From the history of the cozonac: from the fluffy one from “La Medeleni” to the economical one of the communists, baked on the butter wrappers

One of the most beloved desserts, which combines religion with the secular, tradition with innovation, and which always smells of childhood, is cozonac. “Weekend Adevărul” leads you to some key points of the history of this cake, with the help of three fragments from the most recent book by the writer Tatiana Niculescu, “The delicious story of the Romanian cozonac”, published by Humanitas Publishing House.

A more special bread, with a sweet, urban taste

The trilogy “La Medeleni” by the lawyer and writer Ionel Teodoreanu, born in 1897 in Iasi, in a family of magistrates and musicians, includes the novels “Hotarul nestatornic” (published in 1925, at the Romanian Book Publishing House), “Drumuri” (published in 1926) and “Between the Winds” (published in 1927). The novel immediately enjoyed great success with the public, even if less than the enthusiasm of literary critics. It’s a story about childhood and adolescence, first loves, the world of quiet country life and its disenchantment with the painful experiences of adulthood.

Along the adventures that the three children go through – Dănuț, Olguța and Monica – come up, every now and then, images of cupcakes. Haystacks in the field are “like towering buns just out of the summer oven”; the old cook of the family is “so fat that she seemed supernaturally leavened in the vast oven from which the cakes came out opulent and towering like the sultan’s pashas”; an episodic character, Gheorghiță a Marandai, “with his sleeves rolled up and tied around his head, deftly kneaded the pastry dough”; the plea of ​​a lawyer at the court ironically refers to the agitation of the cozonacs: the lawyer “raises his arms to the sky – with the palpitating kilograms – and asks for acquittal with a gesture that knocks the entire dough of the public and the jurors limp and inert. Wait for him to wipe his sweat with the back of his hand – like the rowdy after kneading the dough for the buns. Not! It’s the holy sweat of work. Let it flow, drunk”. Towards the end of the novel, what remains of the happy world of childhood is the memory of a smell: “in the kitchen, as before in Medeleni, the aroma of the Easter holiday, of the buns, greets him”.

Despite the popularity that cozonac seems to enjoy in Ionel Teodoreanu’s novel, the illustrated encyclopedic dictionary of the Romanian language from the past and today, which I mentioned earlier, still defines it, in 1931, in approximate terms: “a kind of bread of various forms of wheat flour, kneaded with butter and water, sometimes with the addition of raisins, which is made at home, especially at Easter, or made by confectioners”. Ten years after the completion of the territory inhabited by Romanians within the borders of a single state, cozonacul is therefore not widespread and not even remotely uniform throughout the country. It is considered a special bread, with a sweet, urban taste, associated with Christmas and Easter, which is usually made at home, but can also be bought from confectionery stores. In the same dictionary, babele with the meaning of baking is recorded as “a kind of cozonac with raisins” from Moldova and Bucovina.

It was warm and smelled of vanilla

A young woman trained, in the 30s, at the NotreDame de Sion pension in Bucharest run by Catholic nuns and then a brilliant student at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, she is part of the circle of interwar intellectuals Mircea Eliade, Mihail Sebastian, Emil Cioran, Marietta Sadova, Constantin Noica . The full text will appear only in 2015, with the title given by her “The diary of a girl hard to please”.

The twenty-seven notebooks end in 1953 and contain, here and there, a few references to cozonacs. In 1937, Easter falls at the beginning of May. The day before, on May 1, Jeni Acterian notes: “I didn’t go to church at all and, until today, I didn’t have the impression at all that Easter was coming. Because of the move, probably. Today, however, I helped to fry eggs and, adding the smell of baking, to some extent, a foreboding atmosphere was formed”.

The following year, on Christmas Eve, on December 23, 1938, she assists, in passing, in the making of the cozonacs, and then, overwhelmed by the joy of the holidays, records that “Ileana and Niculae kneaded the cozonacs, and my mother presided over the operation, with glasses on her nose and an obvious concern. I also went for a spin there. It was warm and smelled of vanilla. A sudden joy came over me and I started to annoy my mother, to nibble on the peeled raisins and stick my nose right where they had the most work, until my mother kicked me out”.

Cozonac is a festive sweet bread

Recipe books handed down by women from generation to generation become, in these dark times, precious subversive relics of life before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

A recipe kept in the notebook of a teacher from Botoșani is proof of female tenacity. Housewives’ imagination is put to the test every day. In the effort to invent, as much as possible, tasty dishes, each new challenge is an opportunity to win in the fight against the shortages and the harshness of life. Teacher Maria Ardeleanu, whom her students call Duduia, notes, next to the cozonac recipe in her notebook, that she got it from “Doamna Protopopescu”. It’s a rather approximate economical recipe for a cozonac: “4 egg yolks, 4 spoons of sugar, yeast the size of a large walnut, a glass of milk, a little salt, flour as much as possible”. Vague instructions are given about preparing the dough. The owner of the notebook knows exactly what and how to do it. Cozonac is a festive sweet bread.

A detail opens a window to the era in which the cozonac survives and to the ingenious solutions used by women: the dough is placed in a round or rectangular tray, lined with “butter paper”, writes the teacher. Since there is no baking paper, for a year the women keep the waxed paper in which the butter bought at Alimentara is packed, to put it on the bottom of the tray in which they bake the muffins.

The food austerity and food shortages of the 1950s, which returned even more dramatically in the 1980s, can also be easily discerned among the regularly updated editions of Sanda Marin’s cookbook, which are available to housewives in periods of culinary deprivation , an economical adaptation of homemade muffins, with reduced quantities: 3 eggs per kilogram of flour and 100 grams, instead of 250 grams of lard or butter, which will often be replaced with margarine.