In this Foodie Profile I chat to the award-winning, cookbook author and food writer, Irina Georgescu. Irina hails from Romania and though now based in the UK, she is a culinary and cultural champion of her homeland. In addition to authoring three cookbooks, Irina also runs food tours in Romania. Read on to discover more about Irina’s work, the Romanian pantry, regional tastes, two recipes, and more.
1. Romania has such a rich and layered culinary heritage. For someone discovering it for the first time, how would you describe the cultures and histories that have shaped Romanian food, and what are some examples of how those influences show up on the Romanian plate today?
Romanian food is best understood as a living map of the country’s history: complex, layered, and shaped by centuries of migration, trade, empire, and pastoral life. Sitting at a Romanian table today can feel like reading a history book through flavour.
At the heart of Romanian cuisine is an ancient shepherding culture rooted in the Carpathian Mountains. Romania is, fundamentally, a land of dairy and cheese, and those pastoral traditions spread alongside the Latin-based Romanian language through a region otherwise dominated by Slavic cultures. That heritage still defines the Romanian palate today. You’ll find an abundance of cheeses such as brânză and telemea, along with sour cream, yoghurt, whey, and fermented dairy woven into everyday cooking.
Long before the Romans arrived, Greek traders and settlers established colonies along the Black Sea coast, bringing ingredients and tastes that still resonate today such as olives. The Romans cultivated leeks and taught us a deep appreciation for sour flavours. That love of acidity became one of the defining pillars of Romanian cooking, visible in soups, stews, fermented vegetables, and tangy broths.
Romania’s geography and political history added even more layers. In Transylvania, in the north, Austro-Hungarian influences are evident in the use of paprika, rhubarb, and caraway seeds. In the south, centuries of Ottoman rule left behind filo pastry pies, stuffed vegetables, moussaka, and sarmale – cabbage leaves rolled around savoury fillings. In the east, Slavic and Russian influences emerge in savoury or sweet dumplings, inherited from central Asia.
And then there is cornmeal – perhaps the single ingredient that most defines Romanian cuisine. Romanians have a profound attachment to mămăligă, their version of polenta, but it is very different from the soft, creamy versions many people know elsewhere.
Traditionally, it is cooked until firm, then cut into wedges with string and served almost like bread. In regions such as Maramureș, it becomes balmoș, a rich and complex dish cooked with whey and several types of cheese. Cornmeal appears everywhere in Romanian kitchens: in savoury dishes, desserts, fish coatings, breads, and even omelettes. It’s remarkable how deeply one ingredient can shape a national cuisine.
Romania’s landscape also explains much about its food. It is a country of mountains, rivers, plains, orchards, and fertile farmland, so the cuisine naturally draws from meat, fish, dairy, wheat, cabbage, potatoes, fruits, and walnuts. My first book is called Carpathia for a reason.
Most of all, our use of garlic is legendary. Across all these regional traditions, two flavour profiles stand out above all: sour and smoky. Sourness comes from fermented vegetables, bran-based ferments, and cultured dairy. Smoke comes from the country’s extraordinary charcuterie traditions – smoked sausages, pork belly and hams, plus cheeses, and even fruits. In some regions, prunes are slowly smoked in the residual heat of outdoor bread ovens, creating an intensely flavoured delicacy.
What makes Romanian food so compelling is that none of these influences erased the others. Instead, they coexist. The cuisine carries traces of shepherds, merchants, empires, monasteries, mountain villages, and trade routes all at once. That’s why discovering Romanian food often surprises people: every dish tells a story, and every table reveals another layer of history. Those who come with me on culinary tours to Romania are always surprised by our cuisine.
2. Romania’s regions each have their own distinct identity. Could you take us through a few regions you love – what grows there, what people cook, and the dishes that best capture each place?
Romania is traditionally divided into three main historical regions, but the story is more layered than it first appears, because each region contains smaller cultural worlds of its own.
In the centre and north lies Transylvania – a region with a rich and complex history, where many ethnic communities have lived side by side for centuries. The best known are the Saxons and Swabians, the Magyars and the Szekely, though Armenian and Jewish communities also left a lasting mark on the local cuisine. The food here is hearty and deeply comforting: slow-cooked stews scented with caraway and tarragon, smoked pork and sausages, paprika-rich dishes, cured lardo, cheeses, cabbage and potatoes. Transylvania’s cuisine reflects Central Europe as much as Romania itself.
To the south is Wallachia, or Tara Romaneasca – the “Romanian Land”, where the influence of the former Ottoman Empire is still strongly felt. Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Turkish, and Tatar communities all contributed to the region’s food culture, but the soul of Wallachian cooking comes from the Romanians of Oltenia and Buzau. Here, Balkan flavours dominate. Bread is still baked “la test,” in a style dating back to Roman times. Stuffed red peppers known as “crayfish,” leek stews seasoned with olives, mutton sausages, and pork confit preserved “la garnita” speak of a cuisine built on bold flavours, resourcefulness, and rural traditions. Don’t be surprised to also find baklavas and many filo pies called placinte and cooked in rectangular trays.
Then there is the east: historic Moldavia. Part of this region was lost to Russia after the Second World War and today forms the Republic of Moldova, a separation that further shaped the area’s identity. Moldavian cuisine carries both Russian and Ottoman influences, reflecting centuries of cultural overlap. The food is a rich blend of Balkan warmth and Slavic comfort – sweet and savoury dumplings, soups soured with bors, a fermented condiment similar to kvass, abundant cornmeal dishes, and, above all, plenty of sour cream. In fact, if guests arrive and the sour cream suddenly disappears from your fridge, they are almost certainly Moldovan.
Yet regional identity in Romania is not always easy to define today. Decades of Communist rule damaged many local traditions and blurred the culinary borders between regions. For a long time, it could seem as though the whole country ate the same food. But in recent years, Romanians have begun reconnecting with their regional heritage – rediscovering forgotten recipes, reviving local ingredients, and rebuilding a culinary identity that is proudly diverse once again.
3. For someone visiting Romania for the first time, what food experiences would you encourage them to seek out – not just what to eat, but where and how to experience Romanian food culture?
It depends where you travel in Romania, but Bucharest is a wonderful place to begin. Wander through the Old Town, where faded grandeur, carved facades, and lively streets still carry echoes of the past. Stop at Lacrimi si Sfini for deeply comforting sarmale, or step inside Caru cu Bere, one of the city’s most beautiful historic buildings, for smoky mici straight from the grill. For something simpler and seasonal, Bacania Veche serves food that feels like home cooking at its best. Want to taste what we ate during Communist times? Some people actually miss it. Petra does it brilliantly, the menu has a sense of humour about itself, and the food is genuinely well done.
Romania also has a bold modern food scene. Soro Lume and Kane in Bucharest offer thoughtful tasting menus that reinterpret Romanian flavours with creativity and elegance. Or Mahala and Cambun restaurants, so good, innovative yet keeping traditions in mind. Near Brasov, Matca pairs breathtaking mountain views with beautifully crafted dishes, while Ograda offers a more traditional atmosphere, complete with frescoed walls and pillowy papanasi, warm curd-cheese doughnuts with sour cream and jam.
Across the country, one thing you should always order is ciorba. It is Romania’s soul in a bowl: clear, lively soups filled with meat, vegetables, or both, brightened with sour cream and fiery pickled chillies. If you see bors on the menu, it means the soup is soured with a fermented wheat bran liquid that gives it a deep, tangy flavour. So if you are in Cluj-Napoca, try Zama Bistro.
In the Danube Delta, fish ciorba appears often on the table – a deeply comforting local soup made with freshly caught fish, and one of those dishes that feels inseparable from the landscape itself. When I take groups on culinary tours here, they are really impressed by it.
If I had to build the perfect Romanian meal, it would begin with smoky roasted peppers, silky aubergine salad, and whipped bean dip. Then a hot bowl of ciorba, followed by grilled or fried fish, especially saramura, fish in a garlicky, spicy broth. Share a plate of sarmale with creamy polenta, sour cream, and chillies. Finish with papanasi or cozonac. Start the evening with a shot of tuica or palinca, end it with visinata, a sour cherry liqueur, coffee, and drink local wines throughout, especially the floral Feteasca Alba and the rich, velvety Feteasca Neagra. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be fabulous.
4. Despite the regionality of Romanian cuisine, there are also staple foods and dishes that are much loved across the country. What does a typical Romanian food pantry always have in it and for those of us outside Romania, where would we find some of these products and how would we use them?
My pantry tells you everything you need to know about Romanian cooking.
Cornmeal is always there – fine and coarse, depending on what I’m making. I use stone-ground because it has flavour on its own; you don’t need to add much else. Coarse grind works beautifully in polenta or as a filling for stuffed cabbage leaves. Fine grind is perfect for breading fish or meat.
Garlic is non-negotiable. Most dishes start with it, and some finish with it, too. There’s a dish called Ostropel (it’s in my book Carpathia) where you also add garlic at the end. We also make mujdei, a garlic condiment that goes with just about anything.
Paprika, we call it boia in the south, shows up constantly. It’s especially good with pork, whether you’re roasting it whole, mincing it for fillings, or cutting it into chunks for stew.
Pickles are huge in Romania. Fermented cabbage, gherkins, pickled peppers – they’re pantry staples. So is fermented wheat bran for making bors, the sour base for soups. I make my own (the recipe is in Carpathia), but you can buy it ready-made.
Cabbage, potatoes, and white beans appear in endless combinations. There’s even a well-known dish called Varza a la Cluj that’s all about cabbage.
The herbs we use most are lovage, tarragon, and dill – very typical of Eastern Europe. And curd cheese, a fresh young cheese, goes into all kinds of pie fillings and cakes. You’ll find plenty of recipes for it in my baking book Tava.
5. In your third and most recent cookbook, Danube, you focus on dishes that are rarely found in restaurants. What makes these recipes so tied to the home, and how might a visitor experience this more intimate side of Romanian cooking while travelling?
There are really two parallel worlds when it comes to Romanian food: restaurant cooking and home cooking. Of course, there is some overlap during major celebrations like Christmas, Easter, or Lent, when traditional dishes appear everywhere, but with Danube I wanted to focus on the food people actually cook at home every day – the recipes shaped by seasonality, local ingredients, family habits, and whatever happens to be available at that particular moment.
What surprised me while researching the book was how rarely these dishes appear on restaurant menus, because they represent such an important part of Romanian culinary identity. They are often simpler, more intimate dishes, passed down through generations rather than designed for restaurants. They belong to kitchens, gardens, and family tables.
For me, Danube is also an invitation to understand Romania beyond the familiar “postcard” image of Transylvania, which has become our most internationally marketed region. The book follows the Danube and explores communities, histories, and food traditions that many visitors never encounter.
Travel can offer that experience too, especially when food becomes the way into a culture. Through my culinary tours, I take groups not only to Transylvania, but also to the Danube Delta, where we explore local cuisine in a much more personal way. We eat in people’s homes, try dishes that are part of their family traditions, and cook with ingredients grown in their own gardens.
It is always a delicate balance, because visitors also want to experience the well-known Romanian staples, and rightly so. That is why our tours combine both city and countryside experiences, allowing people to discover the iconic dishes alongside the quieter, deeply personal cooking that rarely leaves the home kitchen.
I think it is one of the most meaningful and mindful ways to travel. Through food, you begin to understand not only a country’s flavours, but also its history, geography, and the rhythms of everyday life.
6. In Carpathia, you write about how growing up under communist rule shaped what food was available and how people cooked. How did that experience influence your relationship with food, both then and now?
Growing up under Communist rule shaped my relationship with food in ways I still recognise today. The most immediate one is probably that abundance on the table still feels deeply important to me, even when it isn’t necessary. I find comfort and reassurance in seeing a table full of food, in being able to share generously with others. I think that instinct comes directly from growing up in a time of scarcity, although we never starved.
At the same time, and without wanting to romanticise that period in any way, those years also taught me to appreciate seasonality in a very profound way.
During Communism, the overwhelming abundance of choice we see in supermarkets today simply did not exist. There was a short moment when aubergines appeared, and it genuinely felt exciting. We waited for cherry season, for strawberries, for apricots. You anticipated those flavours because you knew they would disappear again. We never had strawberries in winter. So, perhaps for the wrong reasons, I learned very early on to appreciate produce at its peak, when nature intended it to be eaten.
The other lasting influence was the importance of home cooking. We simply did not know anything else. Everything was made from scratch, no matter how labour-intensive the dish was. In fact, the time spent preparing festive food was considered part of the celebration itself. Making cozonac or rolling hundreds of sarmale was never seen as inconvenient; it was part of the ritual, part of the anticipation, part of how families came together.
Today, I sometimes feel we are trying too hard to remove time from cooking – to make cozonac in 15 minutes or sarmale in 10. Of course, convenience has its place, but I also think we have lost something valuable along the way. Cooking used to create rhythm, patience, and connection. I think we need some of that ritual back in our kitchens.
7. You’ve spoken about black market recipe exchanges during that time via written notes or word of mouth, and how your mother kept these recipes in a chocolate box. Where did these exchanges happen, and what do you remember most about the recipes your mother collected?
These exchanges happened wherever people gathered and trusted one another enough to share – at work, between neighbours, among friends. My mother collected many of her recipes at work, but also from her sisters and the women around her. Recipes were passed from hand to hand on scraps of paper or shared through conversations, almost like a hidden currency of comfort.
As a child, I was fascinated by the chocolate box where my mother kept all these handwritten recipes. I loved “organising” them – first alphabetically, then by category, only to reshuffle them all over again. I remember sitting for hours reading the recipe titles. Some were wonderfully vague. One was simply called “Delicious Cake”, with barely any method beyond “make a sponge cake” or “prepare a vanilla cream”. Others felt deeply personal, like Irina’s Birthday Cake – a rich chocolate and toasted walnut cake that eventually found its way into my baking books Tava.
What I remember most, though, is how human these recipes were. Some read almost like diary entries or snapshots of everyday life. One note said something like: “On Wednesday, I forgot to buy flour, so I went to my neighbour to borrow some, and she gave me a recipe for jam cookies.” The recipes carried stories of friendship, improvisation, and generosity.
There was also an incredible ingenuity in them. I remember one trick where burnt sugar was diluted with water and brushed onto sponge cakes to imitate the flavour, and even the colour of cocoa, which was often hard to find. These recipes were not just about baking; they were about resilience, imagination, and finding ways to create joy with very little.
8. In Tava, you explore baking across Romania and beyond, drawing on cookbooks, community knowledge and your own family’s recipes. What did this process reveal to you about what baking means in Romanian homes?
The process definitely looks easier than it really was. Along the way, I discovered regional and ethnic recipes I never imagined existed, each one carrying its own story and sense of place. In Romania, we bake for almost every occasion, and I’ve come to realise that baking and desserts are often the most persuasive forms of storytelling.
I remember someone once telling me about an important meeting with potential sponsors or investors. Nervous about speaking English in such a high-pressure situation, they decided to bring along a very simple childhood dessert to share. In that moment, baking became more than hospitality — it became something familiar to hold onto.
That’s what fascinates me about baking in Romanian culture. It is not only about pleasure or indulgence. There is ritual baking for religious celebrations, festive baking for family gatherings, and even “good omen” baking for life’s important moments. Recipes are tied to emotion, superstition and belonging.
And while writing Tava, I realised something even deeper: baking can also become a way of preserving identity and surviving difficult times. Many communities held onto recipes as a way of protecting their culture, language, and traditions when everything else around them was changing.
So although Tava is, on the surface, a baking and dessert cookbook, I believe that if you read it closely, almost like a history book, you also learn a great deal about Romania and its people.
9. Across your books, is there a recipe that feels especially personal to you, one that holds a story, a memory, or captures something essential about Romanian cooking?
Every recipe in my books feels special to me, though some hold more weight than others. In my latest book, Danube – Recipes from Eastern Europe, I included one that reaches deep into my roots, a dish from my grandfather’s homeland of Oltenia.
This humble recipe, built on leeks, tomatoes, and olives, is more than just food. Oltenia is the region many Romanians believe holds the essence of our national spirit, the place where our truest identity lives. When I cook this dish, I’m not just following steps, I’m connecting with generations, with the land my grandfather knew, with something that feels like the heartbeat of who we are.
Let me share it with you…leek stew with olives from Oltenia (Mâncare de Praz cu Măsline).
I’m also happy to share a link to a free recipe for another dish I love very much: Romanian sarmale. Fermented cabbage leaves are filled with mince pork, rice, onions and savoury, simmered gently in stock with a little paprika, as served with polenta, sour cream and chili peppers. Link here.
10. Romania has such a rich culture of food traditions and rituals. Which ones feel most meaningful to you today, and which would you encourage visitors to notice or take part in when they travel there?
To me, it has to be Easter. In Romania, Easter is even more important than Christmas, and the culinary traditions surrounding it are the reason I began promoting Romanian cuisine, and ultimately why I changed my career entirely.
It all started in the UK, where I began cooking traditional Easter dishes for family and friends. I was struck by how curious people were about Romanian food and how much they enjoyed it. At the same time, I realised how little many people knew about Romania beyond the stereotypes. Food became my way of changing that perception – by sharing not only our dishes, but also the stories, history, and traditions behind them.
What began around my own dinner table slowly turned into a completely new path for me: three cookery books, awards, culinary tours to Romania, contributions to magazines and newspapers, and television appearances. I could never have imagined that cooking Easter recipes abroad would lead me this far.
That’s why, if possible, people should visit Romania during Easter and experience the local customs for themselves. And even if they travel at another time of year, they can still ask guesthouses to prepare traditional Easter dishes such as lamb stufat or drob, the Romanian lamb meatloaf. I’m sure most hosts would happily make them, even though lamb in Romania is largely seasonal and closely associated with Easter celebrations.
And of course, for those who cannot travel, many of these Easter recipes are included in my books, so they can bring a little of Romania into their own kitchens.
Website: irinageorgescu.com
Culinary tours: irinageorgescu.com
Substack:https://substack.com/@irinageorgescu
Photographs copyright: Jamie Orlando Smith, Matt Russell, Issy Crocker, Irina Georgescu, RawDelta.
