11 Jun 2025 4 min read book excerpt

Irina Georgescu's 'Danube'

A new book on Romanian & Eastern European cooking

A few years back, I shared an excerpt and a recipe from Irina Georgescu's book of Romanian desserts, Tava:

Irina has just released a new book, Danube, which follows the river through Romania, with an emphasis on the foodways that flow through and from it. The Danube is the second-longest river in Europe, meandering from Germany to the Black Sea, passing through ten countries along the way. Danube focuses on Romania, but neither rivers nor cultures care a whit about borders:

In one of my other books, Tava, I told the story of some of Romania's ethnic groups through their most important recipes. In Danube, I follow a similar path and take you to the homes of five more communities, where they will cook their family dishes. From the Slavic people of the Iron Gates to the Turkic people of Dobrogea, it is from their culinary ingenuity and wisdom that these local cuisines formed our national cuisine. I use 'national' here in the sense of what people eat across the country, the archetypal dishes, what people remember from their childhood and also what they don't remember.

The book is structured around the culinary and agricultural bounty of the river, with sections on grains ('A Land of Millers'), vegetables ('A Land to Share' and 'A Land of Vegetables'), soups ('A Land of Broths'), fish ('A Land of Fisherman'), and more. One of the most important products of the eastern Danube is cornmeal, especially in the dish mamaliga, essentially Romanian polenta:

I often say that we eat cornmeal more than the Italians. It's true. Coming from the Americas, it was introduced to these lands by the Ottoman Empire, trading with the Venetian and Genoese merchants. Alex Drace-Francis, in his book The Making of Mămaliga, finds maize well established in the 1700s throughout the Carpathian and Danubian area. The plant's presence here was partly a product of these lands situation at the intersection of trade routes, partly a result of the dramatic encounters between the Habsburg and Ottoman land armies in these provinces [...]' It was indeed warfare that determined the intense cultivation of maize in centuries to come.

These borderlands between Empires encouraged a maize market between landowners and armies. The fact that it could grow in the hills and mountains and give better, more reliable yields than wheat was a major advantage. Plus, it was cheaper and readily available. Cooking a cornmeal dish, mamaliga, to satisfy the soldiers' hunger took less fuel and was quicker than making bread. It became the crop to fall on if wheat wasn't enough for civilians, and the rescue plan for Princes to feed their people.

This is how mamalig entered our homes across the country and became a glorious national dish. Throughout this book, you will discover its many stories and versions: simmered, baked or fried. We like to turn it onto a chopping board, allow it to cool, then use a string to cut neat slices.

Like Tava before it, Danube is a beautiful book, filled with gorgeous images, lovely writing, and obviously-delicious recipes, and one you'll want to add to your collection.

Irina offered to let me share two recipes from Danube, and naturally I chose a couple of bready ones. There's pâine la țest (Oltenian ash bread), a thick flatbread baked under a țest—a clay cloche—surrounded by embers.

Along with vinete cu scordolea, a dish of fried slabs of eggplant, served over scordolea, a garlicky bread sauce that came to Romania from Greece (where it is known as skordalia).