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)