Eternal Terrain
By Alexander Lobrano ( Saveur )
Just North of Bucharest, I left this century behind, and an hour later, the last one fell by the wayside, too. As I slowed the car to turn onto a dusty country road, a farmer in blue serge overalls stopped pitch-forking freshly scythed hay just long enough to give a wave, and the honeyed scent of linden flowers wafted in through the open car windows.
Landon Nordeman for Saveur - Transylvanian Recipes
I'd first glimpsed Transylvania through the window of a train traveling from Istanbul to Prague a decade earlier. What I'd seen then—a fascinating medieval landscape of deep forests, small, tidy farms, and fortified hilltop villages—made me want to be there,
to walk its fields, to taste its food.
But I knew next to nothing about the region (apart from the inevitable associations with Bram Stoker's fictional Count) until I started coming across articles in the London papers about agro-tourism in post-Ceausescu Romania a few years ago. After the downfall of one of communism's most dire dictators, several repatriating Transylvanian nobles had opened country house inns. Much of what
I read warned that Transylvania was still "in transition" (read: rough around the edges). This was all that I needed to hear. In the making, history is shaggy, sexy, confusing. For me, any place "in transition" is irresistible. Apparently, I share this inclination with the Prince of Wales. He had become so smitten by the abandoned Saxon villages of Transylvania that he'd underwritten the Mihai Eminescu Trust (MET) to help restore them; through the MET, I learned, you can rent a restored village cottage as a base from which to explore the region and its foodways.
I set off for Transylvania along with my friend Nadine. We arrived at Miklósvár, a village about three and a half hours north of Bucharest and an ancestral seat of the Kálnoky family, just as the cows were coming home. Around a bend by the church, the wide main street was suddenly filled with the caramel-colored herd returning from the pasture that surrounds the village. Miklósvár's denizens, who were sitting on wooden benches outside their pastel-painted cottages to gab with neighbors while watching the event that marks the end of each day, couldn't help but be politely amused when our car was surrounded by the lowing beasts. When I caught the eye of an old man wearing a shaggy sheepskin vest, he smiled and shrugged, his friendly way of telling me what everyone in Transylvania seems to know: If some things can't be hurried, most others shouldn't be either.
At 186 Strada Principal, our destination and the handsomest house in the village, with its immaculate white-washed walls and terra-cotta swallowtail roof, we were welcomed into the formal parlor with bracing shots of caraway-seed brandy and slices of crumbly almond-lemon cake. Despite the wildflowers in an art nouveau vase carefully placed in the middle of a lace doily on a table, this well-kept room had an atmosphere of disrupted gentility. It was Nadine who later noticed the gap between a faded circa-1900 photo of three blond boys in sailor suits at a Black Sea resort and the more recent color portraits of our host, Count Tibor Kálnoky. The chronological hole in the family album began with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, when previously Hungarian Transylvania became part of Romania. Then came the 1920s land reform that broke up the estates of the Hungarian aristocracy, an attempt on the part of the Romanian government to weaken that influence and solder the region to a new motherland. Then World War II, and the mad years of the Ceausescu regime. The endless upheavals slowed the pace of development here, locking the region into a fascinating but fragile time warp.
Landon Nordeman for Saveur - Transylvanian Recipes
We arrived hours later than we expected—suffice it to say that signposts are scarce and mostly incomprehensible in Romania—so after our snack, we joined the other guests at Kálnoky's main guesthouse for dinner. Here you eat according to the same e