccine, which Emese coats with a mixture of cheese curds, raisins and eggs, layered together and baked until crisp and served with jam. The result is surprisingly light, not at all too sweet and delightfully comforting.

“All of us cook this kind of food at home,” says Emese. This sentiment was one shared by Irina. “If you only focus on the restaurants, then you won’t get the whole idea of what Transylvanian cuisine is,” she told me.

With that advice in mind, I set off to the village of Hărman to meet Corina Bozgan, who’s part of a movement across Transylvania called Gastro Local. The concept is simple — locals invite guests into their homes to eat a traditional meal made using ingredients from their gardens and farms. The overarching aim of the organisation is to contribute to the sustainable development of Romanian villages and the gastronomic heritage of the Romanian countryside. “You cook what your family eats — old recipes from your mother, grandmother, aunts,” says Corina, who’s named her venture Hof (meaning ‘homestead’) Hărman.

Corina and her best friend Ioana Gherghel cook straightforward, farm-to-table dishes based on 17th- and 18th-century Transylvanian recipes. Everything served comes either from their garden or local producers in Hărman. She starts me off with a glass of fresh elderflower juice and a chilled sour cherry soup, which is thicker than expected as the cherries are served in varying textures — whole, pureed and in chunks — enlivened with nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and juniper. It’s only slightly sweet, superbly sour and festive in flavour, like a summery mulled wine. There’s a Saxon-style meatloaf called drob to follow, and the meal concludes with two desserts: kolatschen, a sweetened bread roll topped with raspberry jam, and a tart rhubarb cake with meringue.

I pack a few kolatschen for the road and drive to Rotbav, where I meet George Cățean, a sixth-generation farmer at Ferma Cățean. George tells me his family have been herding sheep since 1691, and, together with his two brothers, they run the farm “the traditional way”. That means milking roughly 600 sheep a day by hand, marching them across the mountains daily and making cheeses. The impressive set-up has earned Ferma Cățean accolades worldwide, and counts King Charles III among previous visitors. George says it’s the biodiversity that sets his cheeses apart, with a wide variety of plants in the pastures. “We have about 70 types of plant per square metre here; you’re going to taste that in the milk.”

He prepares a tasting for me: one-year-old and eight-month-old varieties, a fresh one made that morning, a smoked cheese and finally brânză în coajă de brad, which he calls the ‘queen of cheeses’, and which has been wrapped and aged in tree bark. The hours-old cheese tastes grassy, almost like a cucumber, whereas the ‘queen’ has a camembert-like texture and a hint of pine.

I ask George how it feels to continue the family tradition. “For me, a farmer is not just a farmer,” he says. “Being a farmer is being a green energy producer. It’s working for food security, being a teacher, supporting a simpler economy and saving money within the community. In the past, a farmer often had no choice but to be a farmer. Today, it’s become more important to support a new generation”

More family hospitality greets me in Moșna, two hours north west, at Bio Moșna farm where Lavinia Schuster and her son Joel welcome guests into their kitchen (and for overnight stays) to enjoy traditional Saxon feasts. Their speciality is using long-forgotten herbs, calendulas and pansies from their expansive garden to create colourful, old-world dishes. Lavinia serves me a platter of her homemade charcuterie and cheeses. There’s also butter made from this morning’s cow’s milk, and I can taste the wildflowers.

To follow, Lavinia has prepared a meatloaf-like dish inspired by a recipe she found in a 150-year-old Saxon cookbook, combining pork and beef, cream cheese and onion, decorated with sunflower seeds, fried sage and speck. It’s accompanied by a chanterelle mushroom pasta (handmade, of course) and a roasted vegetable gravy. It’s a meal for big appetites, and Lavinia says she cooks it almost weekly.

The meat is so juicy it barely needs the gravy, while the sunflower seeds and fried sage add crunch and herbal, earthy, nutty notes. The standout dish, though, is dessert, a poppy seed pancake topped with cherries, calendulas and a perfectly acidic homemade vanilla ice cream made with raw milk.

As I continue driving across Transylvania, I’m smitten by its untamed grandeur. I snake up and down the smoky Carpathian Mountains into pristinely preserved, UNESCO-listed towns like Viscri, Biertan and Sighişoara, which brim with some of the world’s finest examples of Saxon craftsmanship — pastel farmhouses dating back centuries, fortified stone churches and citadels. Exiting each town, paved roads turn to dirt roads and I spot brown bears emerging from the forest. This is a landscape that’s impossible not to connect with.

This connection reaches a crescendo at Plai restaurant in the city of Sibiu. Here, chef Petra Hianu and her partner Paul Moinea use humble ingredients to resurrect the dishes of their elders. “There’s no new without the old,” says Paul, who honed his skills as a chef at five-star resorts in Italy and Malta. Petra cut her teeth in Michelin-starred kitchens including Maaemo in Oslo and La Degustation in Prague.

“Transylvanian cuisine is rich-flavoured, poor cuisine,” says Paul. The first dish on the menu is crispy trout skin with a tartar sauce made from lovage oil and dill flowers. I’m taken aback by the intensely floral, acidic taste. Next, a buckwheat cracker with soft smoked trout, crisp pickled carrots and a powder made from dried tomato skins. “We don’t throw away anything that can be used,” says Petra.

As well as maintaining a zero-waste ethos, Petra and Paul’s aim is to trigger culinary memories from childhood. It hits me on course four — smoked hay with celery root and pickled lovage. The aroma transports me back to my family’s farm in northern Michigan — haystacks, bonfires, a smoky grill tended by my grandfather.

The symphony continues with a ceremonial welcoming ‘breaking of the bread’, in which I’m asked to rip off a piece of a roll with others in the restaurant. “When a guest enters a Romanian home, they’re expected to break bread with the family, and dip it into salt,” says Paul. For today’s bread, Petra has baked a brioche using mangalitsa pork fat instead of butter. There’s trout to follow and then pork belly that’s been cooked for three days and served with ‘fat grass’ — leafy sedum, normally used to feed pigs. For dessert, Petra digs out some honeycomb from her apiary, which she plates with pollen and milk chips. “Everybody loves milk and honey,” she says. “When I first created this dish, I ate it every day.”

As I walk back to my hotel, still bowled over by the meal, I remember the reason Petra and Paul returned home after a decade away. “Transylvania is your soul,” Paul had said. “It’s your heart.” And it’s a heart and soul, I decide, that’s poured into every dish I’ve eaten.