A Truly Slow Holiday
Liz Houghton
We have just spent a magical eight days visiting the Saxon villages of Transylvania.
A fascinating area where life moves with the seasons and at the pace of the farm
animals in a way that took us back to medieval times. The tour was expertly organised
and guided by Jim Turnbull of Adept – a charitable foundation (www.fundatia-adept.org ) that
is working to preserve this wonderful way of life before it is too late. A praesidium
for the jams has already been set up and Jim is encouraging the producers to run
farmers’ markets in the larger towns. A Slow Food convivium has been set up in Bucharest
and we met and lunched with the leader.
In a small party of nine including the organisers and local guide we bounced and rattled along the potholed dirt roads deep into the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. One day, after several kilometres along such a track, we arrived at the shepherds’ summer camp. These men spend the whole summer camping out with their sheep in the high pastures. Often visited by bears or wolves at night, the camps are guarded by a dozen or so shaggy and very fierce dogs. We watched the sheep being milked and the milk being strained before rennet was added to begin the cheese making process.
Then came lunch - a hearty meal of a variety of sheep’s cheeses, a pork stew cooked
in a three-legged pot over an open fire, followed by cheese-stuffed polenta dumplings
and finally wild plums and cherries from the woods – all washed down with liberal
quantities of polinca (a potent home distilled fruit brandy) and homemade wine. We
ate outside, under the shade of a tree in complete convivial peace, no traffic noise,
no aircraft flying overhead, only the sheep, the dogs and the birds – we felt we
had found paradise.
By the time we had gorged ourselves the cheese was ready to be strained through muslin and the resulting curds pressed down with heavy stones to get rid of excess moisture. Four or five different types of cheese are made. Some like cottage cheese were flavoured with dill and need to be eaten right away, another, with longer keeping properties, is wrapped in pine bark which imparts a subtle flavour and colour to the finished product.
Another day we visited the local baker – a one woman show (her husband helped occasionally
by sprinkling a bit of flour here and there). Originally she had just baked for
her own family’s needs, but the bread was so good that she now gets orders from quite
far afield. The process is completely manual – no bread makers here – and jolly
hard work. The dough which is started the previous night seemed quite wet and sticky
so handling it into several large loaves required some skill. It was baked in a
traditional wood-fired oven which needed to be lit several hours beforehand to bring
it up to temperature. After two and a half hours cooking the loaves come out quite
black, but this outer crust is beaten off with a stout stick to leave a beautiful
golden under-crust.
All the houses in the Saxon villages are of a similar plan. Each one fronts onto the wide main street, which has a stream running down it with ducks, geese, hens and turkeys all dabbling and pecking round for grubs and worms. A large gate (big enough to take a loaded hay cart) leads into a cobbled courtyard. The main house is to one side, with the “summer kitchen” on the other. Beyond the dwelling are a hen house, pig sty and right at the bottom an enormous barn. A substantial part of this enclosed space is devoted to growing vegetables and fruit – all the households are self –sufficient in food. They kill a chicken, goat, sheep or pig when it’s needed and make a tasty meal from whatever is seasonally available in their garden. Indeed the village shop, when there was one, sold only jeans, washing powder and bottled water.
Our group stayed in the village houses and ate like kings. A typical meal began
with soup made using chicken stock and flavoured with vegetables from the garden
and herbs from the fields and woods. Sometimes the soup had beans in it, sometimes
wonderfully light dumplings. This would be followed by a stew of some kind – or
stuffed cabbage leaves, with polenta as the staple accompaniment. Dessert was cake
with rhubarb, cherries, or apricots in it. And all washed down with home-made wine
and polinca.
In the evening we would sit outside the village bar and watch the cows come home – a memorable occasion that conjures up Grey’s Elegy. All the villagers’ cows are taken to pasture by a group of lads each morning to return at dusk with a jingling of cow bells. The courtyard gates are opened in readiness and, as the herd moves slowly up the village street, the cows peel off into their own yards – without any human intervention, save for an old woman with a broom who encouraged the stragglers on their way.
The hay carts also returned at dusk. The hay is all cut by the family using scythes and they’d be sitting on top of the loaded cart. Half way up the street the horses would turn to one side to drink their fill from the horse trough before also returning home.
All the housewives have a rich tradition of bottling and preserving any surplus from the garden, fields and woods. Pickles, chutneys and best of all, wonderful jams are made. These have a much greater proportion of fruit to sugar than our commercial jams so the flavour is really special. Herbs of all kinds are gathered and dried to flavour soups and stews, and for medicinal purposes.
We visited local craft workers using traditional hand tools to make barrels for wine and polinca, a blacksmith who, by special request from one of the group, made a poker while we worked the bellows. We watched charcoal being made deep in the forest, (by the chap whose photo was on the cover of the latest Snail Mail!) and visited a lady who did the most wonderful traditional embroidery and weaving – everything from rugs to tablecloths (special black ones for funeral teas) and lacy mats. One very hot day we donned beekeeper suits to meet the local bees, followed by a tasting of several different honeys – some from the wildflower meadows, some from the forest. This latter was particularly dark and strong flavoured.
This was a truly memorable trip back to a time when life really was slow and sustainable.
Milking Sheep
Handling the Dough
Viscri High Street
Cows Coming Home
Helping the Blacksmith
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