Mamaliga is a thick maize meal porridge. It is one of the all-time favourite dishes of Romanian people. It is served with various additional ingredients; it is fried, and used to make puddings. However, it’s not what we’ll be cooking today. Viorika Groza will introduce another national dish to us. Hello, Viorika!  

“Zama is made out of any meat. Today we’re going to cook it using chicken.”

INTRODUCTION

 The hero of our show, ViorIka Groza learnt to cook under the supervision of her husband. She got married at the age of 16 and relied on the all-conquering power of love and was right. Mikhail Groza taught his young wife not only to kindle the flame of the family hearth but also folk dancing, the art of painting and carpet weaving - basically everything that he could do himself. 2 years ago Viorika Groza visited her husband’s homeland, Romania.  

IN THE KITCHEN

Why is it good for your health?

-Because it’s not fried, everything is fresh. 

It’s certainly true that the vegetables are not fried when cooking the soup called Zama. They are only boiled in meat broth and are saturated with its taste and flavour. However, there are some cooking tricks for making this seemingly unsophisticated dish. 

You need to steam the bran with boiling water for fermentation. It is left for one day and, for example, 3 litres of kvass is made at a time. You put it in the fridge and add it to the dish when you need it. It can actually be added to any dish.”

Skillful Romanian cooks enrich the taste of various soups from borsch to solyanka (or a thick sour soup with vegetables and meat) with this kvass. In addition to that, there’s another frequent ingredient in the national Romanian cuisine. According to Viorika Groza, a true Zama soup is never served without chili peppers.  

“We put the hot peppers on the table and not in the meal. We peel them and bake them on coals. They’re very tasty peppers and can be eaten with anything. – But they’re really hot. – They are. Nevertheless, they’re very good for your health. Romanian people don’t start eating without having peppers on their table. ”

While getting down to cooking the soup itself, it is important to keep in mind that the recipe can be altered. It can either be complicated or simplified depending on the preferences of the person who is cooking it. For example, the entire Groza family feels a special love for greenery. Therefore, the amount of herbs exceeds all the other ingredients.  

“So what kind of greens do we have? We have celery and this herb called lovage which is called leustean in Moldavian or Romanian. – Could you show it to me please? It looks and smells different.- Here you are. So we’ve got celery, parsley and the taste of leustean which is also called lovage. It grows in my garden. – Where did you get it? – I brought the seeds from Romania.”

We chop the herbs and don’t hesitate in mixing them altogether as we will put all the greens in to the kazan simultaneously. For those who don’t like dill, parsley or celery, our housewife recommends not chopping them but to split them in two or not to cut them at all so that there aren’t any problems with extracting the boiled greens out of the finished soup with a skimmer. We dice the potatoes into small cubes. There’s an alternative recipe for Zama where the vegetables are boiled in their entirety without being cut at all. Viorika explains further:

“You can even leave the potatoes without cutting them so these big potato pieces are boiled whole then removed and consumed with the broth. This is also very tasty and interesting.”

We are now cutting the peppers into sticks.

“-What else can we add to this soup? You’ve mentioned that you can add some home-made noodles. – Yes, home-made noodles which are usually made out of eggs can be added to it. It’s very tasty. There are two types of soup, both with and without noodles. Everybody prefers not to have flour-based ingredients in there. – So we simply have a summer variety then? – Yes, it’s the summer variety of this soup.” “And now we chop the onions into sticks as well. We also cut them into four parts.” “This is the Romanian name of the soup and there’s a similar one in Turkish cuisine as well. –Yes, in Turkish cuisine it is called Chorba. People also call it Chorba in Romania.”

Chorba is a general name for the hot national soups of Moldavians, Romanians, Serbians, Bulgarians and Turks. Furthermore, the word “chorba” itself goes back to the Turkic “shorpa”. Kvass makes up a considerable part of this dish in the recipes of Eastern European nations. We will cook the soup in a wood-burning stove. Viorika Groza believes that any dish can acquire a special taste thanks to being cooked on an open fire in the fresh air. 

“We already have the broth which was prepared in advance. Which meat are we cooking? – We’re cooking chicken. You can cook it out of chicken, mutton or any meat you like. This dish is tasty with any meat. We put the potatoes in, we’ll get them ready and we’ll also throw in some greens. – Do we cover this all up or cook it in an open pan. – No, we don’t close it.”

“- How often do you cook outside? Do you only do it on special occasions? –Yes, when you need a lot of it. When you don’t have much time you can cook on the gas stove and you can cook 10 litres of Zama in the kazan outside and it’s tastier like that. Any dish prepared on an open fire is a lot tastier. For example, I can’t imagine cooking anything without this stove as I make various products for winter on this stove as well as in the kazan. Everything turns out a lot better and more delicious.”

Without extracting the meat from the broth, we add the cut vegetables and kvass into the kazan and wait until all the ingredients are cooked. 

“Romanian cuisine is believed to be simple and rich at the same time. Anyone can eat their fill and warm themselves when it’s cold weather. And we’ve spent how much time on it? 1.5 hours. It took us only 1.5 hours to cook it.”

RECIPE

Zama
1.5kg of chicken 
500gr of potatoes
0.5kg of tomatoes 
300gr of sweet pepper 
300gr of onions
1.5l of kvass
Herbs 
Pepper
Salt 

Author:Valentina Stepanova