Romanian tastes on Canadian vloggs

Pakistan, Jakarta (Indonesia), Brazil, are just some of the places visited and featured on the vloggs created by two Canadian youths calling themselves the "JetLag Warriors." They visited Romania as well, and produced a series of 90 videos recommending several unusual "traditional recipes," as well as outstanding areas, including buildings of great historical value in our country.

JetLagWarriors, the Canadian couple made up of Steve and Ivana, have travelled for several years, especially during the Canadian winter, so that got the taste of traveling and decided to spend their life on the road "indefinitely." They post information on low-budget travel, Airbnbs, street food and many others. In the series devoted to Romania, the tripe sour soup is not necessarily a surprise, but the clip recommending palinca or plum brandy with black pepper as a "sickness cure" is a lot more exciting. It is in Romania that the Canadians seem to have discovered this universal remedy, which cures everything from a hangover to a sore throat.

We talked about this tradition of old folk remedies in Romania and elsewhere with Chef Relu Liciu, and we found out that hangover remedies are very different:

Relu Liciu: "These remedies vary from one region to another and, around the world, from one country to the other. When I went to Germany I found out they used bananas, given the lack of potassium in your body during a hangover. Usually, in 90% of the cases, people get a hangover because they mix drinks."

And still, can "ţuica" or "palinca" be used as sickness cure?

Relu Liciu: "Some use it as an appetiser, to drink before the meal, while others regard is as a digestive, to be had after a meal. A lot of nations, including Italy or Austria, use spirits as a digestive. But go to Transylvania, and you'll never get ham and palinca at the end of a meal, this is what you start with. And it does have to do with the stomach. I remember I went to Serbia many years ago and I saw a bottle in a drugstore, the label read "Stomakia", and it was a local brandy with leaves of wormwood in it."

Our guest also told us why some of the best-known Romanian sour soups, especially the giblets and the tripe soup, are seen as hangover cures:

Relu Liciu: "Just before a hangover, you get dehydrated and you desperately need liquids. But after that you get really hungry, and you can't have anything solid. A tripe soup serves both purposes, and it's a meal in itself, you don't really need a second course after that. But if you ask me, the giblets soup is THE hangover cure. I first heard about it when I was 7, it was served at weddings after the party or the next day, you couldn't have a wedding without giblets soup!"

As for the tripe soup, Steve and Ivana, who have learned to cook it as well, not only to eat it, call it "life!" The vloggers across the Ocean were so delighted with what they found in Romania, that they celebrated their return home with a plate of "mici." Other culinary recommendations they make include the pálinka / pălinca, various vegetable spreads, the "Cluj-style cabbage" which they compared to "sweet lasagna", and various traditional desserts. But Romanian food, they say, is so good and filling that you don't really need a dessert.

Chef Relu Liciu tells us more about what we should eat or drink after having local drinks:

Relu Liciu: "Many people use coffee, many others use pickles, yet others eat sweets or use carbonated drinks. People planning to drink usually do a little preparation first, in the sense that they have a fatty meal or drink some olive oil, to make sure the stomach is lined and the alcohol doesn't go straight into the blood stream."

The Romanians who saw the video in which Steve drinks a shot of ţuică with black pepper seem to have enjoyed it, while some found it funny and said the brandy should have been hot and the pepper shouldn't have been ground. But beyond the jokes and criticism, the fact is that a growing number of Romanian recipes are getting viewed and appreciated around the world. (AMP)