The curator of Zacuscă and other Romanian culinary stories

It is a collection of articles, studies, editorials and interviews published in different media, but also original (written especially for this volume) by Cosmin Dragomir, one of the best-known Romanian culinary journalists.

The volume addresses different themes of history and Romanian culinary anthropology and benefits from a multitude of illustrations. In large format, hardcover, full color and consistent (431 pages), the volume can delight any gourmand, gourmet or reading enthusiast. You will discover a lot of local gastronomic fun facts that prove how surprising our culinary history is. The book is addressed to all categories of readers, it has no academic claims, on the contrary, it is written and paged with the idea of not intimidating anyone.

Sweet Romania - a history of our desserts

A volume curated together with Adriana Sohodoleanu for Dr. Oetker

When you are proposed to write a website and then a book that will bear the subtitle "a history of desserts from Romania" (careful, you are not Romanian) first you exult and then you start to become overwhelmed by the scale of the project.

Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of pages to read or reread, whether it's history books or memoirs, whether they're cookbooks or digital articles, there's no way not to scare, not to inhibit the initial enthusiasm. Although the clear signaling "a history of desserts" allowed us the luxury of not being exhaustive, gathering information for the texts in this volume, choosing a limited number of topics or recipes, changing them according to immediate needs or identifying other eloquent stories the undertaking was a mentally and physically exhausting process. But, the fact that you are part of one of the largest and most ambitious projects to capitalize on Romanian tangible and intangible gastronomic heritage - a multimedia and multidisciplinary history of Romanian desserts from ancient times to today can give you unsuspected powers.

I wrote a history and no the history because the volume you hold in your hand is an anthology of texts about desserts from us, written within the limitations of time and typographical space inevitable in an endeavor like this. The history of our desserts is to be written, hopefully with the generous contribution of Doctor Oetker, in the coming years, although it should be a country project, not a private initiative.

Gastronomy is a fundamental part of a people's identity, and I was watching with wonder what other nations are doing in terms of historical-gastronomic reenactments.

Regarding how Romanian certain recipes are, I want to quote the anthropologist Florin Dumitrescu: "Dishes spread around the world before the invention of nation-states. National cuisines are late cultural constructs, which each nation makes for itself". Many desserts are common to the whole world, some of them becoming emblematic of local gastronomy either by the frequency with which they are cooked or by a - sometimes insignificant - regional particularity which can be: a spice, a specific technique or a mix of quantities of ingredients. What's more, each of us builds history: in the present case, through each cake whose recipe is inherited from our grandparents and which we cook for our children or grandchildren, we carry on the tradition. I hope that this volume will be an example of good practice of collaboration between current marketing demands and needs and niche research. I would like such books to appear in as large a number as possible because the profile bibliography is quite poor. I think that with this book we have also succeeded in proving that the history of gastronomy does not only have museum value.