[Sca-cooks] Romanian Cookbook: name, fruits, salads

[Patrick Levesque]

 >
>Salads:
>flowers of 'boranza'
>
>***Here I am wondering if this might be borage though the modern romanian
>word for borage is pretty far from that.  Borage flowers are tasty in
>salads.

This is the best guess I've heard so far, from two different persons.



>***There are two plants that I know of that are called ox-tongue in English.
>They sort of resemble dandelions.
>One is
>Picris echioides
>A second is
>Picris hieracioides


>Salad. Mix lettuce, leafs of 'boranza', fatty herbs,
>
>***The idea of fatty herbs is intriguing.  Any thoughts on what that might
>include?  Herbs where the seeds are used to make oil? Or herbs with
>succulent leaves like purselane?

My lady and I were actually wondering about that; it is somewhat hard to
guess at without a more detailed knowledge of Romanian native plants (and
my knowledge of vegetables, let along Romanian ones, is pretty week as it
is :-)). This is, again, a litteral translation; it could well have a
specific meaning.


> leaf of 'matacina',
>
>***If you split matacina up into mata and cina, from  the stem mat (in
>latin) you get meanings of matter, timber, rushes, ripe and morning.  The
>cin stem tends to go to things that are curly or wrapped around.  Combining
>these brought together  a thought of what we eat as curly endive (sometimes
>called chickory in the US) or maybe even escarole.

Endive and chickory are both found under other names in the recipes
presented, however. The introductory notes corrected the spelling as
'matacuina' however. the water weed connection is interesting, I'll have to
look it up as well.

>tops of 'molotru',
>

I often saw in fish recipes seeds of 'molotru' as ingredients; which is why
I think that mustard plant could be the intended meaning (I am, of course,
out on a limb here...)


>Salad of red beet, boieled whole or ripe in 'spuza' in ??? use, cut the
>leaves, cover with capers, rosewater, oil, salt and sugar.
>
>*** Wonder if that could be liquid of spuza or in a spuza kind of pot?
>Modernly spuza in Romanian mean "hot ashes."   So maybe they are giving the
>option of boiling or roasting it?  For the "in calti uzi" part, cal (in
>latin) usually has to do with feet and hard rock/round pebble like things,
>though it can also refer to heating things.  To me it would make sense that
>you boiled the foot(root) of the beet and either did or didn't boil the
>leaves as well.  If you boiled the plant whole with the leaves on, or at
>least the root whole, it would help keep the color from bleeding into the
>water which would make for a prettier salad with the root and leaves each
>remaining their respective colors.

I have to agree that hot ashes seems the solution.

Petru