Carpathia: Food from the Heart of Romania

Carpathia by Irina Georgescu is one of the top cookbooks published in 2020, and one of the very few to focus exclusively on the foods of Romania. Appropriately for the times we find ourselves in this year, Irina’s style of flexible, practical recipes for delicious new dishes also help satisfy the wanderlust many of us feel while stuck at home and unable to explore other countries and cuisines.And what a cuisine can be found in Carpathia! The pages are filled with comfort food that sometimes seems familiar but often with an unexpected twist. Savory lima bean dip with sweet caramelized onions is so simple and quick to prepare yet it’s almost worth the price of the book alone. Slather that on a slice of your favorite bread, and you’ll understand. Every chapter has at least one standout recipe that you’ll want to cook again and again. Highlights for me include the highly addictive “Salties” - caraway bread sticks that make an ideal snack with drinks, Mici “Littles” - grilled sausages that are a common Romanian street food, potato moussaka - an inventive version of the well-known dish, and for dessert - apple and blueberry swirl pie.Of course, Carpathia offers many more delectable recipes to try. The recipes are carefully tested and all I’ve tried have worked well. The author helpfully suggests substitutions and variations which is much appreciated especially now when shopping can be more challenging.With beautiful photos of almost all the dishes plus scenes from Romania, and a distinctive cover design, Carpathia can just as easily grace your coffee table as your kitchen counter. In fact, Carpathia is filled with background information about Romanian culture and places, history, and charming family lore told with great affection by the author. Beautifully printed and bound, Carpathia also makes for a thoughtful and sure-to-be-appreciated gift.I’m confident that if you enjoy trying new dishes but that use familiar ingredients, or treasure beautiful cookbooks, you will be very happy to add Carpathia to your collection. Highly recommended!

For this as a gift for my Romanian born husband. He loves it. Several of the dishes are slightly different from the region where he is from, but tjey are delicious

I had been interested in learning more about Romanian food and culture for a long time after hearing stories from friends of their childhood days back in Romania. When I came across Irina a couple years ago on Instagram I immediately followed her for her recipes and stories that went along with them. When I heard that Irina was working on a Romanian cookbook. a collection of home recipes, I knew right away that I had to have it. And it certainly didn't disappoint. Not only are the recipes delicious and accompanied by beautiful food photography and styling, she has included stunning imagery of the Romanian landscape...something that is just so captivating and almost fairy-tale like. The cookbook is organized so well with a glossary of terms up front, so I don't get lost in a recipe not knowing what something means. If anyone is interested in learning more about the regional influences of Romanian home cooking, do pick up a copy ! You'll love it!

A lovely collection of recipes with beautiful photographs. The recipes are well conceived. Having our own family recipes, I am enjoying comparing them to the delicious recipes in this book. I am a little disappointed that the recipes call for sunflower oil instead of the traditional lard which was used until the late 1990s, however that substitution can be made easily. The bigger disappointment was the pickled foods like muraturi. In this book, the recipes are made using vinegar, but both traditionally and still today, these foods are fermented with a simple saltwater brine. This makes them more delicious and provides beneficial probiotics as well as naturally preserves them. Still, I was very happy to gift this book to my mother-in-law, and we are looking forward to incorporating many of these recipes into our family meals.

This is an absolute gem of a cookbook! It was fascinating to read about Romanian culture and the photos were lovely.My family is from Poland and it was very educational to see the similarities and differences in the recipes as well as traditions listed.While I wish the some of the recipes had more photographs included in an instructive manner, the recipes themselves have all turned out very well.Highly recommend this cookbook! Truly demonstrates food from the heart and how we can learn about each other through culinary cultures.

Seems rather pricey for what you ultimately get.Of the 224 total pages, you have 103 recipes, 80 % of which have pics. 18 of which are desserts, most, unless you're a professional baker, you probably wont ever make.There are also 26, pickling, jams or coffee or drink mixes, which leaves you with a total of about real meal 59 recipes.

I like the well writen recipes and that most dishes have a photo. It would have been helpful to have a pronunciation guide for the Romanian names of the dish. The print size is small and the landscape photos are not crisp and are not labeled. The additional information on the country in the back of the book is interesting. I would have liked a map of the country included. I love forward to cooking some of these dishes.

I love the recipes included in this book and it looks beautiful. I did notice a fair number of typos and even some if the measurement conversions are off. Overall everything is presented well, it just needs to go back to the editing room.

I wasn’t familiar with Romanian food before and I loved what I saw in the book! This is comfort food at its best: if you are a meat and potato type of person you will love what’s on offer. The gammon dish is incredible, my picky children devoured it. I have done several bakes, dips and main dishes and found them to be all straightforward with easily accessible ingredients. My only issue was the recipe on p61 for “Placinta cu carne”. There is no way the dough used on the picture corresponds to the one in the recipe as it looks more doughy than the one proposed. I strongly recommend using more flour than what is stated otherwise it’s very difficult to stretch or alternatively half the filling ingredients as it will leak everywhere and the dough won’t cover it. The dough is more like a cornish pasty in the end (so still very tasty) but doesn’t match the picture as I said.

This unfortunate hiatus from real life has had some benefits. One of these is - for me - more time to do something I've sadly neglected - cooking from cookbooks. I had forgotten how much I enjoy marking up a freshly opened book, the spine cracking just a little, with torn bits of paper. Lately I've been cooking through the torn bits of paper thickly scattered throughout Carpathia. Featuring dishes from the "heart of Romania," Carpathia is a loving culinary travel through a rich and varied country; a country with distinct influences from nearby cultures & countries. Irina's beautifully written recipes are intertwined with personal journeys & stories of an ancient place that not many of us have visited. The photographs are just stunning, too. Carpathia's recipes are fairly meaty, but there are a surprising number of vegetable dishes. And ones where meat is present as flavouring not feature. Irina also gives the reader some really intriguing sounding baked goods, as well as pickles and preserves. Oh, and if you, like me, lean on the versatility of polenta, Irina has many very interesting dishes - sweet and savoury - for you to try, as well as using it as a textural ingredient. Our favourite recipe so far is Urzici cu ustoroi - nettle fricassée with garlic flakes & pumpkin seeds (it has a little polenta in it). We used mainly local young spinach topped up with nettles from our own wild patch of garden. Utterly delicious. Very comforting. Easy, too. Very much a book to not only cook from but to read.

Carpathia is enchanting and captures so many interesting techniques, influences and flavours from the heart of Romania. It is beautifully set out with chapters on small plates and sharing food, breads, a ‘tangy’ chapter, mains, desserts and a stunning closure with pickles, preserves, compotes and drinks. Irina writes evocatively about her Romanian culture and heritage and the photography and modern, rustic styling is delightful. The recipes can be made with readily-available ingredients; try the Breaded alpine cheese dish with cheddar, for example. It’s simple and incredibly good. The dessert chapter is wonderful too; try the Apricot yoghurt cake with seasonal apricots or use another fruit or a tinned variety. Homely and heartwarming and true to Irina’s style - a stunning account to follow on Instagram, too.

The recipes mingle echoes of familiar things with the less known. Many are recognisable in other incarnations (polenta, stews, pies) but in this book they are firmly rooted in traditional ways of preparing (and eating) home-made food. No fast food, no 'chop and throw together' salads, no cutting corners, but no fancy elaboration or unnecessary 'exotic' ingredients either. Just good food. As with everything related to food and eating, what one isn't used to might work or not. Variation and adaptation are wholly possible with the recipes in this book. The food photography looks lovely, but a particular bonus were the beautiful photographic landscape panoramas that are frequent throughout the book. Overall a beautifully presented hardback on good paper with inspirational recipes and images.

Carpathia is Irina Georgescu's first book and features dozens of recipes from her native Romania with chapters covering everything from salads and sharing plates to pickles, main courses and puddings. Producing it has clearly been a huge labour of love and it's my favourite kind of cookery book, punctuated with stories and asides and the author's personality and passion shining through. It's so beautifully-photographed too, that it's hard to know where to start as you just want to eat everything. Carpathia would suit anyone who loves food, from beginner to expert. Many of the dishes are new to me (and I'm a fairly experienced cook and enthusiastic eater), but not so exotic that I'd struggle to source ingredients. And there are enough recipes to make it worthwhile for non meat-eaters too. I've enjoyed it so much I can't wait to visit Romania and sample its culinary delights myself. Highly recommended.