Food & Wine

Most visitors arrive expecting Romanian food to be heavy, and leave having eaten a lot of vegetables. The cooking is peasant cooking in the honest sense of the phrase: built on what a household could grow, keep and preserve, cooked slowly, and served in quantities that assume you have been outside.

The dishes worth knowing before you order

Sarmale are the dish Romanians will ask whether you have tried. Minced pork and rice are rolled in cabbage leaves — or vine leaves in summer — and cooked slowly, usually in a clay pot. They arrive with sour cream and a slab of polenta, and every family will tell you their version is the correct one.

Mămăligă is that polenta: cornmeal cooked until it is stiff enough to be cut with a thread rather than a knife. It stands in for bread across most of the country, and it is what most stews, cheeses and soured creams are eaten with. It is not a side dish so much as the surface everything else sits on.

Beyond those two, the pattern is soups sharpened with something sour, a great deal of preserved and smoked pork, sheep's cheese in several forms, and — in the Saxon villages of southern Transylvania — a baking tradition that arrived with German settlers and stayed.

Transylvania is white wine country

This surprises people, and it is the single most useful thing to know about drinking here.

Transylvania's principal wine region is Târnave, on the plateau between the two Târnava rivers in the centre of the region. It is one of the coolest growing areas in Romania, and cool is the point: the wines come out crisp, aromatic and high in acidity, which is not what most people expect from this part of Europe.

Two indigenous white grapes matter most, and both are associated with this region. Fetească Albă is the older of the two. Fetească Regală — the name translates as royal maiden — is a crossing of Fetească Albă with Grasă de Cotnari, and has become one of Romania's most widely planted native varieties. Sauvignon Blanc does well here too, for the same climatic reason.

If you are used to Romanian wine meaning heavy reds, Târnave is the correction.

Where the eating actually happens

The best meals in Transylvania are rarely in town centres. They are in guesthouses in the Saxon villages, where the person cooking is the person who keeps the garden, and in the small producers around the wine villages who will pour you four things and explain three of them.

That is also the argument for driving rather than basing yourself in one city: the food improves the further out you get, and the distances are short.