Superb miraculous Romanian dishes. The almost forgotten cures that delight your senses but also cure your hangover

The holidays can prove to be a tough test for the body. Especially if we are talking about too rich meals and too many alcoholic drinks ingested. But the Romanian has a cure for everything, including hangovers. In the holiday tradition there are some miraculous recipes.

Fish soup with cabbage stock PHOTO Shutterstock

The winter holidays are difficult for Romanians. Both from a spiritual, family, social and culinary point of view. That is to say, many Romanians go out with their guts hard tried and quite flabby after the Christmas days spent with family, friends and acquaintances, but especially after the New Year's Eve, the heavy hop of the body bombarded with all kinds of food but especially with plenty of drink.

The hangover on January 1 hits many residents of the Carpatho-Danubian-Pontic space as well as all the Balkans from the Carpathians to the Aegean (not that the rest of the Europeans are safe from this post-New Year's injury). But just as Romanians know how to cook crazy dishes and liquors that add to the party, they also know the most elaborate cures for hangovers and damaged stomachs. Here are three of the most powerful and delicious, at the same time, recovery dishes after a hard night of partying. Some are traditional in the urban environment, others in the countryside, but all are at least a century and a half old.

The Romanian miracle after too rowdy parties

The ultimate cure for hangovers and generally the end after a heavy night of partying, such as a wedding or New Year's Eve, is horseradish soup. A classic of the post-drunken dressing for Romanians, but unfortunately and unfairly more and more forgotten and ignored in our times in favor of pharmaceutical products, is the horseradish soup.

“Still a ritual stew, but not at all religious, but, alas, very secular, usually ending, like a sour balm, a night of partying and abuse(…) Potroaca means salt, nothing else, a restorative juice that traditionally removes poison from drunkards, hangovers from godfathers and butter from cooks. It is the soup of tired mornings and chilled by excesses, the Wallachian panacea, detoxifier of the dark rivers of wine that pollute the perverse, Sardanapalic and adventurous wedding night”writes the late Radu Anton Roman in “Cooking, wines and Romanian customs”.

Potroac soup is a peasant food, served in the mornings after weddings, christenings and other strong parties in the world of the Romanian village, sprinkled with buckets of wine and a lot of brandy. It later made its way to the city and began to populate the menus of roadside or slum taverns. Being so good both as a cure and as a culinary delight, the horseradish soup quickly reached the dinner tables, repairing all the “damages” caused by New Year's excesses. Here is the well-known recipe for the famous horseradish soup. First of all, poultry cuts are used, i.e. necks, backs, rumps, but also entrails of poultry, i.e. hearts and giblets. They can be used from chicken, turkey, duck, goose, guinea fowl and any other bird that grows in the householder's yard. At the same time, other important ingredients are also set aside. Vegetables for example.

Horseradish soup PHOTO bucataras.ro

We use onions, carrots, parsnips and celery. We must not forget the rice, cream, eggs, pepper and buttermilk. The wonder ingredient is cabbage juice, clean and suitably sour. It is prepared very simply and within everyone's reach. Cutlery and poultry entrails are boiled in salted water, foaming carefully. The whole thing takes about an hour and a half. While the meat is boiling, we start solving the vegetables. Finely chop the onion and root vegetables and add them to the stew. Leave to boil for another 20 minutes. Add two spoons of rice and leave to boil for another 20 minutes. After that, the blessed cabbage juice is poured, the potroca, the one that gives meaning to this soup. Let it boil for another 3-4 minutes and stop the soup. Quickly mix the egg yolks with the cream. Attention, take and equalize the temperature of the cream-egg mixture with hot juice from the stew, so that it does not curdle. After bringing all the mixture to the same temperature as the juice, pour it into the pot and mix well. Then we add the leustea. The food is ready and the hangover disappears as soon as you clap your hands.

Subtle hangover cure, from the Danube with love

When we talk about a cure for hangovers and fatigue after a long party, we can only think of nutritious snacks. The next post-New Year's cure is obviously also a soup. This time it is a Danube delicacy, eaten all over the valley from Teleorman to Drobeta. If it's a preparation from the riverside, it's obviously with fish, and if it's a hangover cure, it also has sourness. The dish is simply called fish soup with cabbage juice. “Between two former fortresses, Turnu-Măgurele (have you ever thought what a splendid word magurele is? But where was the tower in the name?) and Turnu-Severin, the fish soup is not only soured with vinegar or borscht, but also with cabbage juice”adds the incomparable Radu Anton Roman in the same work.

The soup is made as simply as possible. Prepare the vegetables: three carrots, three onions, two potatoes, three parsnips, a parsnip, a bell pepper, 3-4 tomatoes. Obviously, the main ingredient is fish. Pike or pike are recommended, but Radu Anton Roman confesses that even carp should not be left to such a recipe. At the same time, the cabbage juice and greens should not be forgotten.

Fish soup PHOTO Shutterstock

Chop the vegetables finely and boil them in two liters of water. Meanwhile, put the cabbage juice on the fire, separately. After the first boil, add the good, hot, aromatic cabbage juice to the pot with vegetables. Let it boil for half an hour and add the fish meat cut into pieces. Boil the fish soup for another 20 minutes. Turn off the heat and put chopped greens on top. Leustea is preferable. With this sour juice, light and at the same time nutritious, we can also solve the damage to a stomach that is too tired from so many heavy meals eaten on New Year's Eve.

“A food for drunk visitors” borrowed from the Turks, perfected by the Romanians

We can't end this top three of Romanian anti-hangover cures, miraculous post-party treats, without the famous belly soup. The critics, and rightly so, will say that we cannot pass an oriental food, which reached us through the Ottoman chain, to Romanian dishes. However, belly soup, like sarmaua, experienced an authentic reinterpretation in the Romanian space, being perfectly “acclimatized” and transformed into an authentic autochthonous dish.

Radu Anton Roman is of the same opinion in “Cooking, wines and Romanian customs”, “Of Middle Eastern origin, most likely Arab-Turkish (five centuries of vassalage!) belly soup became a Romanian national good not only through its exceptional popularity but also through the creative additions – cream, egg yolk, leuștean, soup greens, vinegar – that made it autochthonous. Anyway, belly soup, a kind of Eastern onion soup – complete food taking the hangover by hand – it is at home especially in Bucharest but also in the Danube ports and in Dobrogea (the most “Turkish” places for centuries) and it has the gift, in Wallachia, of being the main offer of any restaurant that wants customers. (…) It is food for drunken visitors, but it has the most scholarly and demanding preparation in all Romanian cuisine. It's both sour and sweet, spicy and velvety, fatty yet delicate, eclectic and simple at the same time”he specified.

The original belly soup is prepared in two days and requires a special preparation of the beef belly, obviously bought from the butcher. Since we live in an age of speed and ingredients right on the tray, we can greatly reduce the process. First of all, because we can find ready-to-clean and even pre-cooked beef belly at any supermarket. But let's get down to business. First you need 1-2 kilos of cow legs, with the bones broken (so that the flavor of the marrow comes out) or some medallions with the bone and marrow exposed. Boil the bones for about two to three hours to release all the nutrients and flavor. We have all the time in the world to prepare the vegetables in all this time, but without forgetting to foam the soup.

Belly soup PHOTO bucataria romaneasca.ro

As vegetables we use two carrots, two onions, two parsnips. If we feel like it, we can also add some celery. The vegetables are cut. Grate the parsnip and carrot well and finely chop the onion with a knife. After the three hours have passed, remove the bones and add the belly and the vegetables. Let it boil for another hour (if the belly is the one cleaned and pre-boiled from the store). After everything is cooked and the aroma fills our nostrils, we start with the egg and cream mixture. Rub the yolks with the cream and a clove of peeled and crushed garlic. Add the polony from the juice in the pot, gently, stirring continuously over the egg and cream mixture, bringing to the right temperature. Then pour everything into the soup pot. Season with pepper and salt to taste and add the finely chopped walnuts. It is served hot with hot peppers, but also extra cream, vinegar and olive oil on hand in an olive tree. It's protein, healthy, velvety, nutritious and puts you on your feet as if you were saying “fish”.