Son both and Sunday, September 23 and 24, the first edition of an ambitious festival will take place in the commune of Sfântul Gheorghe in Giurgiu (near Bucharest): the National Soup Day.
Everything takes place in a picturesque area, on the edge of a lake, surrounded by orchards where participants are expected with many soups, but not only, live music, book launches and culinary debates. The organizers have provided round-trip buses from Bucharest to the destination. More details find here
A day for every day
I must admit that such an initiative makes me very happy. It's a perfect occasion to celebrate what I consider to be the national food. I wrote in detail here, a text that is actually the afterword of his book Mircea Groza: Zămuri, soups, soups and nacreli - Transylvanian dishes from the old which I edited a few weeks ago.
Somehow through these kind of events, more or less festive, I hope to increase the level of awareness of the gastronomic wealth at our disposal. While Asian ramen enjoys strong PR worldwide, while Ukrainian borscht has been recognized as part of the UNESCO Intangible Heritage, while bouillabaisse winks at any more or less gourmet tourist, we don't know how to we really promote some of the emblematic local dishes.
Moreover, and I say this for the thousandth time, restaurants are generally captive to outdated mentalities and cannot escape the inertia of the cloned, standardized menu specific to communism. Although we have hundreds of recipes for soups and stews, you rarely find a local one, otherwise, a soup from the grandmother of the local chef. Exceptions confirm that many customers want this. Notice the success of many Local Gastronomic Points covering a culinary niche almost ignored by mainstream HoReCa.
In the meantime, I hope that this kind of events like the one recommended above will bring a new breath to the culinary branding of the country. As Mircea Groza's book (already in its first print run extension) does: Volum "Zămuri - soups, soups and soups; transylvanian recipes from old people" by Mircea Groza, published this summer by the GastroArt publishing house, is nominated in two categories at the Gurmand Awards 2023 – The best in the World. The book of gastronomic stories and recipes is nominated in the "Food Heritage book" and "Eastern Europe book" categories. The winners will be announced at the end of November during a ten-day event. The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards were established in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau. They reward the best food books, print or digital, as well as food TV.
I can only congratulate those from Soup for the initiative and I will wait for you at the event.
Photo credit: © Valentin Jucov | Dreamstime.com
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