Dishes
Perhaps the best known Moldovan dish is a well-known Romanian dish, mămăligă (a cornmeal mush or porridge). This is a staple bread-like food on the Moldovan table, served as an accompaniment to stews and meat dishes or garnished with cottage cheese, sour cream, and pork rind. Regional delicacies include brânză (a brined cheese), and ghiveci (a mutton stew). Local wines accompany most meals.
Traditional for the Moldovan cuisine are dishes combining diverse vegetables, such as tomatoes, bell peppers, aubergine, cabbage, beans, onion, garlic, and leek. Vegetables are used in salads and sauces, they are baked, steamed, pickled, salted, or marinated.
Meat products hold a special place in the Moldovan cuisine, especially as the first course and appetizers. Chicken soup and meat, known as ciorbă is very popular. Roast and grilled pork, beef meatballs, and steamed lamb are common. Meat and fish are often marinated and then grilled.
Traditional holiday dishes include stuffed cabbage rolls with minced meat (known in Romania as "sarma" and in Turkey as "dolma"), pilaf (a rice dish), jelly,, noodles, chicken, and much more. The holiday table is usually decorated with baked items, such as pastries, cake, rolls, buns, and a variety of fillings (cheese, fruit, vegetables, walnuts, etc.), known in Romania as "cozonac", "pască", and "poale-n brâu".
In certain regions, the cuisine of various minorities is predominant. In the Eastern areas, the Ukrainians eat borscht; in the South, the Bulgarians serve the traditional mangea (sauce with chicken), while the Gagauz prepare shorpa, a highly seasoned mutton soup; in the Russian communities, pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings) is popular. Also popular are a variant of Ukrainian varenyky called colţunaşi, filled with fresh white cheese (colţunaşi cu brînză), meat (pelmeni or colţunaşi cu carne), and cherries.
Read more about this topic: Moldovan Cuisine
Famous quotes containing the word dishes:
“Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“Rice and peas fit into that category of dishes where two ordinary foods, combined together, ignite a pleasure far beyond the capacity of either of its parts alone. Like rhubarb and strawberries, apple pie and cheese, roast pork and sage, the two tastes and textures meld together into the sort of subtle transcendental oneness that we once fantasized would be our experience when we finally found the ideal mate.”
—John Thorne, U.S. cookbook writer. Simple Cooking, “Rice and Peas: A Preface with Recipes,” Viking Penguin (1987)
“First there’s the children’s house of make believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)